American Pie

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA Peter Carey

It’s an irony of history that an aristocrat from France was one of those one who provided Americans -- and the world -- with a theoretical underpinning of their brand of democracy. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, accompanied by his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, travelled to America to study their penal system. De Tocqueville found its people sufficiently fascinating to compose an entire book on their system of government and its implications titled, of course, Democracy in America.

This journey is the focal point of Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America. His improvised de Tocqueville is Olivier, an aristocrat-turned-Versailles lawyer; Beaumont is transformed into Parrot, a former printer’s devil from Devon, Olivier’s secretary and scribe.

This being a work by Peter Carey, one naturally expects doubles, shape-shifters, separate voices and wily inventiveness -- and all of these qualities are to be found in abundance. The narrative proceeds in alternating chapters told by Olivier and Parrot, the former high-flown, the latter demotic.

Parrot and Olivier in America teems with incident from the start, as Carey narrates with brio the events of the duo’s childhoods -- from Olivier's return to Paris with his family after the revolution, to Parrot’s mishaps at the house of a currency forger.

The two set sail for the New World, initially not getting along very well: Parrot refers to Olivier as “Lord Migraine” and the other returns the compliment by calling him “the retching varlet”. In time, there’s a grudging acceptance of each other qualities, which deepens into friendship. It is on the ship itself that Olivier formulates his plan to write about the country he is sailing to. As he writes,” the future of France will be found in their experiment and when the wave of democracy breaks over our heads, it will be best we know how to bend it to our ends rather than be broken by its weight”.

Upon disembarking, the two are plunged into a series of comic adventures as they travel across New York, Connecticut, Philadelphia and elsewhere. Discovering America through its citizens, they make alliances and alienate them; they fall in love and out of it; they decide to settle down and change their minds.

The account is studded with Olivier’s observations, some of which Carey states he’s cadged from Tocqueville’s book itself. The myopic aristocrat comes across as admiring democracy’s virtues, yet snobbishly alert to its flaws. He’s overwhelmed by the “feverish enthusiasm”: “they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route (to prosperity)”. He wonders whether an absence of class boundaries would lead to upwardly-mobile posturing and also whether standards of art would suffer. Moreover, “the American habit of changing oneself from one thing to another…seems to be the national occupation”.

Though the core of the book is the relationship between Parrot and Olivier, there are patches during which this focus falters, such as Parrot’s account of his misadventures when deported to Australia. Perhaps this is what Carey hints at when he tells us right at the beginning of Olivier’s boyhood fascination with a tandem, a bicycle for two, which suffered from a lack of steering.

Fittingly, it is Parrot who takes more readily to America, with his garrulous voice drowning out Olivier, as is made clear in the dedication at the end. Parrot and Olivier in America, then, is a rambunctious, energetic novel, and even on the occasions that it seems over-inflated, it is Carey’s panache that keeps you reading.

Medical Mystery Tour

This appeared in the March/April issue of Biblio

THE QUARANTINE PAPERS Kalpish Ratna

Plagues have always attracted writers. The word itself occurs no less than 113 times in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, the most memorable use being, of course, when it was employed by Mercutio to damn the houses of Capulet and Montagu in Romeo and Juliet. Going back a few centuries from here, one can still sense the horror and wonderment that arose in the mind of Giovanni Boccaccio from his description of the Black Plague at the beginning of The Decameron. There are echoes of this in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, an account of a character’s experiences while sojourning through London during the Great Plague of 1665. To turn to the 20th century, it was Albert Camus who made use of the affliction for allegorical purposes. In his 1947 The Plague, the city of Oran in Algiers is struck by a pestilence, one that ravages the city because the people are slow to act when it first makes an appearance. The obvious parallel is with the Nazi occupation of France.

