Black Narcissus (1939) begins and ends with tea, brought to the Sisters in the open air in jade-green sandstone cups. The cups have no handles and the tea seems strange and exotic to them. But this is Darjeeling, tea is central to its economy and the book even features a tour of sorts around a tea factory. What could be more ‘English’ than tea? Besides, isn’t it the nuns who are exotic? The locals, who lead their ponies through the forest, liken them to ‘white snows’ and ‘a row of white teeth’. Some have already had experience of religious: they’ll want to ‘know everything and alter everything’ The nuns can’t understand a word of what’s being said about them in clear earshot. It’s the narrator who includes their point of view, ‘translates’ for us. Throughout the novel, perspectives multiply and shift.  The shifts are as sure-footed as the little ponies that clamber up and down the mountains, it is only when you pause that you realise momentarily the utter strangeness of story and situation.

Black Narcissus is about a group of Anglo-Catholic Sisters who try to make a convent – ironically called Saint Faith’s – out of an isolated house, high on a hill in an Indian native state (The kernel of the story was a lonely grave that Godden discovered, high on a plateau in Assam, with the inscription ‘Sister Mary’). Mopu ‘palace’ was once a harem and is still redolent of forbidden pleasures but this doesn’t stop the nuns setting up a clinic and a school, and trying to build a chapel.  Disoriented by the high-altitude, the abundance of beauty and the purity of the water, they find the task they have set themselves extraordinarily difficult. Their bodies rebel in ugly, humiliating ways. They all suffer from diarrhoea, one nun develops boils They are distracted from their labours and their faith by the distant Himalayan peak of Kanchenjunga and the wind blowing restlessly through the convent, allowing nothing new to settle. Both palace and the mountainous locale are powerful forces in the novel but there are no long descriptive set-pieces. Representations of place are lyrical but brief and brim with narrative possibility. At the start of the novel, the nuns approach the palace ‘in a state of green, dark, sleep.’ The greenery lulls them into an enchantment like a fairy tale with its own set of wishes and prohibitions. When Sister Ruth first rings the bell on the edge of the cliff, she thinks she ‘must look like a fly that had fallen into a green and blue bowl’ – intimations of the horror to come.

The familiar institutions we know from Kipling, Forster and Orwell – club and compound, army and courthouse, polo and Bridge parties – are entirely absent from Black Narcissus. There is one half-dissolute Englishman, Mr Dean, the ruler’s agent and general fixer. He helps the Sisters but upsets them more. Their only recourse to the familiar is their own church: the promise of visits from ailing Father Roberts and correspondence with the Mother Provincial. Mopu itself has been ‘given’ to the order by the local ruler to make obscure amends with his past – the Sisters are in some complex sense his ‘guests’. (The large house where Godden grew up on the banks of a tributary of the Brahmanaputra river in East Bengal was in fact owned by a household servant – something Godden only discovered much later.)

I first read the novel after seeing the Powell and Pressburger film, better known than the original novel, celebrated for its colour, complex atmospherics and moments of camp horror. I was probably about thirteen and raced through the book to find out if there was more about Sister Clodagh and Mister Dean (David Farrar), who epitomised masculine romantic pain in the penultimate frame of the film. I remember being disappointed. This novel wasn’t much of a love story, I thought. I read it again years later when I found it on a bookshelf somewhere I was staying, old enough to be interested in the ‘setting’ or context, and was gripped. One of the striking things about the novel – unlike the film – is just how specific its narrative moment is.  Published in 1939, the main action takes place after the extensive Japanese bombing of Canton/Guangzhou which had ended in late 1938. Sister Adela, who joins the convent later on in the book has been injured in the attack. It is hoped that the new convent will help her recuperate. The bombing is also an element of the book’s ambiguous atmosphere. The nuns are never far from some definitive Eastern danger and malevolence, but the Japanese are also a violent, colonial power.  The Massacre of Nanjing (1937) where up to 20,000 women and girls were raped and many also murdered is just a memory away for characters and readers, and Sister Adela has an angry, strawberry scar between chin and ear, not wholly concealed by her wimple.

As the Indian independence movement gained ground after World War One, the currency of Raj fiction declined. Novels such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), which Godden later said changed her life and made her reappraise her family: ‘we were like the Turtons’, or Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934), were highly critical of the British ‘in’ India. In this context, it’s tempting to see the convent as an allegory of the Raj itself:

The order had spread to the East and sent a stream of sisters to Egypt and Persia and India and China. In India Sister Clodagh had found the same brick buildings, the same green walls and echoing stone stairs, the same figures of saints in coloured plaster … The corridors were crowded with girls in neat blouses.

