If You Really Want To Hear About It

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

How many Zen Buddhist monks does it take to change a lightbulb, asks the old joke. The answer: none, because real change only comes from within. There were many who felt that J.D. Salinger – who died on Wednesday at 91 and was profoundly influenced by Zen Buddhism -- simply refused to change, immersed in the adolescent world of his characters and shutting himself off from society in the decades before his death.

In Holden Caulfield, though, Salinger created a character that generations of disaffected teenagers saw when they looked in the mirror. The alienated 16-year-old protagonist of 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye and his laconic pronouncements had a profound effect, traces of which are to be found till today in estranged anti-heroes on screen, embittered song lyrics and fictional heirs from Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood to Russell Banks’ Chappie.

Such passion leads to extremes: the book was banned several times across high schools in the US; Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, quoted from it during his trial; and it was rumoured that Kurt Cobain was re-reading passages some days before his suicide.

Salinger’s other major fictional creation – and obsession – was the Glass family. Short stories featuring its members were collected in Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. (There were other uncollected appearances in The New Yorker, notably Hapsworth 16, 1924.) These are tales of seven precociously talented siblings -- professors, soldiers, homemakers, students – who are round pegs in square holes. If Salinger’s teenage years informed almost everything he wrote, here we also find him mining his traumatic World War II service memories.

It was the buzz around The Catcher in the Rye, though, that the author found unbearable. Fleeing the “goddamn phonies”, he retreated to the hamlet of Cornish in New Hampshire to remain diagonally parked in a parallel universe for the rest of his life. Perhaps all he wanted was to stay submerged in his beloved Glass family without the world butting in.

Salinger-spotting soon became the outdoor equivalent of a literary parlour game, even though the author stubbornly turned down almost all requests for meetings or interviews, blocking the publication of British journalist Ian Hamilton’s book on his writing career (a version of which appeared as In Search of J.D. Salinger). Over time, unflattering memoirs appeared, notably those of young ex-lover Joyce Maynard and daughter Margaret.

Throughout his seclusion, Salinger was said to be writing obsessively. Now that he’s no more, there’s sure to be pressure on his family to release all or some of those manuscripts for scrutiny. It’s a difficult decision: to go the way of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend, and Dmitri, Nabokov’s son; or respect the fact that Salinger himself displayed no desire to share his prose. For now, we’re left with Holden’s words: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody”.

Love One Another And Die

A slightly shorter version of this appeared in today's The Hindustan Times

IF I COULD TELL YOU Soumya Bhattacharya

The narrator of Saumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You dotes on his daughter, is a cricket enthusiast, has lived in Bombay and London, and is set on becoming a writer. Clearly, Bhattacharya is keen to create a teasing interplay between his life and his fiction, evident from the very first word of the book: Oishi, the name of both the narrator and novelist’s daughter.

Speaking of his work-in-progress, the unnamed narrator quotes Bellow – “fiction is the higher autobiography” – and clarifies that, in the words of Roth, this is a confession in the guise of a novel, not the other way around. The differences between reality and the novel become clear as the book’s tragic dimension unfolds; one should heed Lawrence and trust the tale, not the teller.

Love and frustration encircle the narrative like strands of a double helix. This is the tale of a character drawing from his life to write “a novel of unfulfilled ambition and hope, about fatherhood and wanting to be a writer”. It’s in the form of letters to his daughter, a structure that allows for reflection and digression; to Bhattacharya’s credit, such meditations are part of the overall flow rather than detracting from it.

The novel opens with Oishi’s birth on a Calcutta evening in 2001, and circles between past and present – the death of the narrator’s parents when he was three; his years in Calcutta and Bombay; his invested nest-egg; his time studying in London; meetings with his to-be wife; and their lives in Bombay. It’s when an act of naïve unfaithfulness comes to light that relationships are wrecked, a situation further complicated by the slackening of India’s much-touted growth by the recent recession.

The prose is compressed and lucid in portraying events and emotions, yet lyrical in description and detail, be that of monsoon skies, sunlight on a London park, a torn rejection letter or rain-soiled umbrellas. (Because of this display of control, the inebriated, Joycean ending comes as a surprising affectation.)

