Revisiting The White Hotel

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Pornography and plagiarism. While soft-core versions of the former dominate best-seller lists, writers and commentators are increasingly accused of the latter. All of this in a literary environment in which the hard-won lessons of Modernism seem to be ignored, with English-language writers churning out pleasantly middle-brow novels. It’s instructive, then, to cast a look back at a novel published three decades ago that faced charges of both plagiarism and being pornographic – yet managed to maintain its reputation of being artistically challenging as well as satisfying.

When it was published in 1981, most reviews of D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel in the UK were lukewarm. In the rest of Europe and in the United States, though, reviewers were ecstatic. “Heartstunning”, “haunting”, “dazzling” – and, of course, “lyrical” -- are just some of the adjectives on the first few pages of my silverfish-ravaged paperback copy. The novel went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, losing narrowly to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

The White Hotel isn’t exactly a book to take with you to the beach. Set mainly in the middle of the last century, it deals with the life, neurosis and visions of Lisa, a budding young opera singer, who is treated by Sigmund Freud for – in the language of the time – “severe sexual hysteria”. The novel’s six parts contain erotic fantasy, poetry, letters, postcards, a case study in the style of Freud’s ‘The Wolf Man’ and finally and most strikingly, the barbaric reality of Nazi atrocities. Each part is connected with the other, but without concessions: the reader has to work to make the links.

Some of the fantasies described are indeed sexually explicit, and uncomfortably so; and the latter part of the book that depicts the behaviour of Nazi soldiers at Babi Yar is extremely disturbing. What catapulted the author to the front pages, however, wasn’t this as much as the charges brought against him for appropriating sections of Anatoli Kuznetsov’s 1996 book, Babi Yar, which was termed “a document in the form of a novel”.

Thomas tried to explain this away by pointing to the publisher’s note at the beginning that “gratefully acknowledged” the use of material from Kuznetsov’s book, but many weren’t convinced. In time, however, the originality and strength of the rest of the book won out, with the controversial sections being seen as a postmodern ploy. I’m not so sold on the postmodernity of Thomas’ intention, but the note before the book’s text clearly indicates that there was no intent to pass off the Babi Yar passages as his own.

One of the things The White Hotel sets out to do is to capture the life behind the statistic: to show how, when individuals are barbarously done away with, there are entire real and fantasy worlds that vanish. The specific life in this case is represented through its polar opposites of intense passion and a death wish – that is, through Eros and Thanatos, to return to the language of the Viennese doctor whose case study features so vividly in the novel. This is the artistic choice that led to scenes that were dubbed pornographic, matched by later sections that are unbearable to read. The book’s coda, a redemptive imagining of lives after death, is an effort to mitigate some of the novel’s harsh sting, with the message, as Lisa writes in her fantasy, that “…nothing in the white hotel but love / Is offered at a price we can afford”.

Whether you think of it as very effective or very overdone -- or both -- reading The White Hotel all these decades later makes the ambitions and vision of today’s novels seem painfully circumscribed. It’s time for more writers to take to heart the dictum quoted by Freud in Thomas’ novel: do not turn away from “what, unknown or neglected by man, walks in the night through the labyrinth of the heart”.

Revisiting Chandler's Mean Streets

My column for the Sunday Guardian.

According to a recent report, John Banville will be picking up Raymond Chandler’s mantle to write another Philip Marlowe novel under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black – with the blessings of the Chandler estate. At first glance this may seem like an odd choice, despite the series of Black mystery novels that marvellously evoke a seedy, shifty Dublin of the Fifties. Consider, however: when it comes to Chandler what stays behind is not plot but style; what remains in memory are not events but atmosphere. Such prose, said one critic, “is a peculiar mixture of harshness, sensuality, high polish and backstreet poetry”. To recreate this mixture, Banville may just prove to be an inspired choice.

That style was supreme was something recognized by Chandler himself. To re-read The Big Sleep is to find a muddle of events featuring, among other things, pornographic rings, blackmail, absent spouses and missing corpses, but holding all of this together is Chandler’s distinctive, cool voice, with Marlowe as world-weary, incorruptible knight-errant walking down the mean streets of 1930s Los Angeles. As Chandler was to write, “In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time…the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off”. For Chandler, it paid off in spades.