The duo of Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan, writing as Kalpish Ratna, are similarly influenced in their latest work, The Quarantine Papers. This capacious novel delineates the lives of characters during two difficult times in Mumbai’s history, in the late 19^th century and in December 1992. The first was when an outbreak of plague struck the city and the second, of course, was when it was stained by riots in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

The book opens with bite-sized, intriguing accounts of a variety of as-yet-unknown characters and their doings. In one sense, all that follows is a filling in of the blanks and an explication. It is December 6, 1992, the very day the masjid crumbled, and we’re introduced to Ratan Oak, 36, a freelance microbiologist living with his ailing father and coming to terms with the end of his relationship with his wife. As shock and anger sweep the city, Ratan finds himself discovering the body of a woman who was protesting against the razing of an outhouse on the grounds of the Sir J.J. School of Art, once owned by none other than Lockwood Kipling, father of the man who wrote about the white man’s burden.

Ratan falls prey to mysterious visions and what one could call the opposite of clairvoyance: he realises soon enough that this other world he inhabits is that of Ramratan Oak, his great-grandfather, who was active during the city’s late 19^th-century plague years. The present, then, is transformed into a mirror that reflects the events of the past, showing that not much – especially the nature of human beings – has changed. The book see-saws between the two periods, detailing a breathtaking succession of events that involve riots, Hindu-Muslim marriages, fundamentalist ire, attempts to get hold of a crude biological weapon, missing persons, sudden deaths and the fates of the families of four friends who make a covenant to “defeat hate”. Slow-moving is certainly not an adjective that can be applied to The Quarantine Papers.

Breezy and quick in pace though it may be, there is evidence of much research that underpins the novel, most of which is drawn from the state archives. Details of the period apart, these emerge in the form of old letters, statements, petitions, medical reports and the like. These, woven into the narrative, thicken and lend it greater verisimilitude. In addition, there are several occasions when the authors’ medical knowledge comes to the fore, such as in details of autopsies, injuries and effects of bacilli; here, one is put in mind of the medical prose employed by another doctor, Abraham Verghese, in his recent novel, Cutting for Stone.

Though there is dexterity in the manner in which the novel switches back and forth between the two ages it deals with, there’s no denying that the prose can sometimes turn purple. Take this passage, an account of a book of watercolours:

“Red opened its flower. From its vermilion frill to its cerise heart through a swirl of reds – cardinal, carnation, carnelian, carmine, crimson. Satin unfurled, shiny and dense, a slither on the skin that made him gasp. Then further agape, a silken billow, a swell of red blown thin, left glistening in the air to harden, a glass bubble though which the sun came in and inked the sun pink. When he blinked, it splintered and scattered in pink shards. Pink petals, turned vermeil at the edges, enameled jewels.”

Goodness. However, almost as though to offset these, there are other passages with resonant metaphors (the sea on one occasion is described as “a shed snakeskin in the sun”), and the sections describing the buildings and general milieu of the city’s inner streets are particularly effective. Take this one, for example:

“A road run berserk, traffic snarls matted and choked in exhalations of their own filth. Broad-backed gutters, their oily scum a glacial glint in the sun. Tidal waves of garbage washed up against buildings like end moraines. Buildings erupting past the hairline, breakaways from the grid of roads, lanes, parks, pavements, lunging into the traffic. Peopled long before they were plastered or painted, numbered of named….Walls like slow bruises changing colour after seasons of abuse as old Bollywood posters peeled off, and returning finally to their natural pigments of earth and excrement. Pavements spilling over with lives that began faraway and were headed elsewhere.”

(The clear fondness for contrasts and alliterations in prose can be discerned from the title of the duo’s earlier work, during the researching of which much material must have turned up for this one. It was called Uncertain Life and Sure Death: Medicine and Mahamaari in Maritime Mumbai.)

Though the strengths of The Quarantine Papers are not inconsiderable, it must be said that on many occasions, the abundance of characters and the speed of events cause the narrative thread to become needlessly coiled and intricate. Some more pauses for breath, some paring down of the number of people and their back-stories, would have made it much more effective.

The structure of the book uses the present to scrutinize the past; in doing so, it’s the present itself that comes under scrutiny. Towards the end, Ratan finds that “with hate coming to a boil, every man could stand accused. A mosque is destroyed, hate breaks free, memory becomes weapon.” That sentiment, unfortunately, is all too true given the headlines that one encounters virtually every morning in the papers and on TV. It is to Shakespeare again that one must turn, and recall the line he puts in the mouth of King Lear’s hapless Gloucester: “ ’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.”