This is a narrator for whom literature has replaced religion – witness the frequent allusions to other writers -- and who exists at an angle to the universe. Of his time in London, he says, “It seemed to me that I wasn’t a real person in a real world but inhabiting the world of books that I carried around in my head”.

Such solipsism unfortunately creates the effect of events happening in a bubble, unshackled from surroundings and social moorings -- even though the gentrification of Mumbai’s suburbs, crumbling infrastructure and noxious traffic are often mentioned. This inwardness also weakens the portrayal of other characters: the wife, for example, appears only when she has a specific role to play, not being woven into the novel’s texture. The narrator refers to himself as unreliable, yet this unreliability – and his awareness of it – appears underdone.

The novel’s title, and one of its epigraphs, is from the Auden poem of the same name. The blend of tenderness and tragedy in this tale “of hopes thwarted, of promises broken” reminds one of another famously-amended line by the same poet: “We must love one another,” he wrote, “and die”.

Sex And Death

A slightly edited version of this appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE HUMBLING Philip Roth

Given that there’s usually been a hallway of mirrors between Philip Roth’s life and his fiction, it’s hard not to think of this, his 30^th novel, as an allegory for his own situation. “He’d lost his magic,” is how The Humbling begins, and though at 76, Roth’s output remains undimmed, his books have of late verged on the stark and the melancholy, dealing with loss of powers and imminent mortality.

This, of course, wasn’t always the case. The best of Roth’s novels feature characters who erupt with vitality, be it Alexander Portnoy or Mickey Sabbath. Even American Pastoral’s tragic, conflicted Swede Levov is tireless in his attempts to unravel the mystery of his daughter’s whereabouts. All that changed from 2006, with the elegiac Everyman – though glimmerings emerged in 2001’s The Dying Animal – and continued with Nathan Zuckerman’s swan song, Exit Ghost. Though Indignation’s innocent, hard-working Marcus Messner appeared to buck the trend, we now have the slim The Humbling.

Unfolding in three acts, the novel introduces us without any ado to the predicament of Simon Axler, “the last of the best of the classic American stage actors”. Now in his sixties, and facing the aftermath of a string of disastrous performances, Axler finds himself bereft of self-confidence and talent. His wife leaves him to stay with their son and, alone in his isolated dwelling in rural New York, Axler contemplates suicide with the aid of a shotgun he keeps in the attic. (At which point it would be wise to keep Chekhov’s admonition in mind: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.”)

Pooh-poohing his agent’s plea that he sign on for a production of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Axler spends 26 days in a psychiatric facility bonding with the other inmates and attending art therapy sessions. Though the predicament of the others makes him realize that he is not alone in his helplessness, the retreat does little to restore his self-belief.

Much of this first section carries a convincing, compelling charge, but it's when Pegeen enters Axler's life that the narrative’s waters become muddied. She's the 40-year-old daughter of Axler's former theatre friends, has been in lesbian relationships from the time she was 23, and is just recovering from a messy break-up when she takes up with the aging actor.

Axler goes about remaking her, at least in externals, buying her clothes, lingerie, jewellery and shoes in “an orgy of spending and spoiling that suited them both just fine”. After a stylish, expensive haircut, there’s something of an epiphany: “Wasn’t he making her pretend to be someone other than who she was? Wasn’t he dressing her up in costume as though a costly skirt could dispose of nearly two decades of lived experience?” Ignoring this still, small voice, he convinces himself of the validity and longevity of the relationship, speaking to her parents and listening patiently to her accounts of what they have to say to her.

Here, the compressed, terse, almost sketchy, prose style that made the first part forceful isn't up to the job of delineating their affair. In particular, given the context, the sex scenes are blatant and verge on the ludicrous, involving a dildo, a cat-o-nine tails and, on one occasion, a threesome. (Not for nothing was a passage nominated for the Bad Sex award). It's not that Roth hasn't been transgressive about sex before -- that’s an understatement -- but here, there’s a grim almost voyeuristic tone completely lacking his earlier sauciness.

In addition, there’s the problematic portrayal of Pegeen as stereotypically butch, especially during the episode when the two pick up a woman at a bar. The stage now is set for the final act -- compelling again -- in which we witness the fallout of the liaison and the effects on Axler’s life, readying him for a last private performance.

