Crying Wolf

This appeared in the latest TimeOut Mumbai. In passing, it's interesting that wolves should figure so prominently in mythology and folktales. There are the so-called fairy tales (at least two), the legend of Romulus and Remus, the son of Loki in Norse mythology and Charon, the ferry man from Greek mythology who had the ears of a wolf.

WOLF TOTEM Jiang Rong

At one point in Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, an elderly herdsman tells the protagonist: “There are so many things you Chinese don’t understand…Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes. The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books. If you turn into a Mongol and write books for us, that would be wonderful.” Wolf Totem, then, is that book. Based on the author’s own sojourn in Mongolia in the 1960s during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it became a million-copy bestseller in Chinese, and is now available in Howard Goldblatt’s lucid translation.

Wolf Totem is about the exploits of Chen Zhen, a Beijing student, one of four classmates who travel to the Mongolian steppes. Here, Chen discovers that life moves to a primeval rhythm, dictated by extremes of weather and the necessity of hunting for survival. Above all, he is made aware of a “complex attitude of fear, reverence and infatuation” towards the wolf, which colours all activities. None other than Genghis Khan is held up as the prime exemplar of the virtues of lupine wiliness.

The novel progresses via episodes of hunting and herding, with a supporting cast of dogs and gazelles, not to mention a wolf cub. Though many of the episodes are fast-paced there’s no overall narrative flow, which can make for heavy going -- heightened by regrettable overstatement. Rong’s case is that the Chinese have much to learn from the Mongol’s fortitude and view of the environment as an intricate organism of cause and effect, something repeatedly affirmed.

The novel ends with a eulogy for a vanished land; the losers are the Chinese, thoughtlessly replacing older systems. Wolf Totem’s strengths are ethnographical: much of the novel is clearly the outcome of close observation. Would that it had been more succinct, though.

Cover Stories

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

The problem with satire is that people are apt to take it literally. Something you don’t need to point out to Barry Britt, creator of the by-now infamous New Yorker cover featuring Mr and Mrs Obama as radical Muslims. This, however, is only the latest in a series of provocative covers that American magazines have published over the years.

Some of Britt’s other recent covers for the New Yorker have mined the same vein of mordant irony – such as the one featuring occupants of the Oval Office drowning in post-Katrina waters, or another with Obama and Hillary Clinton in bed together, both reaching for a ringing red telephone.

More urbane covers for the magazine have been created by Saul Steinberg – notably, one that showed a map with “a view of the world from Ninth Avenue”, portraying the average New Yorker’s limited view of the universe beyond the Hudson. An update appeared on the 1 December 2001 issue featuring “New Yorkistan”, comprising areas such as Fuhgeddabouditstan and Bronxistan.

Unsurprisingly, President Bush has often been on the receiving end. A cover for the Canadian Maclean’s drew a moustache on him to make him look like Saddam Hussein; and one by The Nation likened him to Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. The resemblance is uncanny.

Some of the best examples of suggestive covers are to be found in the Esquire of the Sixties. There was the April1968 issue featuring a shirtless Mohammed Ali pierced by six arrows, mimicking St Sebastian, a comment on the pugilist’s prosecution for draft evasion. There was the May 1969 issue showing Andy Warhol drowning in a can of his own Campbell’s Soup, for a story on the decline of the avant-garde. There was the March 1965 photograph of a Marilyn Monroe-lookalike shaving, to accompany a piece on “the masculinisation of the American woman”.

Most of Esquire’s iconic covers were the output of advertising man George Lois, who said of his work, "The statements inside are useless unless there is a statement on the outside.” As a definitive statement on his creations, 32 of his most famous covers are at present on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Others have used cover pictures effectively, too. Annie Liebowitz’s striking photograph of a naked John Lennon curled up against Yoko Ono, taken just a few hours before the ex-Beatle was shot, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone on 22 January 1981. Another photograph by Ms Liebowitz that stirred debate was that of a naked and visibly pregnant Demi Moore on Vanity Fair’s August 1991 issue. A year later in the same publication, Ms Moore appeared in nothing but a painted-on power suit – something Movie magazine attempted to replicate with Pooja Bhatt. Thank goodness the Nineties are over.

