You can buy them. You can borrow them. You can download them. But are all those books out there really worth your while?
Herewith some brief assessments.
At the heart of Ali Sethi's debut novel is a tale of transgressive love in which the protagonist tries to help his cousin to win over the boy of her fantasies. On this slender peg Sethi hangs a series of portraits of people's lives over the years, centring on Lahore in the Eighties and Nineties. Though the author's skill in observation and ability to delineate a large cast of characters is evident, The Wish Maker is too much of a loose, baggy monster to be entirely satisfying.
The novel opens with the young Zaki Shirazi returning from a Massachusetts college to his Lahore home for the wedding of his cousin, Samar Api, a close childhood friend and ally. From here it moves back and forth in time to fill in the blanks in the lives of Zaki, Samar and their families and friends.
We learn of the journeys of the independent women whom Zaki has grown up with: these are, among others, his feisty mother, editor of a progressive Pakistani publication; his doughty grandmother, who’s lived through Partition and the travails of Pakistan; the spirited Nargis, his mother’s friend and an activist lawyer; and the pious Naseem, their household help. As is the case with many recent works by novelists from Pakistan writing in English, the country’s politics is very much part of the backdrop. Episodes such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging, martial law, Benazir Bhutto’s dismissal and laws relating to the status of women are enacted offstage, and provoke animated debate and activism especially among Zaki’s mother and colleagues.
Details and anecdotes abound throughout, in step with a succession of effective set pieces. Sethi’s prose is full of quick, glancing observations even though the occasional choppiness of style becomes, after a while, more of an affectation than anything else.
It becomes clear soon enough that The Wish Maker is a nostalgist’s map of Pakistan. The book encompasses childhood pursuits and misdemeanours, the setting up of an independentmagazine during a conservative time, the reaction of a family to the arrival of a satellite dish, sojourns at the house of uncles and aunts, the influence of Bollywood on impressionable minds, the schedule of a school that Zaki attends and a great deal more. Then again, there are other episodes, such as an account of a vacation in Spain or Zaki’s time in his American college, that – however ably narrated –seem merely tacked on and do little to expand the novel’s ambit.
The Wish Maker doesn’t restrict itself to portraying an upper middle class lifestyle; the cast of characters is carefully chosen to touch upon various shades, from the feudalism of the provinces to the upward striving of the middle class to the decadence and cynicism of the affluent. This all-encompassing approach may seem like a strength because of the ambitious, almost Tolstoyan, breadth of vision, but in this case turns out to be a weakness due to the dispersed and scattered centre of gravity that ensues.
Another quality that drains the novel of vitality is that Zaki, as a protagonist, is more acted upon than willing to act. Indeed, we have little sense of him as an independent agent, as his growing years are almost wholly defined by his relationships. Since many sections of the novel are told from his first-person point of view, the inevitable outcome of this submissiveness is a degree of narrative languor. Samar Api, the wish maker of the title, is a much more engaging character, and it’s a pity she isn’t present for a larger part of the novel.
Like the improvised time capsule that Zaki and his schoolmate bury in his backyard, The Wish Maker is chock-full of bits and pieces that are redolent of life in Pakistan. Had Sethi’s talent had been matched by greater control over his material, the novel would have been the more compelling for it.
At a time when some people are still getting over the fact that men and monkeys swing from the same family tree comes this work by Neil Shubin, asserting that many characteristics we think of as distinctively human are actually shared by fish, among other creatures. Clearly, Your Inner Fish is not to be read while dining at Mahesh Lunch Home.
It was the unearthing of a 350 million-year-old fossilized fish, an intermediate between land and water organisms, that’s the starting point of this book. For Shubin, paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, such ancient fish bones are more valuable than gold, which is why he spent years with his team turning over rocks in the snowy wastes of the Canadian Arctic, braving polar bears and ice storms. The abovementioned sea creature, dubbed Tiktaalik after an Inuit term for freshwater fish, had flippers to enable it to move on land and from a study of its skeleton, Shubin finds fascinating Darwinian connections with the way human beings themselves have evolved.
