Arriving finally at Du Leze’s clock shop in Rouen, Abbas discovers that his mentor has died and the shop is now being run by Jehanne, an Indian-French girl he knew in Mysore. He sets sail for France, first aboard an East India Company cargo ship - a riveting, heartbreaking interlude conveyed through the diary of a soulful English seaman who befriends Abbas - then as a captive on a French pirate ship. Abbas is obsessed with finding the automaton, his finest achievement. The automaton, “Tipu’s Tiger,” becomes a spoil of war, seized by the victors and destined for their homeland.įrom this point on, the fate of Tipu’s Tiger becomes the driving force of James’s increasingly picaresque narrative. Abbas also joins the fight but survives by feigning death atop a corpse. But inevitably, another war with England breaks out, and this time Tipu goes into battle and is killed on the field. The sultan is so pleased by the finished product that he flashes a rare grin at the public unveiling (though his newly freed sons seem more interested in securing the British sweets they enjoyed in captivity than in the wondrous toy). Abbas and Du Leze have exactly six weeks to make it. This creation will be a “great moving toy” - an automaton that also plays music. But he is shocked to learn that the sultan has chosen him to work with Lucien Du Leze, an exiled French clockmaker in the sultan’s court, to build a life-size wooden version of a bronze rifle ornament depicting a tiger devouring a European (“I want the teeth planted in the neck of the infidel,” Tipu commands). Now, thanks to the sultan’s vigilance, his sons are being returned, and he wants to bestow on them a “gift of such grandeur and ferocity that it will silence all memory of the boys’ exile.”Ībbas, a local Muslim boy of seventeen, is a talented wood carver who has made elaborate toys for one of the sultan’s consorts. As part of the peace treaty brokered with the British commander Lord Cornwallis, two of Tipu’s sons have been held hostage, as collateral against the possibility that Tipu will renege on the treaty’s terms. The action begins in 1794 in India’s Mysore kingdom, where the sovereignty of its ruler, Tipu Sultan, has been rattled by recent skirmishes with the English. These elements keep Loot amply supplied with colorful characters and elaborate, page-turner plots (translation: this novel is fun to read), but they also enable James to accomplish something much rarer: a fresh, genuinely inclusive look at the myriad ways that European colonialism affected people from all walks of life. Loot, the ambitious third novel from Tania James ’06SOA, charts the sprawling fictional journey of an actual historical artifact across two centuries (eighteenth and nineteenth), eight different narrative perspectives (from an Indian sultan to a British seaman), and four geographic backdrops (India, the open seas, France, and England).
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