Of course, it’s not just photographs or illustrations that have the power to provoke. One of Time magazine’s most controversial covers appeared in April 1966, comprising just three words: “Is God Dead?” Another striking one appeared in April 1997 featuring TV show host Ellen DeGeneres with the headline: “Yep, I’m Gay.” You could say that more than just the magazine came out that day.

Even paragons of rectitude will occasionally cause comment with their choice of cover. The Economist, for example, chose to accompany a September 1994 story on “the trouble with mergers” with a photograph of two camels mating. That’s one hump too many.

In India, alas, such ‘concept covers’ don’t seem to have caught on. Exposure is the order of the day, be it of politicians or starlets. Making one speculate whether the best ones on the stands are the descriptive, typographical covers for the venerable Economic and Political Weekly.

A Well-thumbed Thesaurus

Just in case you were too busy to read Shashi Tharoor's short encomium in today's Times of India on Rushdie's Midnight's Children being voted 'the best of Bookers', these adjectives from the 180-word piece should give you the gist of it:

- Astonishing
- New
- Teeming
- Myth-infused
- Exuberant
- Restless
- Breathtaking
- Risk-ridden
- Imaginative
- Rare
- Intellectual
- Polyglot
- Multi-ethnic
- Post-colonial
- Extravagant

The Plane Truth

A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES Mohammed Hanif

After coming out of the shadows of magic realism, it looks like we’ve returned to the penumbra of those talented Latin American writers. Dark political satires and fables are the order of the day: there was Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist; there was Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger; and now, there’s Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

This one owes as much to Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold as it does to Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat -- something acknowledged in the book by having one character read the Marquez novel, and many characters feast on the aforesaid animal.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes tells of the time before and immediately after 17 August 1988, the day General Zia-ul-haq perished in a plane crash along with senior generals and the US ambassador to Pakistan, among others. The truth behind that incident has never been plausibly revealed, and it is this ambiguity that Hanif takes as the subject of his debut.

The first strand of the novel tells of the fate of Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri of the Pakistan Airforce Academy, who lands in hot water because of what he’s concealing – or not – when it comes to the disappearance of a fellow cadet. The other strand presents us with the last days in the life of General Zia who, in Hanif’s hands, emerges as a vain, blundering, occasionally cuckolded, fearful and Koran-consulting despot -- a man who, among other things, is troubled by an infestation of tapeworms in his gut.

It emerges that Ali Shigri may well have his own reasons to do away with the Chief Martial Law Administrator, but this isn’t the only threat to the General’s life. There are also conniving generals and curse-carrying crows, apart from the fleshy fruit of the title. Thus we shift from scene to scene, from air force training camp to the Presidential palace to prisons under Lahore Fort to the American embassy.

Much of this is great fun to read, even though you occasionally wince at Hanif’s barbed satire. As with the protagonist of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Shigri’s voice is likeable and effectively maintained throughout: it is cynical, scoffing and baffled by turn. Quite a few aspects of life under military rule come under Hanif’s scanner and he treats each one sardonically, occasionally reminding one of Heller’s Catch 22. Few targets are spared: a brigadier thinks that Jinnah looks like “a tortured eighteenth-century chemist on the verge of a new discovery” and a bearded character named “OBL” turns up to hobnob with Pakistani and American top brass at a Fourth of July party.

However, Hanif’s penchant for overarching satire means that the work falters somewhat as a novel. The identifying and skewering of targets takes precedence over sustenance of pace and depth of character. (Much the same can be said of that other recent satirical work, Adiga’s The White Tiger.)

Be that as it may, the prime merit of A Case of Exploding Mangoes could well be to remind us once more that one of the functions of artists and their work, from the time of Juvenal, is to mock the petty pomposities of those in power. On that score, this is a novel to relish.

