Review: The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey

This is a good book. A *really* good book. A better book than I expected, which sounds mean. I wasn't expecting it to be bad - I was just expecting something shorter and, say, lighter than what I got. Consequently it took me longer to finish than expected - I had slotted it into the 'pulp reading' slot in my life, and found that in fact, when stressed and needing something frothy, this required a bit more brain and a bit more emotional expense than I always had. But it was good. So good.

It's absolutely gorgeous historical fiction, set in 1920s Bombay (Mumbai). It follows the career of one Purveen Mistry, Bombay's only woman solicitor (notes in the back said Perveen's career was based on that of two early Indian female lawyers - one of whom worked in England and one in Calcutta). Our heroine, who works as a solicitor assisting her father, manages property and inheritance disputes, and chafes at the restrictions placed by both her father and the law on what work she may do. The plot centres on an inheritance dispute pertaining to three Muslim widows, and the opening gambit is that Purveen, as a female lawyer, can visit the women in seclusion where her father cannot. The outsider-status which Purveen has as a Parsi lawyer dealing with Muslim custom allows Sujata Massey to build up a steady feed of complex information without dropping a giant info-dump on the reader. As the inheritance dispute comes to include murder, and the disappearance of a child, Purveen's investigations move beyond property law to family history, architecture, and the delicate interpersonal balance of the womens' quarters.

Her English friend Alice, who has been brought home from London in disgrace for frequenting one too many sapphic drinking establishments, becomes involved in the investigation, providing Purveen with both an ally and the nuisance of dealing with an entitled high-status white family as well as her wealthy muslim clients. A secondary plot involves the appearance in Bombay of a figure from Purveen's past, and throughout the book Massey weaves backstory in to build up Purveen as a complex character with not only an unconventional career, but a past that is at once unconventional and too conventional for her happiness.

I was particularly delighted with the relationship depicted between Purveen and Jameshedi, her father. The early part of the book shows Purveen chafing against the restrictions her father places or allows others to place on her, and being critical of his handling of certain clients. There's an element of 'underestimated junior proves herself against the big boss' wishes' here, but it's very delicately done - Purveen and the narration are at all times clear that Jameshedi has been nothing but supportive of his daughter's career (indeed, an added complication enters, in that it was his ambition initially to have her become the first woman lawyer in Bombay, and she has already disappointed him in the course of her career). Purveen, and the ethos of the book as a whole, holds familial respect as critical, but contrasts the example of the Mistry family - a mutually respectful family - with a range of others, from the dysfunctional and conservative Parsis, the Sodawallas, to more ambivalent cases, like the fractious and competitive widows who nevertheless value raising their children together, or Alice's family, who give their daughter more freedom than Purveen's family do her in many ways, but who enforce restrictions with much less respect.

The mystery plot is very well done - I realised halfway through that I have read Sujata Massey before, a novel called 'The Flower Master', featuring a Japanese-American woman living (and turned detective) in Japan. Massey works very well with familiar-outsider detectives - here, Purveen's religious difference from her clients allows for exposition, discovery of unexpected information, and retention of suspense. The key problem with close 3p POV detective narration - that it's hard to have a detective look smart without showing them forming hypotheses, and that gives the game away - Massey avoids by having Purveen be demonstrably unwilling, even in her own thoughts, to ascribe guilt to anyone without hard evidence. Even as she closes in on the solution she thinks of it as a fact-finding mission, and is reluctant to form concrete suspicions of any of the key suspects.

I have no reservations about this book, none at all. Some of the content is heavy going - the dysfunctional family aspect slides into clear abuse in some cases - but it's not a dark novel, at all. There's a lot of food, cake, and ultimately an underlying faith in humanity that I loved.