A Beastly Tale

This appeared in Saturday's The Hindustan Times

BEATRICE AND VIRGIL Yann Martel

There’s no getting away from it: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil is an ungainly, at times unsavoury, book. Like his earlier Life of Pi, this one features talking animals, in this case a donkey and a howler monkey who take their names from characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In that epic, Beatrice is the poet’s guide through Heaven while Virgil accompanies Dante through Hell; here, they’re creatures in a play written by one of Martel’s characters.

The disjointed plot revolves around the travails of Henry, an author much like Martel in that he’s based in Canada and has written a hugely successful second novel featuring animals. That, after all, is the easy way of being postmodern nowadays: centre your novel on a character much like yourself to keep the reader tantalized for no good reason.

Be that as it may, Henry finds his latest manuscript met with bewilderment and even hostility by his publishers. It’s a half-fiction half-essay exploration of the Holocaust; what he’s trying to do is “….take a vast sprawling tragedy….find its heart….and represent it in a nonliteral and compact way”. Of course, there have been others who have written about the Holocaust on their own fictional terms, and in Beatrice and Virgil, they receive a token mention: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and David Grossman’s See Under: Love, among others.

This rejection brings about an acute case of writer’s block. Henry and his wife move to another, unnamed city where he occupies himself by learning music and performing with an amateur dramatic troupe. Here, he comes across a taxidermist who wants his opinion of a play he’s written and, almost against his will, Henry finds himself drawn to this beastly fellow. He meets him regularly to get a crash course in stuffing animals as well as to discuss the play.

Much of Beatrice and Virgil is given over to extracts from this work, clearly inspired by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. When we first meet them, the animals converse about the taste of fruit, the nature of faith and the naming of days, going on to talk of life’s pleasures, pains and essential meaninglessness. The going gets heavy and the plot comes to a standstill while Martel tries to impress upon us the portent and weight of what he’s trying to achieve, namely, create allegorical correspondences between the plight of the animals and the victims of the Holocaust.

The writing throughout is uncomplicated, sometimes facile. It may make sense to settle on a faux-naif style to offset the heaviness of the subject matter, but many times, this comes across as affected, crossing the line between simple and simplistic. Take, for instance, the animals referring to a certain “Aukitz”, or the naming of events that have befallen them as “the Horrors”. In addition, the supposedly philosophical puzzles that appear at the end are banal, causing exasperation more than anything else.

Early on, we’re told that one of the reactions to Henry’s work of fiction is that “…the novel was tedious, the plot feeble, the characters unconvincing….” Unfortunately, those words could well be applied to Beatrice and Virgil as a whole.

The Axe Effect

My first column for Yahoo! India is up: this one deals with the proper role of the novel today. Do read.

Delta Force

This appeared in last week's Mint Lounge

KILLING THE WATER Mahmud Rahman

A parlour game that’s sometimes been played is to list the members of the cricket team the subcontinent would have had if it had not been partitioned. When it comes to novels in English, too, the roster would be impressive. Till some years ago, one would have been hard-pressed to include a name from Bangladesh in such a catalogue. That, however, may soon change. Even if you exclude Monica Ali’s 2003 Brick Lane on the grounds that it was based on an expatriate experience, there’s Tahmima Anam’s 2007 The Golden Age, set during the bloody days that led up to Bangladeshi independence; Shazia Omar’s 2009 Like a Diamond in the Sky; and now, asking for inclusion is Mahmud Rahman with Killing the Water, a debut collection of short stories.

Competent and readable, this assortment of twelve tales was written over a period of ten years, and it shows, both in terms of subjects and quality. Half of them are set in Bangladesh, and the rest in locations in America, ranging from Boston to San Francisco’s Bay Area.

The stories set in Rahman’s homeland range from the 1930s to the present-day, and most deal with characters that have left or are about to leave for greener pastures. Haunted by an underprivileged past, they are more than slightly defensive about their actions, leading to sometimes unreasonable behaviour towards siblings and parents. There’s a well-known Philip Larkin poem that starts with the lines, “If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water”; in Rahman’s stories of Bangladesh, the devotions and travails of those who live on the water’s edge emerge time and again.