Not Entirely Smooth Sailing

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

SEA OF POPPIES Amitav Ghosh

The alkaloid that seduced Baudelaire and a subsequent generation of Romantic poets was also the dirty little secret at the heart of Britain’s Indian empire. Profits accruing from the trade in opium derived from Indian poppy fields gave rise to powerful dynasties, glittering palaces and unjust wars, and it is this that animates Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first novel in a proposed trilogy.

As is his wont, Ghosh weaves together the separate destinies of disparate characters; from these interactions arise the pressure points of plot. There’s Zachary, a principled mulatto freedman from Baltimore; Deeti, an impecunious widow fleeing the depredations that follow her husband’s death in an opium factory; Neel Rattan, a fastidious Bengal potentate convicted of forgery; Paulette, a recently-orphaned and headstrong young European; and Baboo Nob Kissin, an agent for indentured labourers, in the midst of a transformation wrought by a relative-turned-goddess.

It is 1838; the Opium Wars are about to begin; and all of these, with a colourful supporting cast of lascars, labourers and overlords, find themselves on board the Ibis, a “topsail schooner” that sets sail from Calcutta across the kala pani to Mauritius.

The novel isn’t just a seafaring yarn from first to last. Ghosh takes his time in building up the characters, filling in their backgrounds and the circumstances leading to their current predicament. In characteristically limpid prose and with the eye of a social anthropologist – a discipline in which he’s well-versed – he details the customs, diet, clothes and social restrictions of these individuals who are to be thrown together on the Ibis to become “jahaj-bhais”.

As is the case with other novels of the sea by Conrad, Melville, and more recently Unsworth, there is much nautical terminology. We’re introduced to tween decks, foretopmen and ratlines, with sailors eating hardtack and playing ablewhackets while – heaven forbid – the jib and the martingale run afoul of the dolphin-striker. Most of this builds verisimilitude (along with other striking passages that tell of the intricacies of poppy cultivation and the inner workings of an opium factory) but it is Ghosh’s use of polyglot dialogue that takes us into choppy waters. The tower of Babel he attempts to construct teeters under its own weight. Among other volumes, he’s obviously studied his Hobson Jobson obsessively for characters such as Mr Doughty, the ship’s pilot, spout Anglo-Indian dialect to the point of absurdity: “Where’s the mate? Has he been given the kubber that my bunder-boat has lagowed...Hop to it before I give your ganders a taste of my lattee.” (You just know that before too long, this man is going to ask for a “brandy-pawnee”.) The lascars on board the Ibis, too, have their own argot: “Catchi too muchi shamshoo. More better go sleep chop-chop.” And the turn of phrase employed by Baboo Nob Kissen puts one in mind of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, Billy Bunter’s schoolmate.

Not to sound tendentious, but when so much patois is stuffed into so few sentences, it makes characters teeter dangerously close to caricature. Elsewhere, when characters speak in their non-English native tongue (such as Bhojpuri) Ghosh uses the more agreeable expedient of reporting their dialogue in English, without the use of quotation marks and with the occasional vernacular expression thrown in for good measure.

Unfortunately, the streak of latter-day Romanticism prevalent in Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide resurfaces again here, leading him to imbue some of the characters with an exaggerated sense of idealism and occasional naiveté. This is the case especially with Paulette, and with others such as Jodu, her childhood friend. Allied to this are moments tinged with melodrama involving those on the other side of the fence -- principally sadistic or insensitive Englishmen such as Mr Burnham, the Ibis’ owner, whose pastimes include filching property and being spanked. Such juxtapositions at times approach the level of the simplistic.

Despite this, the novel never comes across as slick or pat, a testimony to Ghosh’s way with narrative. He doesn’t let scholarship come in the way of storytelling, and his fascination for describing lives uprooted by history is evident. It’s not all smooth sailing, then, on this Sea of Poppies, but it’s a voyage of many charms.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

This is from the latest TimeOut Mumbai.

