With Loot, Tania James breathes new life into the history of India’s colonization. Her tool is a toymaker eager to learn the skills of an ingenious eighteenth-century mechanic. The toymaker’s tool is an ornately carved tiger.
In the waning years of his rule, the sultan of Mysore commissions seventeen-year-old Abbas Muhammad to create a life-sized tiger gnawing on an Englishman’s body. The mechanical work falls to Lucien Du Leze, a refugee of the French Revolution. In the ensuing weeks Abbas works in the sultan’s palace while Du Leze teaches him French, which comes in handy as his fortunes change.
Abbas’s desire to learn more about mechanics is thwarted when Du Leze returns to France just before the British overrun Mysore and depose the sultan. Abbas escapes the disaster by indenturing himself to a ship captain of the East India Company. The tiger ends up in the hands of a British officer. What follows is a partnership between Abbas and a young French woman named Jehanne, who conspire to recover the tiger for their own purposes.
Tania James spins her tale with a skillful economy of words that, nevertheless, gives depth to her characters and color to the epic settings. Lady Selwyn, now in possession of the tiger, takes Jehanne into her confidence, bewitching the girl with a romance novel she has written. The resulting complications endanger the tentative relationship between Abbas and Jehanne, as well as their plot to seize the tiger.
All this occurs against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, the cultural divide between Whites and Indians, and the nascent Industrial Revolution. The author obviously knows a great deal about this period and allows us to sample it without being academic. Nevertheless, I cannot award her novel the five stars it would merit if she had omitted several sex scenes, instances of offensive language, and a strong hint of homosexuality.
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Weapons of Remorse The Seven-Day Resurrection The Samaritan’s Patient
