M.J. Carter’s historical novel The Strangler Vine has the feel of a murder mystery without an actual murder, instead sending its two central characters on a quest in 1837 India to find a missing Briton who disappeared into the north, likely of his own volition, but whose importance to the East India Company has grown in his absence. It’s a fast read thanks to the tremendous narrative greed in the story and the yin/yang Carter created in her two protagonists, but I found the dialogue completely inappropriate for the time period, as she gives her characters modern vernacular and even sensibilities that feel very out of place in this setting.
The story opens with the young Captain (soon to be Lieutenant) William Avery in Calcutta, chosen seemingly as a last resort, to delivery a message to the reclusive company agent Jeremiah Blake and later to accompany Blake on the mission to find the missing author and poet Xavier Mountstuart (which sounds like an Orioles prospect), who has stirred up quite a bit of trouble with the publication of a novel that paints both the Company and the behavior of British expats on the subcontinent in a rather unfavorable light. This comes just as the Company is trying to expand its influence over greater portions of what we know now as India, which at the time was split into many nation-states or local fiefdoms as with pre-unification Italy, and the disappearance of the author has only further complicated the efforts to bring more of the region under the British company’s control. The Europeans are also combatting the plague of Thuggee, a supposed band of marauding bandits who worship the goddess Kali; rob and murder travelers in heinous, ritualistic fashion; and threaten stability in the region as well as local trade. (Thuggee, or at least the campaign against it, was real, and the English word “thug” is derived from its name.) A handful of real historical personages, including the famed William Sleeman, appear in the book, so portions of the story will be obvious if you happen to know something about the time period.
However, Carter hasn’t captured the vocabulary or rhythm of speech from the time period – an observation I make based on novels I’ve read from that era – and has given some of her characters decidedly 21st-century views. When a man makes a (sexual) pass at Avery, the religious 21-year-old politely rebuffs the attempt and the matter is simply dropped – difficult to accept in an era when homosexuality was illegal and seen as a grievous sin. Blake’s concern for the plight of locals under the Company may have been apposite for the time, yet he speaks and acts with an egalitarian perspective that would mark him as a progressive in 2017, let alone in the 1830s. And the antagonists of the story, notably those with the Company who seek to control the subcontinent, are kind of not racist enough, with their opinions of locals marked more by cultural elitism than outright prejudice – the Indian people need the Brits to install a government, to teach them democracy, to raise them out of heathenism, but in a paternalist sense rather than the overt bigotry I’d expect from that time. (She hints at phrenology once in the book, but only to have Blake dismiss it as junk science.)
If you prefer to read for story, The Stranger Vine will be among the more satisfying contemporary novels you read; the plot works, and even with Carter’s missteps in dialogue, she never talks down to the reader or takes easy outs with her characters. I would still say I really enjoyed the book even as the inaccurate tone irked me, because there’s something so meticulous about the story’s construction. It’s merely a bit flawed, but in a way that may only matter to certain readers.
You’re telescoping the repugnance toward homosexuality of a generation later back onto the period. The author could very well be imposing twenty-first-century attitudes toward sexuality back on the period — I haven’t read the book — but in the 1830s discreet buggery was not unheard-of, and was at worst mildly disapproved of, especially in the all-male spaces like officers in the EIC would have spent much of their formative years in.
I could be completely wrong on this – my knowledge on the subject is superficial at best – but the novel is set around the time of the trial and execution of James Pratt and John Smith for sodomy in England, so I assumed the attitudes of the period would mirror that.