SOURCE: Marnham, Patrick. “An Innocent, but Not at Home.” Spectator 287, no. 9035 (6 October 2001): 69-70.

In the following review, Marnham describes Half a Life as a novel but also as a topical book on contemporary political and cultural issues.

Willie Chandran, from a family of temple priests, grows up in a maharajah's state in the last days of the Raj. Mocked at school because his middle name is ‘Somerset’, he discovers that he was named after a great English writer who had a stammer and who once visited his father while travelling to gather material for a book about spirituality. His father had quarrelled with his own family by marrying Willie's mother, an ill-favoured and sarcastic woman of low caste. Subsequently this father abandoned all chance of a future as an engineer or doctor; he ‘gave up education and unfitted himself for life’. Instead he became a holy man, taking...