Travelling people, moody, self-absorbed people shopping round for a friend or a lover or a guru, form the motley cast of R. Prawer Jhabvala's [A New Dominion]. She lets them loose to test their trite identities ("Gopi the gay and gallant groom", "Margaret hates modern materialism") against an Indian culture that returns a mocking echo to every question. If they find what they are looking for, perhaps that is only because India is so hybrid, so vast, so obligingly ambiguous. Mrs Jhabvala observes her people with concentrated calm: their energetic aimlessness, dim yearnings and contradictory oracles make a fascinatingly various pattern….

The social web is elaborate, insecure and many-layered, so that nobody can make a move without setting off significant vibrations. Glazed-eyed, determined American Lee …; hesitant, fastidious, English Raymond, who might have stepped out of a novel by E. M. Forster; the Swamiji learning to use the butter-knife...