Woody Allen, that other eminent chronicler of the Jewish American psyche, once typically remarked that the difference between sex and death is that with death, you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you. In taking sex and death as the themes of his late-stage novels, Roth shows that he’s better at the latter than the former.

Home Run

This appeared in yesterday's The Indian Express.

HOME BOY H.M. Naqvi

Voice. Often, it’s the attribute that sets the talented novelist apart from the merely competent: the ability to communicate in a style that's distinctive and wholly of a piece with the material. From the opening paragraph of debutant H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy, you know that this is an author who has it in spades. This is the story of Ali Chaudhry, Jamshed Khan and Shehzad – “AC, Jimbo and me” - three young men of Pakistani origin adrift in the United States after 9/11.

Shehzad, the narrator, known as Chuck, is an NYU literature student-turned-investment banker-turned rookie cab driver; Jimbo is a DJ; and AC is a PhD student on a sabbatical. The plot is set in motion when they set out in Chuck’s taxi from New York City to the Connecticut home of a missing associate, Mohammed Shah, a.k.a. the Shaman, described as “a Pakistani Gatsby” (the reference to Fitzgerald's hero is entirely intentional). This triggers off a chain of events that leads to the trio’s incarceration for “terrorist leanings”. Very quickly, the paranoid mood of New York City after that fateful September morning transforms them from “boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men” into “Japs, Jews, Niggers”. Upon his release, Chuck -- all messed up with no place to go – is forced to re-evaluate his life in the United States and forge new relationships.

The word used by the three musketeers to describe themselves is “metrostani”, and this could well be used to describe Naqvi’s sentences, too. “Metrostani”: the word also echoes the title of another debut novel, Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani, with which Home Boy has more of an affinity than with that other 9/11 novel by another writer from Pakistan, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

This is prose with panache, culturally au courant and with an eye for the absurd - a cross between early Jay McInerney and Gary Shteyngart, with subcontinental seasoning. It incorporates underground music, fashion and intoxication-producing substances as well as an Agha Shahid Ali translation of lines by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and home-cooked dishes of seekh kabab and biryani. At times it’s mordantly witty (“Just as three Jews were a conspiracy, three Muslims were a sleeper cell”); at times it’s part-knowledgeable, part-ironic (“Attempting to hail a cab on Columbus at half past eight in the morning is like trying to get a reservation at that sushi joint in Tribeca at half past eight in the evening”).

None of this should be taken to mean that the book is without a disturbing poignancy. Shadows lengthen as the narrative progresses and Chuck experiences the underside of the immigrant dream: when societies feel threatened, outsiders in their midst are looked upon with exaggerated suspicion and even hostility.

Some of the book's vigour peters out in the second half, when the narrator loses touch with his two friends and is left to his own devices. Then again, every so often there's a touch of polemic that surfaces, sometimes during Chuck’s interrogation and sometimes during dinner discussions on liberty and equality.The craft, however, is sustained throughout: take, for instance, the reverse-flip last chapter written entirely in second person. Home Boy, then, scores a home run, not least for its narrative brio. Please welcome Mr Naqvi to the already-impressive roster of novelists from Pakistan writing in English.

Jet Lag

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka

ROADRUNNER: AN INDIAN QUEST IN AMERICA Dilip D'Souza

One of the problems besetting the travel writer must be that of how to organize his or her material, of how to make all those scribbled notes cohere to form a manuscript that holds together from first to last. In many cases, the nature of the voyage itself provides the necessary spine: I. Alan Sealy’s 1995 From Yukon to Yucatan, for instance, was the record of a journey that followed the route of the first Native Americans, from the snowy wastes of Alaska down to the bulk of the continent and ending in Mexico. Then again, there’s the simple, stirring manifesto of William Least-Heat Moon: “I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.”

What strikes one overwhelmingly about the bulk of Dilip D’Souza’s Roadrunner is the absence of just such an organizing principle. This is the record of road trips across the United States over a period of 18 months – many undertaken probably during the decade that D’Souza was living and working in that country as a software professional, in the 80s and 90s. The questions that he asks himself during these travels are: “What does the United States look like, through an Indian's eyes? How do Americans see their country, their place in the world? How does patriotism, the idea of a nation, resonate in the two countries? How does a citizen consider her country?”

