Scott's novels persistently draw on his experiences of India and service in the armed forces with strong subtexts of uneasy relationships between male friends or brothers; both the social privilege and the oppressive class and racial strata of the empire are represented, and novel by novel the canvas broadens. "The Alien Sky" remains the principal fictional exploration of a very light-skinned, mixed race, British-Indian woman who has married a white man by pretending to be white. "A Male Child" is set principally in London and deals with the domestic effects of losing a family member to imperial service. "The Chinese Love Pavilion", after an Indian opening, is largely concerned with events in Malaya under Japanese occupation. These novels can be seen in retrospect as studies leading up to "The Raj Quartet", one of whose minor characters is named in "The Birds of Paradise" (1962), but the lack of commercial impact forced Scott to broaden his range. His next two novels, "The Bender" (1963), a satirical comedy, and "The Corrida at San Feliu" (1964), comprising multiple linked texts and drawing extensively on family holidays in the Costa Brava, are a clear attempt to experiment with new forms and locales. Again, these were well received critically, but neither was especially successful either financially or artistically, and Scott decided that he had either to write the great novel of the Raj of which he believed himself capable, or return to salaried work.