Fate Slipping The Lead Into The Boxing Glove

THE UPRIGHT PIANO PLAYER David Abbott

One of the most revered copywriters in advertising, winner of a Clio lifetime award, a One Club Hall of Fame inductee and creator of memorable work for Volkswagen, Sainsbury’s, The Economist and Volvo. That’s David Abbot, who retired as chairman from the company that bears his name over a decade ago. Turns out he had one more trick up his sleeve: a novel.

Those expecting a fictionalised behind-the-scenes account of the goings-on at Abbott Mead Vickers will be disappointed by The Upright Piano Player. To be sure, Henry Cage, the central character, is a lot like Abbot in that he’s recently retired from a communications company, would rather read a book in a café than mingle with colleagues and is known for a gentlemanly, forthright attitude to work. It’s unavoidable that some of the sentiments attributed to Cage will be viewed as autobiographical, such as a refusal to work on cigarette brands, or statements such as: “He had always been wary of business books and their familiar lexicon of warrior virtues”.

That apart, the novel is more of an exploration of the workings of a malign kismet and how this impacts the emotionally-reticent Cage. It begins in 2004, with him losing his grandson in a horrifyingly gratuitous and violent accident. We segue back to 1999 and Cage’s life at 58, just after premature retirement. He lives alone in London, with memories of an estranged son and a divorced wife in Florida. Cage is confronted and then stalked by Colin, a loutish ne’er do well, has a casual affair and learns of two life-changing events: that Nessa, his wife, is ravaged by cancer, and that he is a grandfather of Hal, a four-year-old. Not quite the right way to start one’s sunset years.

In proficient, occasionally evocative, prose, the narrative moves between London, Norfolk and Palm Springs as Cage comes to terms with what Wodehouse would have called Fate quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove. This grim tale is undercut by intermittent, understated humour, much of it in the form of social commentary: from observations on trendy yet inefficient coffee-shops to management jargon masking a lack of original thought.

There are some finely-observed passages, such as a description of the goings-on at the lobby of the Ritz Carlton. Other episodes, though interesting by themselves, are at odds with the narrative – such as a lengthy recounting of the transcript of Orson Welles’ attempt to provide the voice-over of a radio commercial.

Bravely, Abbott delves into the consciousness of not just Cage but others in his ken, such as the brutish Colin, the valiant Nessa and even the growing Hal. This, unfortunately, doesn’t work as well as it should, as there’s an overall reserve to the writing style that comes in the way of veracity. (At one point, Abbott describes a London policeman by saying that his suit wasn’t the only thing buttoned-up about him; that applies equally well to many of the book’s passages.)

The larger issue is that the plot depends heavily on co-incidence – chance encounters in cafes, streets and brasseries – for it to be entirely convincing. It’s as though Abbott doesn’t trust his characters enough to let them off the tight leash of plot. The Upright Piano Player, then, is well-written and even moving, but suffers from an over-determined flow of events to make its point. 

The other advertising luminary who retired to take up novel-writing is, of course, Indra Sinha: you'll find my review of his Animal's People here.

Tandoori Moose Nights

This appeared in yesterday's The Sunday Guardian

ONCE UPON A TIME IN SCANDINAVISTAN  Zac O'Yeah

The Mediterranean is dry. Sand dunes cover most of central Europe. Tropical monsoon winds, having deserted Asia, now sweep over Nordic countries. And Sweden, along with most of the continent, has joined the Asiatic Union after the Chutney Referendum.

This is the landscape of Zac O’Yeah’s curry-drenched dystopian thriller, Once Upon A Time in Scandinavistan. On the face of it, this conceit set in the near future seems to rest on the notion of colonization in reverse; however, as the book progresses, it becomes clear that environmental depredations, and what they can do to our ways of life, are equally important.

Skip past the awful cover art, then, and meet Herman Barsk, a Swedish official working with “a professional core unit for the detection of anti-social activity” in Gautampuri, formerly known as Gothenberg. The world he inhabits is one of a “native” Europe over-run by a resurgent Asia. The streets are decrepit, beedi-smokers are everywhere, chaat and mithai shops dot the city, roads have names such as Tagore Chowk and Ambedkar Avenue, the rupee is the official currency, and the bureaucracy is in the hands of the Indian Administrative Service. Presumably, too, there are paan stains everywhere.

The grizzled, stressed-out Barsk comes across four dismembered, unidentified bodies in the tandoor of a greasy spoon known as the Tandoori Moose. His investigations into this grisly incident lead him, in ever-widening circles, to unravel the truth behind a mysterious ashram, an escorts club, the actions of a British expatriate known, not very subtly, as McGuffin and the personal lives of his colleagues – one of whom is called Salman Kitabwalla.

