Mr. Duncan, who also wrote the widely praised “Death of an Ordinary Man,” has framed this, his sixth novel, as a quest, tracing Owen’s search for his parents’ past, which is the subject of a book within a book titled “The Cheechee Papers.” The past is symbolized by a bloodstone ring, green chalcedony speckled with jasper, which had belonged to Owen’s father, Ross.  In India, Ross was a railway man, an amateur boxer who won the Inter-Railways bantamweight title and dreamed of going to the Olympics. But an English con man, Skinner, swindled Ross out of the ring and, over the years, appeared again and again, casually to betray him. Now an old man, Ross has given his son the task of finding Skinner, and a chance discovery in a secondhand bookshop of a pornographic novel, “Raj Rogue,” perhaps written by Skinner, sets Owen on the track of his target.  “The Bloodstone Papers” is an intriguing depiction of the complexities of dual identity, of a group whose speech still bears the quaint artifacts of upper-class English pronunciation — “bleddy” for “bloody,” “shot pants” for “short pants,” “lookhyur” for “look here.” It is particularly strong in its portrayal of India before Partition: young Anglo-Indian men, “mellifluous, Brylcreemed and natty in Oxford bags and bush-shirts” who enlisted in the British Army during World War II out of a “tortured patriotism;” and of the sights and sounds of an Indian marketplace, for instance, where “smells changed every few paces: dry-roasting mustard seeds; scalded coffee; frangipani incense; cow dung.”  “A fat green-sari’d woman thickly musk-perfumed went past” Ross, Mr. Duncan writes. “Glimpse of her midriff rolls and blood-red toenails. The city was sexy.”  Regrettably, the novel is less engaging when it comes to Owen’s own story in modern-day London, as a man “not dark enough to scare the honkies or to expect solidarity from the brothers.” Mr. Duncan has said that he drew on his own background for the book, and like the central characters in his other novels “Hope” and “I, Lucifer,” Owen is a debauchee with a fondness for sexual adventure, pining for an old girlfriend, in this case, one called Scarlet, a pole dancer. Like those other characters, Owen is afflicted by a difficult-to-pin-down angst caused by, well ... that he is really a Fictional Type.  Mr. Duncan also writes in a style so packed with metaphors they often interrupt the story’s flow “Our irises in their tired nebulae concede, if we’ve lost love, that we at least had it to lose.” And if it isn’t “tired nebulae,” it’s fatigued breasts: “The large breasts have a look of fatigue,” he writes of Janet, Skinner’s daughter, with whom Owen embarks on an affair. “She’s away to one side watching but occasionally returns to within herself, looks out at me with what seems genuine unanalytical imprisonment in the moment.” (Mr. Duncan is very fond of long, distractingly detailed sexual digressions which also get in the way and seem out of place in a novel centered on an Indian man’s quest for authenticity through boxing.)  Still, despite the novel’s flaws, the relationship between father and son, and the story’s ending, are models of a grand forgiveness, of a vision large and big-hearted. You keep on reading, fascinated by the descriptions of colonial India, and by the quandary of the Anglo-Indians’ unstable, porous identity. It’s of course an increasing predicament of globalization, and it’s one of contemporary fiction’s great themes.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Legacy of the Raj: Adrift in Two Cultures. Today's Paper|Subscribe
The great contribution of Glen Duncan’s new novel is to provide us with a singular look into the lives of Anglo-Indians.