In the stories set in the US, the author loosens his collar in a manner of speaking: here, there is racism, attempts to integrate and relationships both fraying and coming into being. Most of these characters are loners in large cities, wanting acceptance and love but dragging behind them the weight of a past and of attitudes from a different land.

Again, perhaps because of the period of time over which the stories were composed, there are various devices and modes of narration on display, from the slow-motion present intercut with the past (‘Smoke Signals’) to straight-up front-to-back narration (‘City Shoes in the Village’), to well-observed character studies (the title story).

A story that clearly stands out is the sensitive ‘Before the Monsoons Come’, dealing with the plight of a teenage boy who, along with his mother, takes refuge on a tiny island just as his country is coming into being. Some, such as the dreamlike ‘Runa’s Journey’, concerning a cancer patient’s trip home and the parable-like ‘Kerosene’ are effective, while others are less impressive, such as such as ‘Postcards from a Stranger’, which comes across as a tricked-out travelogue. ‘Blue Mondays at the Gearshift Lounge’, dealing with the incipient relationship between a blues singer and an embittered immigrant, has scope and ambition, yet is let down by trite dialogue and a plot that pivots on coincidence.

Overall, the prose is efficient and unadorned, gently probing characters’ mental states and actions – though, at times, not above slipping into lazy metaphors such as, “the view was stunning, like a photograph”.

So, if there was an English Literary XI from an unpartitioned subcontinent, would Mahmud Rahman be on it? Well, yes, but only as a hard-working replacement all-rounder, not necessarily a match-winning one.

Satyrs Of Suburbia

This appeared in today's Indian Express

COLLECTED STORIES Hanif Kureishi

In his introduction to The Second Plane, Martin Amis writes, “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is”. It’s a statement that comes to mind when reading Hanif Kureishi’s collected short stories. To be sure, many of these tales get their charge from a blending of the political with the personal, but questions of virility and potency, specifically in post-Thatcher Britain, animate most of them.

At one point in the title story from Love in a Blue Time, a character considers how “he'd longed for the uncontrolled life, seeking only pleasure and avoiding the ponderous difficulties of keeping everything together”. The bulk of the stories in this volume could be said to be about the unraveling of this emotion. There are many satyrs of suburbia here: no-longer-young men who have fraught relationships with their wives and offspring, puzzling over past successes and failures, taking their measure by changes in old friends and recalling a time of “lies, deceit and alienation”.

In addition, quite a few of those who inhabit Kureishi's world are from the writing or performing arts -- London's playwrights, directors, actors and agents -- which means that many stories, though forceful on their own, create something of a circumscribed air when taken together.

Collected here are the stories from Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day and The Body, as well as eight more recent ones, some of which appeared in publications such as The New Yorker and Zoetrope. To be frank, these new stories – which, naturally, one turns to first -- are a bit of a let-down. ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, for example, has an interesting and provocative premise – the ambitions of a cameraman who films beheadings by terrorists – but isn’t sufficiently fleshed out. Others, such as ‘A Terrible Story’ have stilted and overblown dialogue, while ‘Phillip’, dealing with an old friendship recalled in the present, manages to be moving despite the awkward structure.

There is much pleasure to be had in re-reading the rest, not least of which is the desire they provoke to return to Kureishi’s novels. The affecting ‘Nightlight’, from Love in a Blue Time, has affinities with Intimacy; and the remarkable ‘My Son the Fanatic’ springs from the same urge that would make Kureishi write The Black Album. (As he has said elsewhere, both came from his reactions to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.) Other subjects written about that seem to have arisen from a wellspring of personal experience are those dealing with racism (‘We’re Not Jews’) as well as tales of relationships between parents and children (‘Goodbye, Mother’).

Two formidable stories could well vie for the distinction of being the most impressive ones here: ‘With Your Tongue in My Mouth’, dealing with the lives of two half-sisters, one from Pakistan and the other from Britain, and the novella-length ‘The Body’, which takes to a long-drawn conclusion the premise of an older man reborn in a younger body, with its associated meditations on ageing and Cartesian duality.

