Paul Scott's tetralogy began in the mid 1960s and took: nearly a decade to complete; the volumes, in order of appearance, are The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils. At that time they seemed predictably stolid, middlebrow fiction, but they have since made effective TV dramas - and perhaps from the start Scott had his eye on either the TV or cinema screen, or both. Collectively, the four add up to a "good read" in the old sense, rather as if Galsworthy had been crossed with Gone with the Wind and the ritual admixture of sex then added for a modern readership. Their faults are obvious enough - a prose style as readymade as precast concrete, lack of reality in the "love interest", a certain oppressive, almost colonial Englishness.
But Scott, as a former army officer, knew the Raj in its last years at first hand, and there is a social sweep and breadth about his portrayal of British India and of a shut in, almost claustrophobic society rapidly approaching its inevitable demise.