These large and over-reaching queries, then, could have been the axis of the book; instead, we get what reads like an unexpurgated record of D’Souza’s travels, in Mississippi, Virginia, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas and many more locations, including – naturally – the legendary Route 66. Along the way, he witness one of Obama’s campaign speeches, frequents blues bars looking for the spirit of Robert Johnson and walks around Ground Zero in New York City.

Evidently, then, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill wide-eyed tourist’s account: D’Souza does seek out and spend time travelling the back roads and frequenting smaller towns. And to be sure, some of the connections that the author muses on are relevant and interesting, such as the death of an American soldier in Iraq contrasted with those of jawans in Kargil; relief efforts in the wake of the Katrina and Orissa cyclones; war memorials in Shiloh and near the Indo-Pak border; and shades of bigotry, be they in Mumbai or Texas. Another important point he makes – especially when contrasted with India -- relates to the sheer amount of access that Americans have to a range of facilities, be they scientific or sports-related, access that translates into achievement over the years.

Unfortunately, these are almost drowned out by other accounts that read like dressed-up diary entries, such as those of driving a fire truck, flying in a biplane or fresh-off-the-boat tales of his time in university. Such incidents and more, narrated in a breezy style in short chapters -- often with a jittery, quickened pace to many of the recollections -- steer the book away from its central purpose, which is a pity.

Of course, what makes a travel book memorable are the people more than the places. D’Souza gives us a fair share of such characters and his interactions with them: for example, Don, who paints Boeings for a living and succeeds in overcoming his family’s racist prejudices; Carl, a committed ‘biker for Christ’; the pen friend who drifts away to become a born-again Christian; and the frankly bizarre tale of Pete and his succession of wives.

Buried within this overstuffed travelogue, then, are nuggets that, had they been selected and organized, would have made Roadrunner a much more compelling book. As it is, however, it’s a grab-bag of recollections which, like any long road trip itself, consists of the interesting, the inconsequential and the inane.

An Incomplete And Biased List Of My Favourite Books (So Far) Of 2009, Including Some That Were Published In 2008

Bookshops shut down, publishers saw more red ink than black and Sarah Palin outsold everyone else. No, it hasn’t been a good year for books – but then, you could say that about pretty much everything and everyone else this year, including Tiger Woods. As for me, I spent too much time at work, in traffic, on Twitter and worrying whether I could afford to buy a house in Bombay (I can’t) to be able to read as much as I’d have liked.

With those caveats in place, here’s the selection, in no particular order.

Geoff Dyer’s Death in Venice, Jeff in Varanasi was striking for its two-part structure, flaneur-like musings and part-droll, part-meditative insights. I haven’t read Dyer before, but this novel makes me even more determined to seek out his other work, especially Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered To Do It.

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence was less experimental than some of his earlier work, but more than made up for it in its depiction of obsessive, quirky love and rendering of Istanbul’s domes, alleyways and modes of thought. The word ‘evocative’, so often over-used in book reviews (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), comes to mind. So does the word ‘masterful’.

Also noteworthy was Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger: a decaying Georgian mansion, fraying class relations in post-WW II Britain and things that go bump in the night, all in one riveting package.

Then, there was J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime. If his earlier Diary of a Bad Year subverted fictional conventions with its parallel-track footnotes, this one goes a step further by taking as its subject one John Coetzee who – or may not – be the author himself. Unsettling, intriguing and, given its aims, very readable.

The universal acclaim for Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall left me slightly skeptical, but upon reading it, there’s no question that the praise and the prize were very well-deserved. The charged present tense, compelling string of incidents and marvellous detail were expertly handled. I must confess though that on more than one occasion I was assailed by the feeling that a better knowledge of British history on my part would have helped.

Among Indians writing in English, Madhulika Liddle’s The Englishman’s Cameo -- a Mughal murder mystery set in 15^th century Shahjahanabad featuring the intrepid Muzaffar Jang -- was deft and charming. More please.

To turn to short stories, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms Other Wonders, in its unsentimental depiction of the landless and the feudal elite in Pakistan, was pitch-perfect and moving. Palash Krishna Mehrotra's Eunuch Park was also impressive, with its cool urbane voice serving as a counterpoint to the pathos of the material. Two other lovely short story collections that came my way in paperback in 2009 were Amy Hempel’s The Dog of the Marriage and the handsome Faber edition of Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories. (Which reminds me – heard of a bookshop in Mumbai that stocks her A Gate at the Stairs yet? Thought not. Amazon it is, then.)