Along the way, Barsk has also to manage his amorous feelings for Kumkum, former Miss Bihar and current Swedish postal worker, which he does by, among other things, reading The Kama Sutra and trying to track the whereabouts of her husband. The action, as well as writing style, is suitably manic as a battered Barsk lurches from one imbroglio to another in pursuit of a woman who’s called “a blonde cannibalistic bloodsucking vampire”. Ultimately, it all comes down to a nefarious terrorist plot – with a neat inversion on our notions of contemporary terrorism.

O’Yeah creates this world painstakingly: time and again he reminds us of Barsk’s reality by piling detail upon detail. Some references are sharp, such as Ingmar Bergman being referred to as “an old native cinema director” and Thor “a long-forgotten native God”. There are others that are painful, such as a mention of Madonna becoming the UN General Secretary and Halle Berry the first woman president of the United States. (What next, Sarah Palin as best-selling author? Oh, wait, that’s already happened.) Equally, for every joke that works in the novel -- such as Kumkum referring to the poet Browning and Barsk thinking of a machine-gun -- there are others that are sophomoric, such as Maoists demanding that the India-colonised planet of Mars be renamed Maors.

While much of it is fun to read, this is a novel that clearly needed a restraining hand, the absence of which is apparent on every page. Take O’Yeah’s similes, which tend towards the bizarre. A car's engine protests “like a frog being eaten by a Frenchman”; rain falls like “hard-boiled ostrich eggs crashing out of space”; and a man threatened by a pistol makes a sound “like a lapdog falling into a cement blender”. Ouch.

When, for no apparent reason, we’re treated to a long drawn out scene of Barsk’s meeting with a film director, one C.D. Dhoti, and matinee idol Phillumappa Ishtarjee, we know that the author – in the manner of Michael Chabon in his The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – has fallen too much in love with his fictional universe to relinquish it.

Though likely to be compared with Nordic noir such as the work of Steig Larsson and Henning Mankell, this is closer in its antic spirit to the environmental thrillers of Carl Hiaasen, with his deranged characters running amok over Florida swamplands. Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan, then, is audacious in conception and has much brio in narration. It falls, unfortunately, into the trap of believing that too much of a good thing is even better. 

Half Empty

This appeared in today's edition of Mint Lounge.

THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST Matt Ridley

In September 2007, the financial institution Northern Rock experienced a bank run, the first time this had happened in Britain for over a century. When it was nationalised a few months later, the £25 billion bailout was the largest sum any government had ever given to a private company. The non-executive chairman, Matt Ridley, science writer and former editor of The Economist’s American edition, resigned shortly after.

It appears that he’s spent his time since writing a cheerful paean to free markets. After acclaimed works on sexuality and the human genome, among others, Ridley’s The Rational Optimist can be read as his most ambitious book. It’s also the most misguided.

The Rational Optimist is about “the rapid, continuous and incessant change that human society experiences”. The reason homo sapiens progresses in this manner, according to Ridley, is because of exchange: free trade, ideas, goods and services, leading to specialisation and comparative advantage. In his overheated phrase, it’s all because “ideas start having sex with each other” that cultures progress and prosper.

Adam Smith, then, is the presiding deity of this enterprise, and Ridley takes us on a panoramic journey through human history to illustrate his thesis. Civilisations that have opened their doors to exchange have thrived; those that haven’t have regressed. (Come to think of it, it could well be the other way around: trade as a consequence of a civilisation’s rise, and not a condition.)

The problem with words such as “progress” and “betterment” is one of perspective. Certainly, there is now more prosperity than before, along with significant advances in healthcare and labour-saving amenities. It’s a fallacy, however, to imagine that because of this, human beings are moving towards some homogeneous, utopian goal, as critics of liberal humanism have pointed out. On this larger issue, Ridley is silent.

An unabashed proponent of increasing urbanisation – because, he feels, it provides opportunity as well as frees up land for agriculture – he also doesn’t have much to say on matters such as population density and competition giving rise to alienation, stress, heart disease and other lifestyle ailments. He dismisses surveys that don’t find a co-relation between wealth and happiness because of their margins of error, quoting others to suit his purpose. Such errors are, however, present in every study, making forecasting an inherently unstable exercise.

Ridley, of course, isn’t as naïve as to close his eyes to humanity’s problems, but asserts that “the population explosion is coming to a halt, that energy will not soon run out, that pollution, disease, hunger, war and poverty can all be expected to continue declining if human beings are not impeded from exchanging goods, services and ideas freely.” Africa, too, will shake off its problems with unimpeded trade.