Be it a frog, bat, lizard or human, the deep similarities between bodies shows that they’re all variations on a theme, he writes. “Most of the major bones that humans use to walk, throw or grasp appeared in animals ten to millions of hundreds of years before.” The development of teeth, for example, initially used to bite, led to structures designed to protect - and the same developmental forces led to the creation of feathers, mammary glands and hair. In another instance, a segmented skeletal structure leads him to point out developmental similarities between the head of a shark and that of a human being (all human beings, not just real estate developers).
Shubin also illustrates how the shared genetic code of all living organisms reinforces his variations-on-a-theme thesis. We may not look much like sea anemones and jellyfish, but the recipe that builds us is a more intricate version of the one that builds them. Along the way, he points out the links between a mammalian ear and a shark's jaw, as well as the varying roles and development of visual and olfactory organs. Should you be so inclined, he even tells you how to extract DNA in your kitchen, using the simplest of equipment.
Shubin is clearly passionate about his subject, enthusiastic about communicating his theories, and possesses the ability to clarify abstruse concepts. All of which makes Your Inner Fish illuminating and interesting, aided by the occasional personal anecdote, from haggling with antique fossil dealers in China to visits with his son to New York’s Museum of Natural History. It ought to be said, however, that on occasion the level of simplification appears to be too much: perhaps this springs from the desire to communicate to as broad a readership as possible.
The point of it all, which is what Shubin sums up with, is that there’s a universal biological law: every living thing on the planet has parents - more specifically, parental genetic information – and therefore, all of us are modified descendants of those that came before. This, among other things, throws light on how our evolutionary past causes problems when it comes to our current lifestyle, from hiccups to hernias (the former, by the way, is derived from gill breathing in tadpoles).
The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane, who pointed out the evolutionary significance of Vishnu’s avatars from fish onwards, once said, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”. In identifying the links that bind us all together, Neil Shubin goes some way in making the living universe less mysterious.
Ah, the joys of coming of age in an Indian city in the Eighties. It was a time before easy Internet access, before malls and multiplexes, before the democratisation of airline travel and before the opening up of the economy. Instead, one developed a taste for kitsch at decaying single-screen theatres, implored relatives visiting from overseas to bring back the latest releases, discussed procreation in hushed tones, and prepared for long-distance train travel at the start of every summer holiday. It is with these ingredients that Anand Mahadevan fashions his winsome but structurally odd debut novel, The Strike.
In brisk, efficient prose, Mahadevan takes us into the world and extended family of Hari, a Nagpur-based pre-teen whose family is from south India. Through a series of vignettes, we learn of his experiments with eating fried fish at a neighbour’s house – something his devoutly vegetarian family would shudder at – his interactions with the same neighbour’s daughter as well as a classmate, a family journey to Benares with his grandmother’s ashes, his antics during Holi and his nascent erotic stirrings while at the movies, among other activities.
About halfway through, the novel moves away from this episodic pattern and segues into an account of another train journey that Hari and his mother undertake, this time to Chennai. This is the heart of the book and Mahadevan is at his most evocative here, touching upon aspects familiar to anyone who’s undertaken a similar trip: the food, the porters, a variety of chatty, inquisitive co-passengers, the stench of the toilets, the passing scenery and the hubbub of stations on the way. Hari’s fascination with two others on the train, a eunuch and an aspiring film star, leads to a private sexual awakening -- and later, to a series of mishaps when the train is halted near Ennore by protestors calling for a strike because of the death of their beloved hero MGR. It’s as though the piece of fish that Hari earlier consumed with so much gusto continues to blight his life with negative karmic ramifications.
At this point, Mahadevan again switches register; the novel moves away from a recounting of Hari’s actions and impressions, to dwell on those dealing with the fallout of the train mishap, among them his grandparents, railway officials , disgruntled factory workers and none other than Jayalalitha, in a cameo appearance. Though a chastened Hari does re-enter the scene later, the novel’s interrupted emotional momentum never gets back on track.