Throughout, the prose is unadorned and straightforward, largely comprising simple, declarative sentences with an air of bluntness and Roth-like lack of inhibition. There are many penises in these pages, for instance, even a tepid Gogol-inspired tale revolving around the same organ. Of course, one of the enjoyments of reading Kureishi’s work has always been his sardonic asides, such as when one of the characters is moved to observe: “I imagine that to participate in the world with curiosity and pleasure, to see the point of what is going on, you have to be young and uninformed”.

At another point, in another story, one of his characters muses, “It has, at least, become clear that it is our pleasures, rather than our addictions or vices, which are our greatest problems”. In these collected stories, Kureishi ably takes us on a tour of the pitfalls of our pleasures.

Little Light, More Heat

This appeared in today's DNA.

SOLAR Ian McEwan

You can’t scan the newspaper these days without spotting headlines dealing with the failure or otherwise of the Copenhagen summit, the success of the so-called Earth Hour, the actions of the UN climate change panel and more. Global warming and sources of renewable energy are, well, hot topics and certainly a fitting subject for the contemporary novel. When the novelist in question is of the stature of Ian McEwan, there’s a buoyancy of expectations.

Solar, however, turns out to be a victim of the greenhouse effect – an over-heated creation that, while not without a certain appeal, also possesses an unevenness of shape. This is the tale of Michael Beard, now in his fifth decade, who’s been “sprinkled by Stockholm’s magic dust” when he was younger, having been awarded the physics Nobel for his conflation of an Einsteinian hypothesis. Many particles have accelerated since then and it’s been over two decades since Beard did anything original, content to live off sinecures and speaking engagements.

As the novel opens, we meet Beard trying to balance the elegance and simplicity of the world of physics with the messiness of his domestic life. He isn’t an especially likeable chap: he cheats on his wife, eats and drinks to excess, dissembles and isn’t above stealing the work of a post-doctorate student and passing it off as his own.

Solar unfolds in three parts, relating episodes from Beard’s life during the years 2000, 2005 and 2009. The prevailing mood of the novel is that of farce, be it when detailing the fortunes of Beard’s frozen penis during an expedition to the Arctic, or the manner in which his wife’s young lover meets an untimely end. At other times, McEwan takes aim at other irritants of modern life, from media sensationalism to well-meaning but ineffectual liberal post-modernists unpacking every phrase for meaning in context.

McEwan’s prose is rich and accomplished throughout – no surprises there – and in addition, he’s clearly steeped himself in the lore of modern physics in order to create verisimilitude for Beard and his world. (“Dimensions tightly wrapped in six circles, the rediscovery of Kalusa and Klein from the nineteen-twenties, the delightful intricacies of the Calabi-Yau manifolds and orbifolds!”). This manner of writing also puts one in mind of the medical knowledge that the author presented us with in the case of Perowne, the neuroscientist from his earlier Saturday.

Beard careens from one lover and one engagement to another, progressing from heading a British government centre for renewable energy to becoming an “energy consultant” to setting up a site in New Mexico to create clean energy through artificial photosynthesis. His excesses over the years, however, finally catch up with him, in a manner that brings to mind a saying by Einstein: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once”. The accumulation of bad karma spills over to create a conjoined nemesis that arrives all of a sudden in Beard’s life in the form of unexpected phone calls, e-mails and personal visits. It must be said that, in terms of plot, this sudden downfall smacks too heavily of contrivance -- the sudden gathering together of strings to enmesh Beard isn’t McEwan at his most elegant.

Solar, then, aims to be a mordantly comic work, revealing the pettiness and fads of civilisation as we know it through the actions of a character who often approaches the grotesque. At one point, the gluttonous, philandering Beard, in an uncharacteristically quiet moment, muses that “the pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked unstoppable and were generating a heat, a modern kind of heat that had become, by clever shifts, his subject, his profession.” It’s the same subject, in fact, that is Solar’s guiding light.

