Volume 22, Number 20 · December 11, 1975
The Short Good-bye
By Neville Maxwell
Freedom at Midnight
by Larry Collins, by Dominique Lapierre
Simon & Schuster, 582 pp., $12.50
One of the deadliest traps for the writer of contemporary history is the informant who is just too good. A central actor in the events to be chronicled, crisp and comprehensive in memory, meticulous in preserving his documents, forthcoming, articulate, immensely likable to boot—when these authors found such an informant across the French ambassador's table in London, they must have felt that their intended work on the independence and partition of India was already almost done, and safely on the best-seller lists. Lord Mountbatten, the last of the viceroys, who was sent to India to set it free, and stayed on as independent India's first governor-general, gave Mr. Collins and Mr. Lapierre some thirty hours of tape-recorded interviews. The authors claim that this amounted to 'the most painstaking and exhaustive review of his Indian experiences that he has ever been exposed to,' remarking that during this process Lord Mountbatten was able to refer constantly to the documents in his possession. And there's the rub. It was not the authors who consulted the crucial documentation, but the former viceroy.
Review, 1773 words
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