Mahadevan takes care to weave in markers of the era – the Indian Peace Keeping Force, the Bhopal gas tragedy and the vagaries of south Indian politics, for example – but since the book was first published in Canada a few years ago, he also takes pains to explain their meaning and significance to readers of that country, either though dialogue or narrative exposition. This, combined with structural inconsistencies, makes The Strike engaging but not very striking.
Pity the poor travel writer. Long gone are the days when all that was needed to gather material for a new book was to stick a pin into an atlas to find an unexplored corner of the world, and then return with tales of how they do things differently there. This Eurocentric model has been replaced by tales of heroism and endurance – the north face of the Eiger, anyone? – or inventive means of structuring the journey, be it circumnavigating London or following in the footsteps of legendary travellers of yesteryear. It helps, of course, if you can simply make the reader chuckle (as Bill Bryson will tell you).
The plot thickens if the traveller visits a place that he’s linked to by history: then, even a first-time visit is shot through by ancestral anecdotes and childhood memories of where one’s parents and grandparents came from. The one book that springs to mind in this regard is, of course, V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness, a map of the writer’s disillusionment with the country of his forebears.
Like Naipaul, M.G. Vassanji can trace his ancestry back to India, and to specific locations within the country. His A Place Within is a response to and record of voyages around the subcontinent. Unlike Naipaul’s book, it isn’t an account of a single, extended journey, but a montage of incidents culled from his many visits to the country, the first one being in 1993. That’s fifteen years’ worth of material, and organizing these into a tightly-knit narrative poses a challenge that Vassanji isn’t always up to.
The self-described “Indo-African Canadian writer” has said of his first novel, The Gunny Sack, that it was a novelistic organization of “memories, oral histories, and myths”; A Place Within is comprised of much the same elements.
Vassanji’s is a less caustic eye than Naipaul’s, and India’s poor infrastructure, dirt and difficulty for the foreign visitor draw no more than pained sighs and sometimes, bemused wonderment at the state of affairs. In this manner, he meets the taxi strikes, delayed trains and indifferent accommodation that he’s sometimes had to face. Clearly, he has tried to immerse himself in the country, not just view it through a pane of glass, as his accounts of train travel, treks to pilgrimage spots on foot, eating with hands and – on at least one occasion -- cleaning teeth with charcoal powder will testify.
It may well be his scientific background, but Vassanji’s approach to the places he visits is to dig deep into their histories in an effort to link them to the present. Such recounting of the past, coupled with his personal sojourns in the present, then, is Vassanji’s attempt to understand the influences that have created him, in cultural, geographical and historical terms. As he writes: “When I was a boy in colonial Africa, history began and ended with the arrival in Zanzibar and Mombasa of my grandparents or great-grandparents from Gujarat. Beyond that, nothing else mattered, all was myth, and there was only the present. After a few years in North America, I came upon the realization that ever-present, which had been mine, my story had itself begun to drift away towards the neglected and spurned stories oif my forebears, and I stood at the threshold of becoming a man without history, rootless. And so origins and history became and obsession, both a curse and a thrilling call.”
Thus, for instance, there are long sections on the growth and decay of Delhi’s legendary seven cities, interspersed with accounts of his own ramblings though the city. Nothing, it seems, escapes his courtly, genteel attention, from flashy new developments to legendary eateries of old Delhi to the tomb of Raziya Sultan to the house of Kamala Nehru, to mention but a few. Take this wide-eyed snapshot of the walled city, for instance: “On our way, busy meat shops; sweetmeats, salty namkeens frying; fresh-baked breads and cakes on display; a sidewalk book vendor eating meat curry with chapatti opposite the Jama Masjid; a perfume seller calling out, rubbing samples on people’s backs; boys playing alley cricket; cycle rickshaws, horses, mules, cows; burqa-covered women walking stifflt, proudly on the street; busy shopkeepers, idle shopkeepers, a bevy of women gathered outside a shop to inspect a heap of material. I’ve never seen so many veiled women in India before.”