After a chequered career as poet, reviewer, teacher, accountant and oil company executive, he tried his hand at writing for pulp magazines, finding success with The Big Sleep in 1939, when he was 51.  He followed this up with other novels featuring Philip Marlowe – notably The Long Goodbye and Farewell My Lovely -- giving rise to the genre of noir thrillers that have dominated shelves since. (Though mention must also be made of Dashiell Hammett, a clear influence on Chandler and to whom he paid tribute in his essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’.) Later writers such as Ross McDonald and Elmore Leonard and movies such as Double Indemnity and Chinatown, to name only a few, all took forward the brooding atmosphere and wise-guy dialogue Chandler was known for. The influence extends further: as Pico Iyer has pointed out, those from Brazilian novelist Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza to Haruki Murakami have all, at one time or the other, fallen under the spell of Chandler’s almost affectless prose.

It’s not that the reception to Marlowe was completely uncritical. Edmund Wilson claimed to have liked Farewell My Lovely, but then added waspishly that Chandler was “a long way below Graham Greene”. Borges was more dismissive, stating, “The atmosphere in Chandler and Hammett’s stories is disagreeable”. And Martin Amis, some years ago, said that Chandler’s The Big Sleep hadn’t aged well. In this, there is some truth: to read expressions such as “if you want to pick lead out of your belly, get in my way” – to take just elements of the prose, not the setting -- is to find sections of the book amusingly irrelevant. Other Chandlerisms, however, still endure: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” is a lovely sentence for a detective novel, as is: “She gave me one of those smiles that the lips have forgotten before they reach the eyes”.

The Chandler estate has tried to continue his legacy before, calling upon mystery writer Robert Parker in 1989 to complete Chandler’s unfinished manuscript, Poodle Springs, followed by another Philip Marlowe novel, Perchance to Dream – both of which met with a lukewarm reception for their tepid recreation of Chandler’s prose. Something that ought to illustrate for Banville the perils of refurbishing a much-loved voice. Another trap, of course, is the descent into parody, something that the Chandler style has lent itself to over the years: look at Woody Allen’s piece, ‘The Whore of Mensa’, for example, or Jason Harrington’s ‘The Man who Repaired Laptops’ published in McSweeneys this month. If Banville, a master prose stylist, steers clear of these pitfalls, his Marlowe novel will be well worth waiting for.

Reading While Travelling

My column for the Sunday Guardian.

On a recent two-week work trip, the Kindle resolved at least one dilemma: that of how many books to take along.  It was, in any case, stuffed with new e-books I hadn’t begun, innumerable samples of others, and recent issues of a few periodicals. More than enough. But because old habits die hard, I also carried some paperbacks: John Lanchester’s Fragrant Harbour (as it was set in the city I was going to be in); Heinrich Boll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (which I needed to re-read in order to write last week’s column); and Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (which I’d been putting off reading for some time).

Much to my surprise, I finished the Lanchester and the Boll, as well as new issues of the London Review of Books and the NYRB -- and downloaded Pankaj Mishra’s new book before departure, making inroads into it on the flight back. This is quite unusual: before most trips, for work or otherwise, I spend more time deciding what books to take along than actually reading them, and return with almost all unread. It’s not that I don’t feel the need to read when away from home – it’s more to do with being able to devote more time to reading when in familiar surroundings. This time around it was different, probably because I was away for longer than usual.

 

Reading while waiting for a flight at an airport is another skill I have yet to master. Walking up to the flight gate and spotting others immersed in paperbacks or e-books causes a twinge of envy. I’m more likely to seek something fattening to eat, or to wander around the bookstore looking for more to add to the unread pile. And every time there’s an illegible announcement on the PA system, I imagine it’s to inform me that my flight is either delayed or on the verge of taking off.

It’s better once I’m on board; after all, what else is there to do during a flight, especially if you’re travelling alone? Watching movies on that little screen has never been very satisfying, and as for the food, the less said the better. Although on one flight, when I was immersed in the Kindle -- after they’d announced that it was OK for electronic devices to be switched on – a passing attendant raised her eyebrows and asked me to turn it off. (Perhaps she’d assumed it was a giant phone?) When I indicated that the wireless wasn’t on, her eyebrows shot up further, so I hastily went ahead and turned the device off, anyway. Visions of being handcuffed to my seat without any reading matter had arisen before my eyes.