He claims that global warming scaremongers are simply wrong, picking research to back his claims. Moreover, he says, we ought to embrace GM foods because of their increased output. The rising cost of inputs – much of them monopolistic – doesn’t bother him. Fossil fuels, too, should be used as long as they last, as they enhance means of production, and before they run out, human ingenuity will find other sources of energy. This is nothing but conveniently shifting responsibility to coming generations.

History and economics apart, Ridley also makes use of biology. He writes of the prevalence of the hormone oxytocin in human brains that makes people more liable to trust and cooperation, jumping to the conclusion that “there is a direct link between commerce and virtue”.  (Ah, that explains modern Russian capitalism.)  He recognizes that large corporations aren’t always motivated by the best of intentions – for example, WalMart – but affirms that their advantages always outweigh anything else. That ought to console sweatshop employees and local firms going out of business.

In essence, Ridley’s arguments are built on the foundation of the human being as homo economicus, a creature inherently rational and inclined to maximise profit. In the real world, as we know, all of us act on compulsions other than those of the strictly pragmatic. Fundamentalism is one consequence. The nuclear arms race is another.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs, “the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive”. The good life, then, “means making full use of science and technology -- without succumbing to the illusion that they can make us free, reasonable or even sane”. 

Through The Luka Glass

This appeared in today's DNA.

LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s 1990 fable for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, struck an immediate chord because of the circumstances of its writing and publication. This endearing, inventive book was, after all, Rushdie’s first after The Satanic Verses, written for his older son and, for those old enough to spot it, full of allegorical resonance. An arch-storyteller, the Shah of Blah, and his young son fighting Khattam-Shudh and the Chupwalas to regain his powers and prevent the Ocean of Stories from being poisoned? Irresistible.

Two decades later, we have the follow-up, Luka and the Fire of Life, written this time for his younger son as he turns 12. If this lacks the contemporary charge of the earlier work, it’s simply because Rushdie’s circumstances are (thank goodness) very different today.  It starts once again in the country of Alifbay and this time, young Luka, brother to Haroun, witnesses with alarm his storyteller father falling into a Big Sleep. To prevent his demise, Luka must venture forth to steal the Fire of Life from atop the Mountain of Knowledge.

Accompanied, to begin with, by Bear the dog and Dog the bear, he journeys into phantasmagorical lands facing successes and reverses, making friends and enemies as he nears his goal. As before, there are ingenious fabrications and a lot of wordplay, as well as allusions to, among others, Alice in Wonderland, The Terminator and Sherlock Holmes. (Try reading some passages aloud: it’s then that the rhythm, flow and mischievousness of the sentences come alive.)

The book is loosely structured in the manner of a videogame, with Luka having to pass through rising levels of difficulty, losing lives but not his life. Perhaps the most delightful section, and one with significance to those of us in this country, is when Luka finds himself in a land known as the Respectorate, inhabited by thin-skinned Rats quick to take offence at just about any utterance. Other pleasures await the bilingual reader: for example, there’s itching powder made from the rare Khujli plant, and the formidable guardians of the fire, the three Jos: Jo-Hua, Jo Hai and Jo Aiga.

Ultimately, of course, Luka is successful in his quest, but not before earning the friendship of a local potentate who goes by the name of the Insultana of Ott, fighting off and then winning over a bewildering number of unemployed gods from the world’s cultures (Neil Gaiman, anyone?) and a little last-minute help from Prometheus, the original fire-stealer. It’s a ride as dizzying as the one Luka faces on the Insultana’s magic carpet -- even though it must be said that it’s Haroun which is the more deft and charming of the two books.

If you think Literature ought to begin with a capital L, have an aversion to puns and like your heroes grim and existential, stay far away. The rest of you can dive right in.

Asia As It Is

This appeared in the latest issue of Forbes India

SOMEBODY ELSE'S CENTURY Patrick Smith

There have been, of late, many books that claim to explain “the Asian century”. Numbers are crunched, technology is analysed, currencies are compared. Economists and business leaders are quoted. Generalisations based on alleged Asian ways of thinking are held together by catchy – if inaccurate – metaphors, some revolving around the world being flat.

Patrick Smith’s Somebody Else’s Century does none of these things. These three linked essays are inside-out rather than outside-in, discussing the “post-Western world” with a focus on China, India and Japan. As such, it is more ruminative than ratiocinative, providing a deeper and more insightful exploration of the subject.