In many ways, Vassanji’s trips to Gujarat are the heart of this book, for it is here that he comes closest to an understanding of his “in-between life”. There’s a painstaking and almost dogged recital of the area’s history, touching upon Baroda, Ahmedabad, Champaner and more. And since Vassanji’s first trip here was in 1993, to a country still reeling in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid destruction, the taint of communalism is much on his mind: “I always cringe at the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’; they are so final, so unequivocal. So exclusive. For ‘Hindu’ – itself derived not from the name of a founder, as ‘Chriatian’ is, or a philosophy or attitude (of submission) as ‘Muslim’ is, but from a geographical marker, the river Indus – I often substitute ‘Indian’, for India’s primary identity is rooted in its ancient history and culture, which preceded these religious divisions. I imagined India as my ancestral homeland; to witness, upon my arrival, its divisions running so deep was profoundly unsettling.”
He visits and analyses cities and towns, stopping at formerly riot-hit areas, shrines, monuments and ruins: “In North America, we treasure the past, strive to preserve it; but perhaps there is not much of it anyway. Here, there is a glut, enough to be neglected or selective”. He places emphasis on religious syncretism and dwells on sites relevant to his community, the Ismaili Khojas -- in particular in Junagadh and Jamnagar, for it is from here that his grandparents migrated to East Africa. At one shrine in the village of Pirana, he discovers the roots of the ginans (hymns) familiar to him from his childhood; however, “there was no Kunta Kinte moment; I did not come looking for one. If there ever was one close to it, it was when I first stepped on Indian soil, undertook that quick tour of the country that began with a train ride, the Puri Express.”
The urge to capture all his impressions in one volume, however, lets Vassanji down in terms of structure. He often gives in to the temptation of appending extracts and fragments of memories drawn from his trips over the years. The intention, that of encompassing all of his experiences, may be laudable but the book’s focus becomes diffused.
Vassanji also spent some months at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, writing parts of what was to become The Assassin’s Song – the first of his novels to be based in India -- and he speaks with warmth of the hill station and its sights and sounds. In particular, there’s an affectionate remembrance of his meetings with Bhisham Sahni and his wife, as well as details of his treks to the Hanuman and Tara Devi temples. There’s also a recounting of briefer visits to Bombay and Calcutta, and his meetings with Mulk Raj Anand and Asghar Ali Engineer, among others.
Naipaul’s book ended in Kashmir; towards the end of A Place Within, Vassanji takes us to Kerala. Here, he examines the origins of the Moplahs, visits litterateurs -- Basheer, T.S. Pillai – and towns such as Calicut and Trivandrum, in each case assiduously and inevitably providing historical anecdotes. Then, he pushes on south to India's tip, Kanyakumari, where Swami Vivekananda’s memorial is more peaceful and awe-inspiring than the other temples in the vicinity. And then he segues into a brief account of a short visit to Dharamshala -- once again succumbing to the impulse to move away from a central spine and provide as comprehensive an account of his journeys to India as possible. At one point in A Place Within, referring to Ibn Batuta, Vassanji calls the Moroccan scholar’s travel memoir “intimate, expansive, unpretentious”. Much the same can be said of Vassanji’s book itself.
“Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it. Writing is now timid because writers are now terrified.” That, according to Hanif Kureishi, is one of the outcomes of the two-decade old fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
Such consequences and more are what Kenan Malik attempts to get to the root of in his From Fatwa to Jihad, a compelling look at the ways in which the world -- specifically, the United Kingdom -- has changed in the years since the book was burned in Bradford and Rushdie, in Martin Amis’ memorable words, “disappeared into the front page”. (For those who need reminding, India was the first country to ban The Satanic Verses.)