GUARDIAN OF THE DAWN Richard Zimler

A novel set against the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa in the 16^th century? Sounds fascinating. Alas, in Guardian of the Dawn, Richard Zimler takes this premise and turns it into an overly solemn and often portentous work.

The novel narrates the fate of Tiago, brought up by his Portuguese-Jewish father in the princely state of Bijapur, his Indian mother having died in his infancy. Others in Tiago’s orbit include his high-strung sister Sofia, his loving cook Nupi, his enigmatic adopted cousin Wadi and his gentle wife Tejal. Tiago is imprisoned and tortured by zealous officials of the Inquisition and the story moves from present to past as he recalls his childhood and the circumstances that have led him to his current predicament.

Years later when he is finally free, Tiago makes plans to identify the shadowy individual who incriminated him, and take his revenge. This is when, all of a sudden, the novel’s tone and pace shifts to become a tale of behind-the-scenes machinations and bloody murder, a la Othello (Tiago, Iago, get it?).

Notwithstanding some scenes of great vividness – such as the sentencing and punishment of alleged heretics – Zimler’s prose is often florid, and we never get an accurate sense of the main character’s identity as half-Indian, half-Portuguese. The gravity with which Catholic excesses are delineated is excessive, with innocents too obviously pitched against zealots, and the underlining of common ties between religions could have been more subtle. Despite the research and seriousness of intent – or perhaps because of it -- Guardian of the Dawn is too ponderous by half.

Shelved

A bookstore at the new airport in Bangalore doesn't appear to think too highly of recent work by Messrs Mukherjee, Rushdie, Banker and Hosseini.

Less Graphic, More Novel

This appeared in yesterday's DNA.

KARI Amruta Patil

One of the things that can be said about graphic novels as opposed to their all-prose counterparts is that, by supplying images to the words, they leave the reader’s imagination with less work to do. Those who recognize this make it into a strength by inventive metaphors and devices – such as Art Spiegelman’s anthropomorphism in Maus, or Marjane Satrapi’s reinvention of the miniaturist’s art in Persepolis.

In her debut, Kari, Amruta Patil employs no such stylistic bravura, relying instead on well-chosen words, low-key images and ironic observations to make her point. This is the story of Kari, whose lover, Ruth, leaves her to settle overseas. Kari, who arrives in Mumbai to take up employment as a copywriter in an advertising agency, acutely feels the stings and arrows of the outrageous city, which is a palpable presence in the book. It is “smog city”, a place of overflowing sewers, where “everyone guards their sanity against the grief of strangers”.

Patil effectively delineates Kari’s heartbreak, the shallowness of work and the loneliness of being lost in a crowd. She bonds as well as distances herself from her flatmates, and has some allies to lean upon: Angel, a cancer-stricken former agency client and Lazarus, her art director partner at the agency. She faces long commutes and water-logged auto-rickshaw rides, has ruminative seafood dinners at Soul Fry as well as an erotic encounter at Café Mondegar and endures advertising award shows. The action isn’t strictly linear: these are fragments, memories and slices of life that progress towards an increasing disillusionment with her present situation.

Patil’s writing style is appealing piquant, though her illustrations are, on the whole, more muted than striking. There are pleasing touches though, such as tips of the hat to Munch’s Scream and da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Overall, however, there’s clearly more of a reliance on the written word: the impact is less graphic and more novel.

The to-be-continued ending is inconclusive and hence unsatisfying, and the ongoing solipsism can be trying. Despite these inconsistencies, it must be said that Kari is an interesting and heart-felt debut and, one trusts, a harbinger of better things to come.

The Write Stuff

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times. As it turns out, in the gap between writing and publication, I actually managed to read -- and even review -- some of the books mentioned below.

