... the prevailing tone modulates between gentle humour and low-key poignancy. The small, often dashed hopes of the under-privileged...are affectingly noted ... Subtle with nuance and alive with immediacy, again adroitly using small-scale effects to enlarge understanding and extend empathy, the resulting novel is a masterly achievement.
Byrd is woven into the conflict, but in a complicated way, since Ms. Davies is eager not to fit him into the colonial-era role of the white savior. The Mission House is a careful, quiet, skillful drama of well-meant misunderstandings and cultural divisions. The interactions are polite and repressed, but the story is galvanized by the 'passion simmering under the surface of things. Always, every once in a while, the lid blowing off, and nothing, it seemed, that anyone could do to stop it happening.'
Davies prefers to leave the politics submerged in suggestive detail, occasionally bubbling up ... an interesting take on a familiar trope: the westerner who finds in India deliverance from the wasteland of modernity ... What’s different is that this isn’t the India of unadulterated eastern spirituality that normally greets that stock character. There are no banal mantras, no cryptic mystics. Jamshed, Ravi and Priscilla are all atheists. Byrd instead sees in India a vision of long-lost Englishness ... a twist...is dramatically unconvincing, yet thematically necessary. Byrd is like so many others, from beatniks to empire loyalists, who form a connection not with real Indians but with a fantasy of India fashioned out of their own ideological prejudices and psychological needs. The Mission House truthfully reveals that the new realities of India will increasingly have their revenge on these tired old romances.
... a beautiful literary object...insulated from turmoil. For whether The Mission House overplays its subtlety or is politically timorous, the effect is the same: this is a tale that squanders its context—the rise of Narendra Modi and Hindu nationalism ... a quiet novel of unquiet times. With India’s ideological unrest a vague and distant rumble, Davies’s book feels temporally unmoored, as much an unwitting elegy for a lost England as a portrait of India in the throes of remaking itself. That’s the peril of the hapless Englishman: at its best, this literary device can be a sharp cultural skewer, but it can also be a vector for a kind of folkloric nostalgia that obscures the dark realities of empire.
The text is engaging, but there is little in the protagonist to draw sympathy, nor prompt any other emotion other than perhaps pathos ... it is a slow journey, with questions left unanswered—the narrative progresses with the same hesitancy that [characters] forming the bonds experience ... I confess to being baffled by the novel, not really sure of my opinion when I turned the final page. I understand the themes and the commentary it passes. I recognise that politics (and largely, religion) is left aside to focus instead on human character and connection and I am aware that reviews have praised it for being a new take on the British love affair with a romanticised notion of India. However, for me, there was something lacking ... I found elements of the story unconvincing whilst yet recognising that this may be misperception in the context of an India ill-judged through Western eyes ... the pace, whilst languid and dreamlike in its slow progression and therefore conforming thematically, was simply too slow in parts, and the plot too predictable. The denouement was rushed ... books are a subjective choice and unfortunately, this one simply wasn’t, on balance, for me.
While there is no doubt that an impressive amount of research has gone into the novel, echoes of the very colonialism Davies seeks to critique, manifest in her writing ... We are constantly reminded that India is hot and sticky and its people are short and dark and apparently consume lots of fryums ... suspension of disbelief did not eventuate.
Part mystery, part romance, this charming story is set in the present but has the feel of an earlier time. Fans of Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry will eat this spicy masala of a novel right up.
Davies...creates a world that is magical yet daubed with menace. Nuanced characters, lush descriptions of South India, and an incisive look at class and religion make for a rich and layered novel.
... a stunning, understated novel ... an unsettling denouement. Told from alternating perspectives, this captivating, nuanced tale balances a pervading sense of melancholy with pockets of wry humor. Davies’s masterly elegy is not to be missed.
Lightly yet deftly crafted, hovering in tone somewhere between comedy, tragedy, and fable ... Davies’ accumulation of curious, private, overlapping characters is presented tenderly in an India that seems, despite mention of internet cafes, scarcely to belong to the modern era. But nostalgia is intended to contrast with the seismic rumblings referenced in the Padre’s mentions of 'the beatings and the burnings, the lynchings and the riots' ... Davies subtly synthesizes complex issues into a low-key yet compelling web of affecting destinies.