Back home, I still have on the bookshelves a bulky, yellowing paperback edition of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, which has been my companion on at least three journeys so far.  However, I’ve only managed to read the first few paragraphs of Justine, the initial volume; in fact, I’ve started the page over so many times that I can offhand recall portions such as “the thrilling flush of wind”, “sky of hot nude pearl” and “I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child – Melissa’s child”. It’s a great opening which promises much, but so far I haven’t been able to go further, distracted every time by thoughts such as: “Should I turn down the air-conditioning? Should I go outdoors and explore instead of lying here reading? Is this pillow too soft? Should I turn up the air-conditioning?”

Too much of this, and I achieve the state captured in a quote attributed to baseball player Satchel Paige: “Sometimes I sit and think and sometimes I just sit”. After which, I just sleep. Now that it’s Durrell’s centenary year, I’m firmly resolved to finish the tetralogy before December. If I manage to regulate the temperature, that is.

Words, Labels And Heinrich Böll

Today's column for the Sunday Guardian.

Consider, to begin with, the following scenario: Women whose morals are questioned because they leave home alone and (gasp) dance with men at parties. Sections of the media falling over themselves to report what they consider to be scandals as well as threats to national values. Suspicion and fear of anyone who espouses left-leaning and radical causes. Those who think this environment is unique to today’s India should pick up Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, written in 1974, which satirises and dissects these very tendencies – in barely 140 pages.

The book, published two years after Böll won the Literature Nobel, deals once more with his chosen themes of institutional abuse of power and its effect on the common man and woman. As Salman Rushdie has written of The Safety Net, another one of Böll’s novels, “...the real tragedy, for Böll, is the replacement of the old kindnesses, of human values, by the remorseless, amoral world of the technologists.” By technologists, he refers to the press, the police and others in positions of authority imposing their views on the rest by the use of force.

The story of Katharina Blum’s lost honour is narrated in the book’s first few pages, being cast in the form of an objective report stitched together after consulting a variety of sources. Thus, the structure of this “polemical parody” itself is ironic. Overnight, the eponymous Katharina, a good-hearted, hard-working housekeeper, is first picked up by the police and then picked upon by a malicious newspaper. Her crime? At a party one evening, she befriended a young man under suspicion of being a terrorist, and subsequently helped him evade the law without realizing what exactly he was wanted for.

After the police release her from incarceration, an unscrupulous reporter continues to write scurrilous pieces, twisting and distorting both facts and interviews. (“Murderer’s Moll Won’t Talk!” is a typical headline.) Katharina’s life turns upside down; among other things, she begins to receive anonymous postcards with offensive and derogatory messages – the equivalent today of being hounded by trolls on Twitter and Facebook. Driven to desperation, she seeks out and, rather dramatically, shoots the errant reporter, after which she coolly surrenders to the police.

It’s a subject that Böll was drawn to because he himself was pilloried by the press and by right-wing sympathizers in 1972 after he expressed doubts over the treatment of Ulrike Meinhof. Böll’s opinion was that slanted newspaper reports on the activities of the Baader-Meinhof extremists had deprived her of a fair trial, and for this he was harassed to the extent of having his house searched by the police. (Meinhof was to later die in prison, allegedly a suicide, though more than a few have contested this.)

It was from such a background that Boll’s late novels such as The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and The Safety Net emerged. This also explains why, in the former, Böll is explicit, and acidulously so, about the damage that irresponsible media can cause: “Here is a young woman, cheerfully, almost gaily, going off to a harmless little private dance, and four days later she becomes (since this is merely a report, not a judgment, we will confine ourselves to facts) a murderess, and this, if we examine the matter closely, because of newspaper reports”.

In a Paris Review interview a few years before he died, Böll memorably said, “Behind every word is a whole world”. This draws attention to another important concern in his work: the proper use of words, awareness of their meanings and of what happens to individuals when words turn into labels. What, then, is fact, what is fiction, and what lurks between the lines? All these years later, it’s a still a message worth paying close attention to.