Smith’s credentials for the task are apt, having been a foreign correspondent in Asia for nearly thirty years. He writes: “These essays are about perspective – or just as much its opposite, which is not precisely blindness so much as a failure to overcome received assumptions.” He compares his method to that of Raghu Rai, aspiring for both great depth as well as breadth of field.  In this manner he tries to capture AAII,“Asia As It Is”, speaking to entrepreneurs, professors, architects, screenplay writers and village workers, from Somnath and Calicut to Kitakyushu and Quixia.

Each essay revolves around a pertinent question. What does it mean to be modern? What versions of history do we embrace and why? Can Asia understand itself without reference to the West? “After 150 years with the modern,” he says, “the modern has lost its strangeness for Asians. Neither is the modern understood any longer to be Western.” There are no easy answers, and Smith puts his views in the context of nostalgia, anxiety, identity and ressentiment, words that define the current concerns of the three countries.

Given this framework, there is much speculation, some of it abstract, such as when he applies notions of an ideal and material world to a country’s development. He muses that now, more than ever, Japan will create an identity not based on an uneasy cohabitation of tradition and Westernisation but one that’s more uniquely Asian -- with consequent lessons for other countries. In China, he discusses the many versions of the past that prevail, depending on which decade you were born in. And in India, he analyses the concept of heterogeneous time, and the tradition of the eccentric -- along the way touching upon the erosion of Hinduism’s syncretic tradition as well as the notion of jugaad, the country’s indigenous method of innovation.

It was Kipling who once wrote: “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old”. Though much slimmer than other works on the subject, Smith’s book goes much further in unpacking this sentiment. 

Freedom, Lost And Found

My year-end piece for Yahoo India.

On the one hand, freedom; on the other, its curtailment. 

That’s the story of two books that attracted the most amount of newsprint this year. The first, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, called by some “the best novel of the century”, which earned the author a spot on the cover of Time magazine – the first novelist in a decade to be so feted. The second, Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, which, as we all know, was treated less as a book and more as a springboard for a new Thackeray to be catapulted into the limelight.

Though I have reservations about the acclaim with which Freedom was greeted, it’s ironic that while Franzen’s book explores varying notions of freedom through the prism of an American family, the opposition to Mistry’s novel showed that freedom itself can’t be taken for granted. Franzen illustrates how freedom can empower or emperil -- be it when applied to a homemaker, a student or a nation – while in another corner of the world, a local political party picks a book of which they’ve read, at best, a few paragraphs and has it removed from a university syllabus on the basis of that straw-man argument: “offended sensibilities”. Which brings to mind Rushdie’s words: “It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.”  More so here, since it was an optional choice in the syllabus, not a mandatory one.

On one side, an acclaimed author from a nation searching for answers about its global role; on the other, the revenge of the anti-Enlightenment brigade. One gloomily recalls the words of John N. Gray, arch-debunker of humanism: “The good life means cherishing freedom -- in the knowledge that it is an interval between anarchy and tyranny.” Happy new year.

Windowpane Or Stained Glass?

George Orwell wrote that good prose ought to be like a window pane. But those such as Nabokov, Banville and Updike prefer stained glass. The next instalment of my Yahoo India column.

Family Matters

This appeared in today's DNA.

FREEDOM Jonathan Franzen

In an essay for Harper’s magazine in 1996, Jonathan Franzen rued the contemporary novel’s inability to engage with culture in the manner in which, say, the 19^th century novel did, when  new instalments of work by writers such as Dickens were awaited, pored over and discussed. As he wrote, “The ambitious young fiction writer can’t help noting that, in a recent USA Today survey of twenty-four hours in the life of American culture, there were twenty-one references to television, eight to film, seven to popular music, four to radio, and one to fiction (The Bridges of Madison County)”.

Franzen’s much-commented-upon 2001 novel, The Corrections, exploring “the possibility of connecting the personal to the social”, was an impressive attempt to overcome this, being a study of an American family over the years. His new novel, Freedom, has been greeted by a blare of trumpets, and not just from the literary pages. He’s become the first novelist in ten years to make it to the cover of Time magazine; the book has been hailed by some quarters as “the best novel of the century”; and it’s climbed up and stayed on the bestseller lists from the moment of publication.

Freedom, then, arrives with numerous expectations, and though many are realized, it must be said that it doesn’t live up to all of them. Franzen’s subject is again the American family and, in exploring the vagaries of the lives of its members, he brings out the tenor of the Bush years in America.

It opens with a bravura first chapter introducing us to the Berglunds – Walter and Patty, and their children, Joey and Jessica – entirely through the eyes of their neighbours in St Paul, Minnesota. Walter is a born do-gooder, and Patty is serially conflicted; as their lives unravel, one observer unkindly calls them “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven”.