In non-fiction, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History managed to be both magisterial and puckish, full of unorthodox readings that either had one slapping one’s forehead for not thinking of them oneself, or – more often – simply reading on in slack-jawed awe.

Zadie Smith’s essay collection, Changing My Mind was also notable for the felicity of her prose and the sparkle of her opinions. To read her on Kafka, on Forster and on Nabokov is to come away with a renewed appreciation of those authors, and as for would-be writers out there, I’d urge you to read her ‘A Crafty Business’. (Though strictly speaking, it’s not a ‘new’ book in the sense that most of these pieces have been published earlier.)

Since I didn’t feel that new work by Toibin, Banville and Trevor – so commendable in so many ways – was among their best and therefore merited inclusion here, I shall now turn to another admirable Irish product, a dram of Jameson’s. With the hope that 2010 affords more hours available to spend with a book, an e-reader or – should it ever materialise – Apple’s netbook.

The Top Ten Indian Genes

India maps human genome – The Hindustan Times, December 9.

Allegedly, a hush-hush document prepared by scientists at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research states that among the thousands of genes they have scanned, ten are especially active among Indians in urban areas. Here, for the first time, are leaked extracts from this paper.

H-ONK. Causes itching of the thumb, which can only be relieved by vigorous and incessant blowing of horn while driving.

G-RAFT. A mutant version of the above that also makes the palm of the hand itch, leading to several under-the-table dealings.

PTH-OO. Brings about salivation, leading to excessive expectoration. (Note: This gene is only activated in public areas.)

SIX-SIXES. Activated at the sight of a plank of willow meeting a leather orb, automatically bringing the carrier to his or her feet.

O-GLE. Believed to control eye-function, causing the gene carrier to stare fixedly at others on the road without any provocation whatsoever.

WTF. A dual-action gene that affects perceptions of the colour white: carriers are drawn towards white skin while at the same time being repelled by white money.

FR-Y. This modifies digestive patterns, making the carrier partial to any form of food that has been dipped in oil before cooking.

F-LASH. Dubbed ‘the flashy gene’ by scientists, this compels carriers to indulge in lavishness when it comes to weddings. Typical manifestations are gaudy jewellery, ornate backdrops and thirty-two course buffets.

TICK-TOCK. This gene affects perceptions of time, leading carriers to believe that it is infinitely elastic. (Scientists are attempting to prove the hypothesis that Einstein carried a version of this gene as well.)

OS-TRICH Especially prevalent among those who run for office, this brings about the belief that shouting in Parliament or on TV shows will cause problems to vanish

Turning Moments Into Mementoes

This appeared in today's The Sunday Express.

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE Orhan Pamuk

In his Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk writes that the defining characteristic of the city and its inhabitants can be captured by the Turkish word huzun: a type of deep, melancholic nostalgia, a “state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating”. His fat, satisfying new novel, The Museum of Innocence, is suffused with just such a feeling.

The book starts with a bang: in the dusty bedroom of a hitherto-uninhabited house in mid-Seventies Istanbul, the upper-class, 30-year-old Kemal is making ecstatic love to Fusun, a “poor distant relative”. In retrospect, Kemal, the narrator, says that this “was the happiest moment of my life”. Shortly after, this heir to the fortunes of a thriving distribution and export firm breezily tells us that he’s engaged to another woman, Sibel, an alliance more in keeping with his social standing.

Kemal’s attraction towards the 18-year-old student and shopgirl deepens and grows, and he finds himself helpless in the face of his desire. The initial relationship lasts for barely a month-and-a-half, but after it, he’s racked with anguish, driven to break off his engagement and then spends nine years trying to win Fusun back. It’s an obsession that brings to mind Florentino’s passion for Fermina in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. The fixated Kemal is often caddish and duplicitous, but earns a degree of empathy with his fanatical quest.