Revieweresque

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Book reviewers tend to employ the same adjectives over and over again. Novels are ‘evocative’, 'epic' or 'esoteric'; prose can be 'lyrical', 'luminous' or 'lilting'.  There’s another series of adjectives often used, which describe the novel under review in terms of the style of another author. (Among other things, this has the advantage of making the reviewer appear well-read.) Here, for the rest of us, is a description of what actually goes through reviewers’ minds when they resort to this ploy.

Kafkaesque: Hold on, what’s happening in this novel? Why is that character spending his life trying to get somewhere else? What was he accused of? Am I really expected to read the work of a guy who uses capital letters instead of names? Maybe I dreamt this, but I’m sure one of the characters also turned into an insect. What was he smoking?

Joycean: This was taxing. There were so many words that I hadn’t come across before – and they weren’t in the dictionary either. The publishers said it was an English novel but maybe they sent me the foreign language translation by mistake. And they’d better talk to the typesetter – he seems to have eliminated all the quotation marks. The author must be really angry. Tee-hee.

Dickensian: Where is this writer getting the names of his characters from? Not the phone directory, that’s for sure.  And he seems to be on a social crusade by depicting the lives of those with horrible childhoods and others who are caught up in jails, factories and law courts. Never happened to me, thank goodness. There’s also a pickpocket, I think. And lots of fog.

Dosteovskian: The problem with authors is that they don’t get out much. That’s why they’re so grim, so morose. Take this chap. He makes his characters go underground, suffer theological qualms, and generally mutter to themselves like misfits. How is a publisher ever going to get a film studio interested in this?

Tolstoyan: So many pages, so many people! Hard to keep track of them all. Many go off to war. Others enter into adulterous relationships. A few start farming. One of them will probably open an organic food store and start wearing woven sandals. I’m sure they all meet and reconcile at the end, but I can’t be bothered to finish the book. Holding it up is giving me carpal tunnel syndrome.

 Beckettian: People hang about in homes and street corners throughout the book. I couldn't understand much of it, but I think they're waiting for someone. The conversation is pointless and there's very little of it. I wanted to use the word "existential" but didn't have the patience to look up what it means.

Proustian: What a long, self-absorbed book, full of endless sentences that circle continuously between past and present and examine the effect of one on the other almost as though the writer’s suffered a fit of indigestion by overeating a childhood treat and is now trying to get it out of his system once and for all.

 Carveresque: At least these stories are short. How many hours can a chap waste reading? I actually managed to finish the collection, so it must be good. But his characters….they sit around drinking and thinking suicidal thoughts all day long. I could do with a drink myself, come to think of it. Better finish this review first. 

Murakamiesque: This one was full of cats. And descriptions of women’s ears. And jazz. And lonely men and women in subways nursing broken, or dented, hearts. Not sure how it all adds up, but I guess it does in some alternative realm. I’m tempted to call it “Kafkaesque”. Or do I mean “Carveresque”?

Killing Us Softly

This appeared in today's edition of Mint Lounge.

I AM AN EXECUTIONER Rajesh Parameswaran

Reading Rajesh Parameswaran’s debut short story collection is like watching a skilled young Indian-American writer trying on various hats to ascertain which one fits best. There are a variety of styles on display in I Am an Executioner, matched with a variety of voices, each one crafted to make a distinct impression.

It’s initially tempting to play a game of spot-the-influence with this collection. Is that Kafka lurking behind the story of the secret agent stalking an unknown quarry? Is Robert Heinlein the animating force in the saga of an insect-like being on another planet observing the activity of human beings? Does Borges figure in the DNA of the tale in which a railway clerk from an earlier generation intrudes into the writing of his history? Is that Nabokov in the shadows of the annotated story about the elephant on a rampage? It’s tempting, yes, but self-defeating, too: this is a collection that demands to be judged on its own terms.

A more relevant measure would be to look at Parameswaran’s feat in terms of breaking out of what Korean-American writer Don Lee recently called “the ethnic literature box”. In an interview with Guernica magazine, Lee wondered when Asian American writers would “feel freer to slip away from writing about identity and ethnicity moving to whatever captures our fancy.” Examined through this lens, one sees that -- despite surface differences and whether intentional or not -- many of Parameswaran’s stories are about questioning identities and surviving in alien environments, in a manner far removed from those who have earlier written about ethnic dilemmas.

