Books: Parade's End

A DIVISION OF THE SPOILS

by PAUL SCOTT

598 pages. Morrow. $10.95.

This long, rueful novel successfully winds up Paul Scott's enormous masterwork, The Raj Quartet, a brooding view of the last years of British rule in India. Together, the four novels of this remarkable cycle—The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils—are a considerable achievement of art and intelligence.

Scott is very much a psychological novelist, and the great length of his work (2,000 pages) is not a matter of kilometers of...