It’s a vast subject and Malik attempts to do it justice by compressed explorations of the nature of contemporary Islam, its relationship to the West, the origin and causes of multiculturalism and the nature of tolerance in liberal societies. These are interspersed with occasional interviews with some of the dramatis personae – not including Rushdie himself – as well as relevant biographical anecdotes.
One of the themes that emerge again and again in these pages is how politics for short-term gain inevitably leads to less-than-desirable results. Malik quotes Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, one of the founders of the Muslim Institute, as saying that “the conflict over Rushdie was never about religion. It was about politics, specifically between Saudi Arabia and Iran over winning hearts and minds of Muslims”. In a wider context, he marshals the arguments of sociologists and others who point out that contemporary Islamic radicalism isn’t an atavistic return to tradition, but rather, a response to the stresses of the present and the diminishment of identity.
It was politics again, this time at a local level, which was responsible for the policy of multiculturalism in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Malik traces this further back than 1988, touching upon opposition to the National Front thugs, the creation of bodies such as the Indian Progressive Youth Association and the 1981 Brixton riots. He outlines how municipal policies of creating a political framework to reach out to minority communities influenced the Bhikhu Parekh report on the future of multi-ethnic Britain, paving the way for multiculturalism at a national level. This “helped create new divisions and more intractable conflicts which made for a less openly racist but a more insidiously tribal Britain”. It’s ironic that the old left-wing dream of concerted action to bring about universal acceptance should come to this.
Early on in the book, Malik quotes Peter Mayer, then Penguin CEO, on his realisation that the publisher’s response to the Satanic Verses affair “would affect the future of free enquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we know it, but also, by extension, no civil society as we knew it”. Such a stance seems to be forgotten nowadays, what with the Danish cartoons controversy as well as Random House’s recent decision not to publish Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina. Malik refers to this state of affairs as an “auction of victimhood”, with everyone free to air grievances and be offended, all ignoring the advice of Justice Hugo Black from the US Supreme Court in 1961: “Freedom of speech must be accorded to ideas we hate or sooner or later it will be denied to ideas we cherish”.
Words to keep in mind as we enter even more polarised times, considering this month’s European parliament election results in which far-right and anti-immigrant parties across countries made significant gains. If you’re expecting another Enlightenment anytime soon, don’t hold your breath.
Considering that there’s a mysterious death on the very first page of Monica Ali’s third novel, it's surprising how turgid the bulk of In the Kitchen turns out to be. This, on the face of it, is the story of Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef at the Imperial Hotel in London, a Victorian establishment that, despite several renovations, is clearly past its prime.
Gabriel Lightfoot – neither angelic nor swift on his feet – is in his early forties, with ambitions of opening a restaurant of his own, and in talks with sleazy promoters to make this come about. However, when the body of Yuri, night porter and Ukrainian immigrant, is found in the basement, the chef’s ordered life begins to come apart at the seams. He develops a strange and intense obsession for Lena, another porter from East Europe, inviting her to stay with him, and this liaison puts a strain first on his relationship with his girlfriend Charlie, a spunky nightclub singer, and then on his mental health itself.
Much of the action of the book, but by no means all of it, takes place in the hotel’s kitchen and its environs, and the author takes pains to recreate the world of an executive chef, with his gustatory and administrative responsibilities. We learn about the selection of cheeses, the preparation of desserts, the duties, grades and volatile moods of kitchen personnel, the choices leading to the determination of a menu and – pay attention now, this could be important -- the temperature below which custard gets lumpy.
The following paragraph, for instance, is entirely representative of this sort of thing: “Nikolai, the Russian commis, chopped salad onions with heart-breaking deftness and speed. Suleiman hovered by the Steam’N’Hold waiting for his souffle with evident anxiety, as though it were his firstborn son. Victor moved between the Bratt Pan, wilting off spinach, and the combi-oven, loading up potato rostis and cubes of butternut squash. A commis dropped a bowl of peelings and everyone clapped. Benny ran over to help him and ran back to his station, wiping his hands. A spit of fat from a wok hissed in the blue burner flame. In Ivan's empire the air pulsed with heat so that the grill chef appeared hazy, as though he were a mirage. He slapped a couple of steaks on the charcoal grill and took a hammer to a third, the sweat darkening the back of his white coat.”