Consider the stories that feature Indians in America, to begin with. They stay clear of the usual stereotypes and clichés that such characters are prone to. (Look elsewhere for love affairs with ripe mangoes and homesickness for the lush monsoon season.) In one of the stories, a woman whose husband has collapsed and died in their living room tries to continue with her normal activities, unwilling to reject the speculation that it’s her own unworthy thoughts that have killed him. In another, a laid-off CompUSA employee sets up a private medical practice without prior experience, a move that will have chilling consequences. And in a third, an art director involved in an affair with the wife of an acclaimed Bengali film director attempts to direct his own movie for an American producer to find that he has a lot to learn about love and art.

It’s appropriate that the first story here is ‘The Infamous Bengal Ming’, not only because it is the most striking, but also because many of its concerns resonate throughout the stories that follow. This takes us into the consciousness of a tiger who, escaping from a zoo, roams the city to discover that the only way he has to express love is by staying true to his instinct to maul. What we’d call victims are, for him, objects of affection. Here, then, is the collection’s keynote tenderness and savagery in equal measure, along with the writer’s unnerving ability to enter into the mind of a being quite unlike others.

All of these are love stories, proclaims the book’s subtitle, and that emotion is certainly present in these pages. But – in the same way that tropes of Indian-American writing are overturned – it’s a love that’s misshapen, demonstrating itself in acts that stray towards the macabre. The actions of the Bengal tiger apart, there’s also the many paragraphs devoted to the insect-like aliens in a remote outpost of the Andromeda Galaxy trying to devour each other after consummating their affair, an act that, we’re told and then shown, is necessary to provide sustenance for their larvae.

It must also be said that sometimes, Parameswaran’s talent with voices can be overdone to the point of archness. The narrator of the title story, for example, an executioner of an unnamed city-state grappling between the demands of his job and his wife, speaks in overstated Indian-English: “Normally in the life, people always marvel how I am maintaining cheerful demeanours and positive outlooks”. (This manner of speech is handled in a more nuanced manner in the story about the art director-turned-film-director referred to earlier: “Our hair is less and our backs give enormous pain”.) Such excess is also to be seen in the tale of the elephant, in which the footnotes become overpowering – this is partly the point of the story, of course, but it does come across as heavy-handed.

Leaving aside these quibbles, all the stories in I Am an Executioner have a cracking and satisfying pace that bespeaks careful composition and saves them from becoming mere character sketches or solipsistic ruminations. This, combined with Parameswaran’s flair of looking at the world aslant, ensures that with I Am an Executioner he sets about killing us softly with his skill.

The Laureate Of Old New York

Yesterday's Sunday Guardian column.

From 1964 till his death in 1996, staff writer Joseph Mitchell came to his office at the New Yorker day after day without filing a single word for publication. His 32-year-long writer’s block is now the stuff of legend. However, his profiles and character sketches before that, from 1938 onwards, are no less legendary.

E.B. White, Mitchell’s colleague, once wrote that New York City was “a single compact arena [for] the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant”. Mitchell’s arena was the Lower East Side of the 1940s and 50s; his subjects were the area’s panhandlers, Bowery bums, saloon owners, anti-profanity crusaders, street preachers and other eccentrics. It was with uncommon candour and gracefulness that he rendered their words and lives on the page. Most of his pieces were collected in his Up in the Old Hotel, first published 20 years ago, and the recent Vintage re-issue is another reminder of his achievement in memorializing these unconventional lives.

The openings of many of his profiles are noteworthy, simultaneously introducing the subjects as well as piquing interest. Take this one: “Commodore Dutch is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself.” Or: “A tough Scotch-Irishman I know, Mr Hugh G. Flood, a retired house-wrecking contractor, aged ninety-three, often tells people that he is dead set and determined to live until the afternoon of July 27, 1965, when he will be a hundred and fifteen years old”.

Mitchell’s prose is plain and declarative, yet has a hypnotic cadence. (One of his favourite books was, unusually, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.) For him, details were divine; there’s not a counter, shelf, room or wall mentioned without also a precise and particular description: “Coins are dropped in soup bowls – one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves – and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox”. In a bar, he notices that “the three clocks on the wall have not been in agreement for many years”. He is also marvellous at conveying atmosphere by invoking all the senses -- here he is on one of his favourite spots, the Bronx’s Fulton Fish Market: “The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fish-mongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me.”