From here, we move to a lengthy section comprising a journal that Patty has written of her formative years, at the suggestion of her therapist. This manuscript plays a key role later in the book when it is read by two other characters, provoking a sudden change in circumstances. (In this manner, Franzen tries to combine his brand of realism with more modern methods of telling.) The problem with this record of Patty’s school, college and wedded years it that the overall tone is too ironic and knowing for us to fully believe that it’s emerged from her pen.

The narrative moves on, with detailed and rich accounts of the characters’ inner and outer lives. We’re told of Patty’s increasing loneliness and despair, Walter’s search for meaningful work, Joey’s relationship with his parents, love interests and shady business deals, and of Walter’s old friend, Richard Katz, an indie musician who achieves a degree of fame he’s ambivalent about. Befittingly, the novel is also rife with cultural markers to indicate time’s passage, from books to music to movies. (It’s odd, however, that though all the characters’ lives are deeply delved into, it’s the daughter Jessica who’s comparatively ignored.)

The tangles and triangles in all of these people’s lives are explored in an unhurried manner that brings out all their rainbow-hued complexity, and this is Freedom’s greatest achievement. There is much bleakness and heartbreak to be found in these pages, more than occasionally leavened by sly humour -- Joey’s dislike of the acronym MILF, for example.

In keeping with the title, the novel also investigates what it means to be free, in various contexts: from that of a housewife seeking validation to the social ramifications of a nation flexing its muscles overseas. Sometimes, these notions appear a tad heavy-handed, almost as though Franzen is willing himself to insert such concepts into an already smooth narrative.

It’s in the second half that the experience of reading the novel flags: Franzen’s suave, knowing prose, so impressive to begin with, rolls on and on, sometimes unevenly, and one starts to harbour a feeling that he’s too much in thrall to his characters to let them go. In particular, the detailing of Walter’s efforts at ecological conservation tend to pall.

Freedom, then, is layered and ambitious in the way too few books are in today’s times. Alas, as Browning’s Andrea del Sarto would have said, its reach exceeds its grasp.

Books On Holiday

What books do you take with you when travelling? My next Yahoo India column.

Tusker Tale

This appeared in last Saturday's The Indian Express

THE ELEPHANT'S JOURNEY Jose Saramago

In the tale of the blind men and the elephant, each person describes the animal in a different manner, depending on the part that he feels. Something similar occurs in Jose Saramago’s last, posthumous novel, The Elephant’s Journey.

The novel is inspired by the true story of an Indian elephant and his master travelling from Lisbon to Vienna on foot in 1551. In Saramago’s telling, the pachyderm, named Solomon, is a gift from the king of Portugal to his cousin, the archduke of Austria. Solomon and Subhro, his mahout, travel by land across Portugal, by sea across the Mediterranean and finally traverse the Alps, in the manner of Hannibal’s army.

The officers who travel with them, and the people they encounter along the journey, react to the elephant in ways that reveal more about their self-importance and insecurity than the actual animal itself. The animal emerges as larger than life, open to interpretation:  “Some even say that man himself was made out of what was left over after the elephant had been created…”

Commanding officers and priests, in particular, show themselves to be equally susceptible to petty vanity, Saramago’s way of gently mocking different sections of of the state. In particular, he pokes sly fun at Christian theology, sometimes contrasting it with Hindu myths, especially that of the origin of Ganesha.

There’s much of the author’s trademark style in the way the novel is written. Paragraphs go on for pages and quotation marks are done away with in favour of run-on dialogue separated by commas. In addition, proper nouns are democratised by doing away with capitals. One gets used to all of this surprisingly quickly, and the cumulative effect is to add more than a degree of orality to the narrative, all aided by Margaret Jull Costa’s adept translation.

 This aspect is emphasised further by Saramago’s impishness. There are frequent asides to the reader, some of them self-referential: “Now, this story has not lacked for reflections, of varying degrees of acuity, on human nature, and we have recorded and commented on each one according to their relevance and the mood of the moment.” At other times, he gleefully skates over centuries: “It’s a shame that photography had not yet been invented in the sixteenth century, because…we would simply have included a few photo from the period, especially if taken from a helicopter, and readers would then have every reason to consider themselves amply rewarded and to recognize the extraordinarily informative nature of our enterprise.”

The book’s second half has something of a rushed air, especially when contrasted with the first; and Subhro the mahout does come across as a bit of a cipher, with one remaining unsure of his motivation. For all that, The Elephant’s Journey is a pleasure to read in the way that an updated parable for our times would be a pleasure to listen to. A folktale, then, but one told in the knowing, ironic tone of a person who has seen the world and its foibles more clearly than most.