Springcleaning Book 19 – “Breakfast with the Nikolides” by Rumer Godden

Breakfast with the Nikolides by Rumer Godden is one of her books set in India, where she lived as a child. It is set in 1940 when Louise, who has been living with her children in Paris, is forced to return to India and her estranged husband because she has nowhere else to go. For Louise and other adults India is a place of tension and there is tension too between the characters – within the marriage, between the staff and students at the agricultural college, between one rich student and his poor teacher, and between the British and Indian characters. For Emily, who comes to India for the first time with her mother, this is a time when innocence is destroyed and she experiences death, betrayal and lies.

The main event of the book is a small one, the death of Emily’s beloved dog, which happens when she has been enticed away from home by the promise of a breakfast with a local family, the Nikolides. The death affects Emily and causes further rifts between her parents but it also affects the local vet and a student at the college. Emily loses trust in her mother and stages a one person denial of reality in order to force her mother to confess her part in the dog’s death. There is a sense in which built up grievances and suspicions have been allowed to fester and that one event allows them to come into the open.

This is a coming of age story for Emily, who is possibly the most sympathetic character in the book, with the exception of the dog, but it is also about relationships between different people and different types of people. There is an underlying feeling of sexual tension and attraction (which makes it quite similar in places to A Passage to India) and which I have noticed in other books by this author.

The story portrays India at a specific time, when there was war in Europe but not yet independence in India and when European people had positions of power and authority. Louise, the students and Emily reflect those who are powerless and often oppressed and the book shows them gaining power which they may use wisely or not. It’s an interesting story which also reflects 1940s attitudes to sexual assault and to race which can be offensive to the modern reader.

I am reading my way through this author’s books when I find them in secondhand bookshops, which is where I assume that I obtained this one, as I have no memory of buying it. I find the writing interesting and unusual and I like her ability to tell a story without romanticising it. This paperback is in excellent condition and I shall pass it on to Oxfam so that someone else can read it.