Now, if this seems all too familiar, it’s because such territory behind the scenes in a large kitchen servicing a busy restaurant’s needs has already been staked out by Bill Buford in Heat or Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, among others.
That apart, Ali’s prose is quiet, undemonstrative, and in no hurry to score points. (With the occasional lapse such as when Charlie is described as being “as lovely as a summer’s day”.) She carefully delineates Gabriel’s shifting states of mind, the geography of London that he passes through, the interiors of restaurants and cafes he inhabits, and his current and childhood homes, among other locales.
The book, then, posits an individual’s dire predicament with shifting ideas of England old and new, and as though to underline this ambition, there are also tepid debates on multiculturalism, on the state of the economy and on an evolving national identity. Unfortunately and inevitably, the phrase that comes to mind at this point is: “bite off more than one can chew”.
Though some scenes – such as Gabriel’s attempted rapprochement with Charlie -- are undeniably powerful, for large sections in the middle the dough is stretched very thin. The central character’s circumstances don’t change all that much, and the death of Yuri at the beginning comes across as an all-too-convenient ploy to capture the reader’s interest. Ali’s depiction of the condition of immigrants from Eastern Europe and what this is doing to England doesn’t shed much new light on the subject, and there’s an uneasy coupling of this with Gabriel’s own private crisis.
The upshot is that one finds oneself increasingly distanced from the chef’s predicament and, therefore, from this purported condition-of-England novel itself. The novelist may have selected with ingredients with care, but the outcome is decidedly stodgy.
In an essay from his recent collection, Clearing a Space, Amit Chaudhuri has written of the importance of exploring “the elisions that direct the binaries (East, West; high; low, native; foreign, fantasy; reality, elite; democratic)”. In his new novel, The Immortals, he continues to uncover such elisions by delving deep into the lives of disparate individuals living in the Bombay of the Seventies and Eighties.
The focus is primarily on Mallika, incipient professional singer, married to Apurva Sengupta, chief executive of a large corporation, and their sensitive son Nirmalya. The other pole of the narrative concerns Shyamji, musician and tutor, who instructs Mallika and then Nirmalya in the intricacies of Indian classical music. Others who wing their way in and out of the text include the Neogis, old friends of the Senguptas, a domestic retinue of cooks and cleaners, and others from Shyamji’s extended family, who also dabble in music.
Chaudhuri’s fiction has always had more to do with delicacy, nuance and the minutiae of the everyday, rather than grand national narratives, character development or plotted arcs. It’s no surprise then that he follows the same template here, as he traces Nirmalya’s coming of age, Mallika’s blanched dreams and Shyamji’s disillusionment over the years.
There’s an elegiac, long-summer-afternoon tone to much of the book, with Chaudhuri taking his time to explore moods, their gradations and his characters’ self-questioning ways. Of a character’s using the word “beautiful” to describe a Cuffe Parade flat, for example, he writes, “By 'beautiful' she didn't mean what she meant when wandering about an art gallery, or assessing one of her husband's graphic designs; as an adult sometimes pretends to use a word in a simple, clear, limited way for the benefit of a child, she used the word as the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie thoughtlessly used it, as an uncomplicated acknowledgement of well-being.”
The city of Bombay is the living, breathing backdrop to the characters’ peregrinations, and Chaudhuri carefully maps the spaces they inhabit: three-bedroom apartments in Malabar Hill; the taking of tea at the Sea Lounge and dinners at Tanjore; classical concerts at NCPA; buildings in far-flung Borivili; new developments in Versova; chawls in King’s Circle; and the genteel charms of Bandra’s Pali Hill.