Some decades ago, Alvin Toffler coined the expression “information overload” to refer to the state of having too much data to go through in order to remain up-to-date. Well, given the line-up of new book releases over the next month, I’m suffering from the literary equivalent

The problem is that so many of the releases belong to the you-must-read-this category. In fiction, there’s Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (despite the suspicion that this is another attempt at mining an exhausted seam of immigrant alienation); Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence; Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You; and short story collections such as Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins and debuts such as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. In non-fiction, there’s Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Sathnam Sangera’s If You Don’t Know Me by Now.

What makes it worse is that all these follow on the heels of so many books acquired but yet lying unread, glaring accusingly from the bookshelves: among them Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib; Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases. All of them hugged to one’s bosom the moment they were spotted, as books to be read right away. And don’t even remind me of the piles of books purchased much, much earlier, with spines still uncracked.

Such logorrhea is most unfair on the part of the authors concerned. Their respective Muses may well be perched on their shoulders urging them on, but surely all of them ought to get together to ration their offerings? “Sorry Salman, you had a book out two years ago, it’s my turn now.” “But Hanif, this is topical, it can’t wait.” “Both of you get in line, my debut is the fresh new voice the world is waiting for!” “Shut up Aravind, my tale of growing up in a dysfunctional family is the one that will bring succour to millions.”

Lest such exchanges degenerate into hair-pulling and ear-biting, I propose an organisation that follows the OPEC model of laying down quotas for oil supply – call it the Organisation of Literature Writing Countries -- which could allocate the number of titles published every quarter. Publishers and literary agents attempting to break the embargo could be blacklisted and exiled to the Polynesian Islands, a place where no-one has been spotted putting pen to paper since recorded history.

Of course, it’ll be a while before the literary authorities take note of this suggestion and even longer before they act on it. Meanwhile, the only recourse for the hapless is to pick up French professor Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read and follow his instructions. In case any of you out there do this, could you tell me what the book contains? Of course, I haven’t read it yet.

Epic Illusion

A slightly edited version of this appeared in Sunday's DNA.

THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONS Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

In The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni sets aside her usual brand of exotic realism and attempts to show us the world of the Mahabharata though Draupadi’s eyes. Which brings to mind other feminist retellings of mythological epics, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which narrated Arthurian legends from the point of view of Morgan Le Fay, Guinevere and others and, more recently, Margaret Atwood’s slim The Penelopiad, which retold The Odyssey from the point of view of the distressed Penelope. The success or otherwise of such attempts is clearly to be measured in terms of how they make us re-evaluate the previous work.

Here, the mode of expression is in the first person -- the challenge, then, is to work with the limitations of such a viewpoint to recast the omniscience of the original. Unfortunately, Banerjee side-steps this by having her Draupadi become the recipient of the stories of others, be they the Pandavas, her nursemaid, sundry bards, her brother Dhrishtadyumna and more. This seems like a cop-out: the uniqueness of a woman’s point of view is diluted and what remains is another potted version of the epic. In addition, many of the characters appear unchanged: Duryodhan is always vengeful and wicked, Krishna is always playfully divine, and so on.

Banerjee does introduce touches of her own, principally Draupadi’s unconsummated yearning for Karna, which she uses as a device to set some of the events in motion (although anthropologist Irawati Karve points out that this notion is to be found in some later Jain puranas). Banerjee also has Draupadi in an adversarial relationship with mother-in-law Kunti, and setting up courts after the Kurukshetra War to hear bereaved women’s issues. Her account of Draupadi’s outrage and subsequent acceptance when told that she is to marry all five Pandavas, as well as her implacable determination that her husbands fight the Kauravas to the finish are occasionally insightful -- but equally, there are parts that are unconvincing, such as the Freudian analysis of her husbands: “Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you. No matter how famous or powerful they became, my husbands would always long to be cherished”.

If it’s stimulating insights into the Mahabharata you need, there’s still nothing better than Iravati Karve’s Yuganta; if it’s a clear-cut encapsulation you’re looking for, brush the dust off the Rajagopalachari version.