Parts of the chapel are shipped ready-made from England to replicate the Surrey mother house. The end of Forster’s novel looks to a horizon beyond Empire; Black Narcissus ends with a departure that is also a kind of defeat and the novel also upends many of the stock features of exotic romances. The conventional loyalty of the natives has mutated into pragmatism, cynicism, or, in Ayah’s case, active rebellion, as she tries to undermine the Sisters at every turn. Even, the little boy Anthony, who acts as a translator, won’t obey orders when the crisis comes. Indian characters have their own agendas and the nuns ignore these at their peril. The young General, Dilip Rai wants to be taught at the convent so his uncle will let him go to Cambridge – he has already been to England and is desperate to get back. He is also an object of forbidden desire, stirring Sister Clodagh’s memories of the man she loved as a young woman in Ireland. Near the end of the novel, he comes to discuss his clothes with her – what is a pinstripe and should he wear braces? He’s brought a catalogue to show her and wonders aloud about the properties of Viyella which he has read is ‘best for underwear.’ He has even ordered ties, socks and pyjamas to be delivered to the convent so the nuns can help him choose.  Clodagh tries to explain the impropriety of this, tries to stop him talking, but she can’t summon the energy, plucked at by her painful memories. The young General is represented here as vain and childish, innocently but annoying self-absorbed. He’s an easily recognisable native stereotype. But his whole is more complex. For the young General is trying to construct a suitable persona for England and wants the Sisters’ help. The absurdity of their sexual rules are brilliantly exposed by his guileless questioning.

Clodagh is also distracted by the strong, tanned body of Mr Dean. Her memories disrupt her supervision of the convent and her prayer but she doesn’t agonise about the colour of the men who prompt them. Miscegenation was the explicit theme of Godden’s earlier novel The Lady and the Unicorn which explores the precarious existence of a mixed-race family. The Eurasian population that hovered on the fringes of official English society made the outcomes of mixed-race relationships an obvious topic in Raj fiction – though not perhaps in the way Godden treated it. When Godden set up her own dancing school in a big house in Calcutta in the early 1930s, including Indian and Eurasian girls in her classes and living ‘alone’, the rumour that she was Eurasian stood for much of the disapproval she attracted.

The other nuns also find Dilip Rai beautiful but they contain him (and their desire) in aesthetic terms. Only Sister Ruth holds out against him, fixated by his colour. ‘”He’s so vain”, she mocked, “like a … fine black peacock’. She is the nun who continues to insist ‘they all look alike to me’ and who shockingly accuses the guileless Sister Honey of wanting a ‘black brat of a baby’ of her own. But Ruth’s desires are not straightforward either. Her obsession with Mr Dean which drives the novel’s final crisis begins with her first close physical encounter:

Her shoulders were not as wide as half his chest: she was fragile and white beside him; his flesh was live and bronze like a Red Indian…

This is very much Ruth’s point of view and is pure Orientalist fantasy– ‘she was fragile and white beside him’. The lure of the primitive is present too, conjured by the Red Indian likeness. For Sister Ruth, Dean is a white man who incorporates an exotic, masculine other.

It is easy to summarise Black Narcissus as a melodrama: English nuns (though Clodagh is Irish) in a remote part of Darjeeling, illicit passions, long-repressed memories, the descent into madness.This is part of its pleasure, one of its threads.  There are moments of lurid intensity, as when Ruth comes to Clodagh to describe with high excitement a woman who has been brought in for treatment: ‘covered in blood …I think it was an artery because it spurted blood’. The words ‘blood’ and ‘bleeding’ are used four times in seven lines. But it’s important that novel and film don’t get fused in memory. Powell and Pressburger’s film goes several steps further: Ruth enters the room in a blood-spattered habit. Melodrama and horror are vividly part of the film’s narration at this point, we see the blood on the white habit with its connotations of sexuality and violence, and hear what has happened. But in the novel, there is no description of Sister Ruth’s appearance. Tellingly her manner is prefaced and framed by the narrator’s comment: ‘She started and then said dramatically …’ The reader is warned.

Sister Ruth quickly reveals many signs of madness: hysteria, paranoia, uncontrollable rage and jealousy towards Sister Clodagh, an insistent rigidity about how things should be and should be named. She dubs the young General ‘Black Narcissus’ but is this really Sister’s Ruth’s name to give? Naming and renaming the Other are classic colonial moves and the boundaries between East and West, self and other, in this novel can become suddenly precarious. The faraway exotic of Darjeeling turns out to be closer than the nuns can imagine in some ways. In the local market, Roger et Gallet soap and Lucky Strikes are on sale along with yak’s blood and cloth prints from Manchester and Japan; the shawls of the women drop in ‘Italian folds’. Ayah and her old mistress, the Princess Simatri have travelled in Europe: London, Paris, Baden. And ‘Black Narcissus’ is not another name for the ‘little General’ anyway but a perfume that Dilip Rai bought in the Army and Navy Stores, which had branches in Karachi and Bombay as well as Paris and London – another part of his self-fashioning. Everything is multiple, difficult to classify, including the narrator’s ambivalence to this world that is both radically other and pressingly familiar. At the very end, all that is clear is that the novel’s title encompasses both the bottled exoticism signalled by the perfume and something which far exceeds it.