There are times when his quiet prose carries a whiff of wry irony; at other times, one encounters an unhurried poet’s eye, as with this description of a Bandra lane following a spell of rain: “After the shower the gulmohur blossoms would have fallen from branches on certain parts of the road with a particular exactness and economy, precise carpets of bright red only in those sections of the lane where the gulmohur trees stood, then, an hour later, becoming pink, then, after another hour, a soiled pink fading into the tarmac's perennial, unsentimental grey.”
The creation and inevitable commercialisation of music also plays a large role in the novel, charting the ups and downs of Shyamji’s family when it comes to chasing fame and riches, and Mallika Sengupta’s fantasies of becoming a performing artist – as well as guest appearances by Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsle, among others. In particular, the philosophy-loving, jeans-and-kurta clad Nirmalya mulls continually over the nuances and origin of Indian ragas and the compromises that those he looks up to make to achieve popularity. Such discussions on music and its evocation, in fact, are among the book’s great strengths.
Because Chaudhuri’s is a miniaturist’s art, and because this is a more commodious book than his others, there is occasionally a feeling of formlessness and even indolence about the enterprise. Nirmalya’s solipsism and his family’s frequent shifts of residence are dwelt on for self-indulgent lengths of time. (Chaudhuri, in his earlier essays and poems, has written frequently about his own experiences of growing up in Bombay, and this is why there’s always the lurking suspicion that he’s unable to get away from dredging and re-dredging memory’s gold.)
On occasion there are tributary-like digressions into the lives of others, along with their back-stories, that don’t quite serve to thicken the mix, and in addition, the few shifts of location to London – following first, Shayamji and then Nirmalya – appear to be unwarranted. Admittedly, Chaudhuri’s concerns are broader than simply painting a portrait of Nirmalya as a young artist, but in casting his net so far and wide, he disperses attention.
At one point, the teenage Nirmalya, pondering over the pointlessness of his young existence so far, muses that “nothing in the end can cocoon you from the effort it takes to master something, from the fact that the returns are wrung reluctantly from the energy invested - but neither can you protect yourself from the banal and the everyday that comprise your life and make it safe and familiar for you”. That, indeed, could have been the epigraph to this sensitively delineated but languorous novel.
There have been novels about the atomic bombs dropped over Japan (BlackRain). There have been novels on the aftermath of India’s Partition (Train to Pakistan). There have been novels based in war-torn Afghanistan (The Wasted Vigil). And there have been novels regarding the aftermath of 9/11 (too many to recount).
Now, Kamila Shamsie bravely tries to weave all of these and more into her new work, Burnt Shadows -- clearly, an ambitious departure from her earlier novels. Though her even-toned prose and efforts to probe the changing psyche of characters over the decades are worthy of note, what lets the novel down is its linear, chronological structure that calls for many technical compromises.
Throughout, these tragic global events are the backdrop to the shifting relationships between various members of two families over the years: “Whatever might be happening in the wider world, at least the Weiss-Burtons and the Tanaka-Ashrafs had finally found spaces to cohabit in, complicated shared history giving nothing but depth to the reservoir of their friendships.”
With such a grand design, there’s always the danger that the need to keep the narrative moving, as well as provide connecting chronological tissue, will precede character development. That this is unavoidable to some extent (Hiroko’s character is the most fully realized) is ruefully acknowledged by the author herself when she has one of the characters tell another: “Both times you've entered my home it's been nuclear-related. Once was acceptable; twice just seems like lazy plotting”. (Perhaps this could have been avoided had the links been thematic rather than literal, as with the work of David Mitchell.)
In other respects, though, Shamsie’s care with the narrative is evident. There are striking impressionistic sketches of the cities that her characters travel through, and passages such as Raza's panic when faced with an exam paper, among others, are well-handled.
Setting aside the question of how the book’s structure impedes its ambition, BurntShadows is an intrepid look at how the scars of history -- like the bird-shaped radiation blemishes on Hiroko’s back -- are difficult to erase in an age when individual destinies become subservient to nationalistic ambitions.