He also lovingly details another fixation: that of collecting objects to fill his “museum of innocence”, each one enshrining a memory associated with his beloved. An ear-ring, a doll, a piece of wallpaper, a hotel key, a bell, restaurant menus, photographs, an ashtray, hair clips, a paperweight and much more -- these, like Proust's madeleine, are his gateways to the past. In them he finds the intersection of “desire, touch and love”. They “preserve the colours, textures, images and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through these moments”. At a structural level, it is this that holds the book together with its succession of short chapters.

Kemal’s fascination for populating his museum is matched by Pamuk’s for delineating life in Istanbul. He contrasts social strata through a succession of details and observations, and the large cast includes people from Kemal’s extended family, friends and business associates, as well as Fusun’s circle of film aspirants. Like the narrator, Pamuk too comes across as “the anthropologist of my own experience”.

The city, then, with its inhabitants and landscapes lives and breathes in the book and time and again, Pamuk’s love for it comes through: “There was beauty to behold in the world…the summer night was cooled by the north wind blowing off the Bosphorus, rustling the leaves of the plane trees in the courtyard of the Tesvikiye Mosque, and causing them to whisper in that lovely soft way I remembered from childhood; and at nightfall the swallows were screeching as they swooped over the dome of the mosque and the rooftops of the 1930s apartment buildings.” Also woven into the narrative are historical incidents from the years in which it is set, such as when the waters of the Bosphorus were aflame because of an oil spill caused by colliding Greek and Romanian freighters.

As with his earlier work, there’s a tug-of-war between tradition and modernity. Here, much of this is expressed in Turkish society’s attitude towards its women: Should they remain virgins until wedlock? Should they work as shopgirls? Should they appear in beauty contests? How short should their skirts be?

Ironically enough, despite all that we’re told about Fusun, she remains a cipher – much like Humbert’s Lolita. Kemal himself confesses in a moment of rare candour: “I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her.” In this sense, Fusun is as much of an object as any other in his collection.

There is much sensuality in the book, with many passages carrying an affecting erotic charge. There’s also a playful spirit that occasionally shines through, such as when a certain “Orhan Pamuk” puts in an appearance at the narrator’s engagement as “the chain-smoking, twenty-three-year old Orhan, nothing special about him beyond his propensity to act nervous and impatient, affecting a mocking smile”. Pamuk re-appears towards the end, this time as a full-blown novelist, giving the book a self-referential twist.

It must be said that because of some heavy-handed foreshadowing, the denouement can be seen approaching from a distance. And the middle section, detailing Kemal’s visits to Fusun and his attempts to set up a film production business, sags a bit. Despite the lucid translation, one does come across the occasional clunky cliché: the “sexual beast” threatens to “rear its head” and the narrator “drank like a fish”. These pale against the overall scheme; Pamuk’s care with the narrative is otherwise evident in the doublings and oppositions he sets up: engagement party and funeral procession; narrator and novelist; the affairs of father and son; backstreet haunts and high-society soirees; Coca Cola and a local substitute. Above all, there’s a fascinated Turkey succumbing to the charms of a seductive Europe, with concomitant effects on its movies, fashions, food and more.

The Museum of Innocence is a compelling tale of remembrance of things past aided by objects present. It is saturated by visions of Istanbul, its squares, marketplaces, avenues, boulevards, backstreets and views of the Bosphorus. There is beauty to be found in these pages. And truth. And love.

Low Interest Rate

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka.

DEATH OF A MONEYLENDER Kota Neelima

The problem with polemical novels is that they’re more polemical than novel. Barring exceptions such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, novelists who come to the keyboard with a well-defined agenda in mind produce work long on argument and short on characterisation. These are precisely the issues that bedevil Kota Neelima’s Death of a Moneylender.

The theme here is the predicament of the Indian farmer and of how the rest of us – particularly the noble men and woman of the Fourth Estate – misrepresent their plight and pander to vested interests. The author’s knowledge of the subjects she writes about is never in doubt; it’s the turgid story-telling and over-wrought prose style that make the novel a disappointment.

Death of a Moneylender deals with the change in the mindset of Falak, a talented, cynical journalist dispatched to the village of Bapat in south India to cover the death of Desraj, a moneylender found hanging from a lamp-post. Conventional wisdom dictates that he was the victim of a disgruntled villager, but as Falak probes deeper, he finds that Desraj was a moneylender with a difference: he actually cared about the plight of farmers, helping them with not only soft loans but also progressive means of farming.

