The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

possession they assume for the benefit of the local population. The socially
accomplished but professionally inept products of the British public school
system, disparagingly described as the "relics of a dead age" (123), are exemplified
as a category by the urbane and perennially inebriated Bedford, whose
"world was dead, and he did not know the language or currency of the new.
Nobody wanted gentlemen nowadays" (124). If Nathaniel remembers his
childhood haunts as "that was Eden, a long time ago" (167), there is something
even more pathetically Arcadian in the British community's nostalgic
attachment to the expatriates' club where "the exiles of three generations had
met... to drink and to mourn the lost island home for which they longed
but to which they did not want to return until they were old" (140). The
deepest fear of the English is that of being obliged to return to an Eden which
has altered irrevocably in their absence, and in which they no longer have a
place. Virtually all the characters, then, white no less than black, are painfully
racked between the old world and the new, psychologically anchored in a
moribund tradition and propelled despite themselves towards a future that
is conceived by turns as desolatingly vacant and overwhelmingly menacing.
The one member of the British expatriate community who seems to be
essentially immune to this syndrome is Johnnie Kestoe, who is anxious to
obliterate a past that for him is associated only with squalor and humiliation,
and who is wholeheartedly oriented towards a future in which he
hopes to achieve the personal success upon which his sense of self depends.
If commitments divide in his case as well, the choice is not between the old
and the new, or between one culture and another, but between the imperatives
of friendship — or at least of group solidarity — and those of professional
expedience. The crisis is precipitated by the decision of the
London-based head office of the company for which he works to recruit
local personnel for its African branch, although this entails making its
English staff redundant. Having cynically gauged the climate of the times,
and determined to wrest whatever personal advantage he can from the situation,
Johnnie forges a secret alliance with the chief instigator of the company's
Africanization policy, thereby betraying the colleagues who have
confided their anxieties to him. This breach of trust has a number of
unforeseen moral ramifications, and in the end even Nathaniel, who has
taken upon himself the task of selecting suitable candidates for Johnnie's
recruitment scheme, is induced to compromise his own ideal of disinterested
public conduct by accepting a bribe.