Who's Indian, What's Authentic

This appeared in today's DNA.

BECOMING INDIAN Pavan K. Varma

The ultimate triumph of colonialism is to keep the subject’s mind in chains long after the land has been set free. This assertion is at the heart of Pavan Varma’s Becoming Indian, in which he looks to India’s cultural past as a panacea for the ills besetting the country today.

Such a way of thought is not new; it was central to, for example, the romantic nationalists in Germany and then other parts of Europe from the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. We all know what that led to.

Varma, however, is too polished a polemicist to indulge in rabble-rousing. The book isn’t merely an airing of views; it’s studded with personal memories and anecdotes, starting with his father’s joining the ICS as well as his own visits to Bristol to see Raja Rammohun Roy’s grave, to the Tower of London to view the Kohinoor, to Southall to interact with the Indian community there and several other locations.

His cri de coeur is that “freedom is not only about having one’s own flag and Constitution and Parliament; freedom is as much about re-appropriating your cultural space, of reclaiming your identity, of belonging authentically to where you come from, because without these your articulation of freedom has a synthetic and imitative quality”. The key word here is “authentically”, and the question that remains unanswered is: because something belongs to the hoary past, can it be deemed authentic, or is it itself the result of intermingling of thought and expression?

Fanon-like, Varma targets colonialism’s damaging aspects on the Indian sense of self, taking aim at individuals such as Macaulay (of course) as well as declining standards of architecture, theatre, classical music and dance. There is some merit in his argument that we blindly embrace the West, but most of it sounds curiously old-fashioned – after all, there’s been an upsurge in cultural confidence of late, hand-in-hand with the country’s economic performance. At times, Varma’s reforming zeal is curiously misplaced: for example, he lays the blame for the Yamuna’s becoming a cesspool on Lutyens’ decision to build on Raisina Hill and not along the banks of the river.

At other times, he is not averse to dissembling. His unabashed promotion of Hindi makes him assert that had Nehru spoken in that language during his “tryst with destiny” speech, large numbers in the southern, eastern or other parts of India may not have understood, but it would yet be a “language of the soil”. Well, there’s more to India than the “soil” of its Hindi heartland.

He can also be misleading – writing of Salman Rushdie, he claims that “the pedestal he has been placed on…may become very wobbly if his brave prose is used to criticize the west.” He ought to be aware that Rushdie has been critical of US foreign policy on more than one occasion; moreover, one of the characters in The Satanic Verses itself went by the name of “Margaret Torture”. Varma also takes Amartya Sen to task for confusing a person’s identity with a person’s interests, something that smacks of semantics and appears to miss the point.

Better editing would have helped, too: there’s a long rambling chapter on the Indian disapora, mainly in Britain, all to make the often-made point that you can take the citizen out of the country but not vice versa.

The crowning irony, however, and one that appears to have escaped the author, is that a book extolling the virtues of “Indianness”, deriding colonial occupation and emphasising the primacy of Hindi is written in – heaven forbid -- the English language.

Slim Book, Weighty Point

A slightly abridged version of this appeared in today's The Indian Express

POINT OMEGA Don DeLillo

In Don DeLillo’s 2007 Falling Man, one of the characters watches a performance artist suspend himself from various locations in Manhattan, mirroring the reality captured in a photograph of a man falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11. Art plays a role in DeLillo’s new work, too, this time as a museum installation that doesn’t reflect reality but a version of art itself. This is an exhibit titled“24 Hour Psycho" that was installed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2006: an actual conceptual piece by Douglas Gordon showing the Hitchcock film in extreme slow motion, taking twenty-four hours to screen. It is, in DeLillo’s words, “the strange, bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that’s not the movies”.

Scenes of characters watching this exhibit bracket the slender Point Omega which, like DeLillo’s last few novels, is written in a condensed, elliptical style. It is, however, carefully and intriguingly structured, almost in an answers-first-questions later manner.