Almost from the start we’re exposed to the novel’s flaws. There’s too much telling and too little showing, and reams of stilted dialogue. (An example of the latter: “The rapidly decreasing agricultural land in this country cannot support a rapidly increasing population solely dependent on it”.)

Neelima attempts to thicken the plot as well as flesh out Falak’s character by having him dip into a copy of the Rig Veda from time to time, and by providing him with a former girlfriend, the idealistic Vani. Both devices, however, are too convenient and heavy-handed – Vani, especially, is too much of a stock figure too make much impact.

As the narrative progresses, the only point of interest remains the circumstances surrounding Desraj’s death, which, it has to be said, are resolved quite satisfactorily. As for the rest, characters ranging from sympathetic police officers, photographers, other moneylenders and virtuous farmers appear and disappear, but not without imparting pearls of wisdom on the state of farmers, the hollowness of current agricultural practices and how the nation is letting down its sons of soil.

In his controversial On Moral Fiction, novelist and writing teacher John Gardener wrote, “True art…clarifies life, establishes models of human action, cast nets toward the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns”. Death of a Moneylender tries to do all of these things, with its aims falling far short of its grasp. The sincerity of intention is not to be denied, and much of the information to be found here could make for a forceful piece of non-fiction. But a compelling novel, this is not.

The Fun Of The Shudder

This appeared in The Hindustan Times on Saturday

THE LITTLE STRANGER Sarah Waters

M.R. James, doyen of the English ghost story, once summed up his art by saying that the most valuable ingredients were the atmosphere and the well-managed crescendo. He continued, “Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.”

That, more or less, is the manner in which Sarah Waters progresses her fifth novel, The Little Stranger, with a little help along the way from another James – the one who wrote The Turn of the Screw.

This, then, is an enjoyably eerie and well-constructed novel designed to bring about the sensation that Edith Wharton called “the fun of the shudder”. It is, however, more than just a device to send an ice-cube down the spine: it also examines shifting class distinctions in England during the period immediately after World War Two.

The tale begins in 1949 when Dr Faraday, a physician in rural Warwickshire, is summoned to the aid of a young maid working in Hundreds Hall, a Georgian mansion owned by the Ayres family for generations. Dr Faraday’s own mother used to work there as a maid, and the doctor was once vouchsafed a glimpse of its gorgeous interiors when, as a boy, he was smuggled inside after a fete on the grounds.

Now, however, the establishment has gone to seed and the surviving members of the Ayres family – Mrs. Ayres, her son Roderick and daughter Caroline – struggle to keep it, and themselves, afloat. The doctor becomes a regular visitor to Hundreds Hall, at first to treat Roderick for his war injuries and then because of a growing closeness to Caroline.

Waters carefully delineates the ruined interiors of the once-exquisite mansion; fittingly so, as it’s a protagonist in its own right. Soon, the gloomy corridors, decrepit rooms and dilapidated fittings play host to inexplicable scorch marks, bell-ringing, scribbling on walls, fires and things that go bump on foggy winter nights. Brideshead Revisited, this is not.

Dr Faraday, being a man of science, tries to assure the Ayres family that there are rational explanations for these occurrences, but it’s when they become more frequent – and much more malign – that they test the weaknesses of each one of the hall’s inhabitants.

As with Waters’ earlier work, The Little Stranger is painstakingly plotted and paced; yet, the twists and turns never feel contrived and straitjacketed. In large part, this is due to the first-person narration of Dr Faraday and the growing realisation that this conservative, repressed country doctor’s account isn’t quite reliable.

The novel is rendered more satisfying by Waters’ depiction of the people and surroundings during the historical period in which the novel is based, including her treatment of class in a changing Britain. At one point, Dr Faraday unburdens himself to a colleague: “It's as if -- well, as if something's slowly sucking the life out of the whole family”. The fellow doctor replies: “It's called a Labour government.”

All too often, the denouement of a ghost story suffers by overplaying its hand. Here, however, Waters’ touch remains as assured as ever, with the result that even after the last page is read, the miasmic goings-on at The Hundreds remain a palpable presence. Pick it up, and you’ll leave the lights on.