The plot begins with Jim Finley, a young film-maker, travelling to a California desert to meet the 73-year-old Richard Elster. The latter was formerly employed by the Pentagon to conceptualise their Iraq war efforts and provide intellectual ballast to their martial leanings. Finley plans a short trip with the intention of persuading Elster to participate in a proposed film project, but when he gets there he finds himself staying on for days, listening to Elster’s theories on matter and mind. Waters are muddied when the passive Jessica, Elster’s daughter, joins them, sent by her mother to spend time away from a suitor’s advances. A sudden disappearance follows, throwing equations off-kilter.

Elster, has retreated from the chaos of cities to “reclaim the body from the nausea of News and Traffic”, and is fond of gnomic utterances such as “matter wants to lose its self-consciousness”. The omega point of the title, a concept that occupies most of his waking hours, refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the acme of awareness towards which the universe is progressing. In Elster’s words, “Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”

As ought to be clear by now, all of this doesn’t exactly make for light bedside reading. Some of it puts one in mind of the brooding landscapes of Cormac McCarthy; at other times, there is Pinteresque menace and silence. What DeLillo seems to be trying to do is contrast “man's grand themes” with “local grief, one body” – and to make the whole palatable, there’s a long, studied build-up, after which the mechanics of the plot kick in. This imparts to Point Omega a strange unity, half in slow motion, the other in something resembling normal speed.

Though the characters often come across as mouthpieces and the book’s gravitas veers close to self-importance, the austere Point Omega does possess a compelling incantatory rhythm. Stripped down without losing vitality, its gravitational pull is that of a star collapsing inwards upon itself to a point of singularity.

Going, Going, Gone

This appeared in today's DNA.

WAY TO GO Upamanyu Chatterjee

“To a man with a hammer,” wrote Mark Twain, “the world is a nail”. And to an uncompromising moralist, the world is full of people and events that need correction. That is at the core of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel, Way to Go, which re-introduces us to some of the characters from his The Last Burden.

As with his earlier work, satire is Chatterjee’s tool of choice to dissect the pettiness and emptiness of our current state. The novel opens with a bravura first chapter in which Jamun, now in his mid-40s and as aimless as ever, arrives at a police station to report the disappearance of his father, the 85-year-old, half-paralysed Shyamanand. Here, officialdom is gleefully and hilariously skewered.

The lampooning becomes darker and bleaker as the novel progresses. We’re drawn into the world of Jamun, his brother Burfi, and others in their ken including their cook, Budi Kadombini, the oleaginous builder Monga, and neighbour Neha Khanna.

Others characters appear and then vanish from the pages for no discernible reason, such as Madhumati, Jamun’s tenant, or Kasturi, his former lover and mother of his child, now creator of an “epic blockbuster Hindi TV soap” titled Cheers Zindagi featuring a character modeled on Jamun himself.

The real-life Jamun broods over “the dispirited and fidgety ghosts of his past”. Old mementoes may be set ablaze in the Holi bonfire organised by Monga, but old memories continually surface in his consciousness, and in the narrative. Jamun reflects on the various ways in which he's failed himself and others in his life, often contemplating suicide in the manner of a man wondering whether to make a withdrawal from a depleted bank account.

Apart from Chatterjee’s gaze becoming decidedly more acidulous, his prose too is jagged and not always easy to navigate, not least because of the inordinate number of dashes that populate his sentences. Any form of behaviour is fair game – from the goings-on at a butcher’s shop to the antics at a prostitute’s den -- and is observed and dissected with something approaching cruelty. Then, there are the metaphors: a mangrove swamp is “nature's lush pubic hair”; gravy resembles “the outcome of a child's indigestion”, and a pair of lips on a policewoman's face shift “like rosy buttocks squirming for comfort”.

The book is structured around the dead and the disappeared, and though -- especially towards the end -- events may seem to swivel haphazardly, they’re actually part of a scheme that is quite deftly explained. However, when you’re being mordantly comic -- and skating on the fringes of farce -- a late shift of register towards the compassionate is not only surprising, it's also unconvincing. One may expect laughter from the abyss, yes, but not tenderness.

Describing the relationship between Jamun and Kasturi, Chatterjee writes, “With them, all was convolution”. It’s a statement that could well be applied to this disturbing novel of overlapping coils.