Throughout, Mitchell refers to himself sparely, if at all, a welcome change from today’s essayists who insert themselves into every other paragraph. He lets his characters speak without interjection or judgment – indeed, one of his strengths is the art of stitching together distinctive dialogue, which often continues for page after page. (It’s a technique that V.S. Naipaul also used, particularly in India: A Million Mutinies Now.) What comes through time and again is Mitchell’s courtliness towards and respect for his subjects, however down-at-heel they may be. As he once said, there were no “little people” in his work: "They are as big as you are, whoever you are”.

One of most notable characters Mitchell wrote about was Joe Gould, first in 1942 and then a longer piece entitled Joe Gould’s Secret in 1964.  This “blithe and emaciated little man”, known as Professor Sea Gull for his self-professed ability to translate English into the language of birds, spent years living in Greenwich Village flophouses, cadging money and meals from friends and strangers, and working on a mysterious, lengthy book that he called “an Oral History of our Time”.

Mitchell was clearly obsessed with Gould – perhaps finding common concerns between their lives – and spent much time in his company, as well as in trying to track down his family, friends and the hundreds of notebooks containing drafts of the oral history. In this latter task he was unsuccessful; it turned out that Gould was faking it, suffering from writer’s block himself. A sad and terrible irony, then, that Gould’s chronicler, who came to be known as the laureate of old New York, was to meet the same fate.

The Power Of A Sense Of Place

Today's column for the Sunday Guardian

If you were to ask readers about their favourite books, the answers would almost always be those set against a backdrop vividly brought to life.  That is what Margaret Mitchell’s Atlanta, Harper Lee’s Maycomb or even the sleepy English village of Richmal Crompton’s William Brown have in common. Such is the power of a strong sense of place, an art that the best novelists use not just to serve as a background for their characters, but also to establish a living, breathing presence that stalks through the pages.

You’ll find this in Richard Ford’s new novel, Canada, with his evocation of the wide-horizoned prairie across the American border. Arriving in Saskatchewan in the second half of the book, the narrator finds no hills, no landmarks and few trees:  “The course of the sun would be what told you where you were — that and whatever you personally knew about: a road, a fence line, the regular direction the wind came from”. Clearly, it’s an environment that shapes the lives of those in it.

Another recent example is Rahul Bhattacharya’s debut novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care. Here, the narrator, an Indian journalist, goes on a slow ramble through the forests and cities of Guyana, in the process evoking its rhythms, landscapes, patois and colonial legacy. Little wonder that it was awarded the Ondaatje Award for the book that best captures “the spirit of a place”.

Saskatchewan and Guyana are, of course, all too real, but some of the most resonant locations in novels have been invented.  Take R.K. Narayan’s sleepy South Indian town of Malgudi, Thomas Hardy’s destiny-laden Wessex and William Faulkner’s race-divided Yoknapatawpha County – each one made-up, although a composite of real places. These writers returned to these sites time and again in their work: establishing a suitable backdrop was vital in foregrounding themes close to their hearts.

James Joyce, on the other hand, was too busy inventing language and form to invent a place as well. In the process, he memorialized the city of his birth by trying to encompass all of “dear, dirty Dublin” in Dubliners and then in Ulysses. As he famously boasted, if the city was ever to be destroyed, it could be recreated again from the pages of the latter work. (Perhaps not in real life, but certainly in memory.)

The stories in Dubliners are linked by their location as well as the working out of common themes. For other short story collections, authors sometimes find it useful to establish a place – usually drawn from their childhoods – that serves as a setting for colourful characters who step forward with their stories. This was V.S. Naipaul’s technique in Miguel Street, as well as that of Rohinton Mistry in Tales from Firozeshah Bagh.

Often, places that are compelling on the page aren’t all that dramatic in real life – it’s the writer’s art that makes them so. Consider the humdrum, conventional nature of the American suburbs, and look at the use the trio of Yates, Cheever and Updike made of them.

Film and TV directors have long known of the hypnotic power of an appropriate sense of place. Take Woody Allen’s New York, for example – or even the manner in which he creates the ill-lit squares, streets and parlours of a murky and altogether Kafkaesque East European town in Shadows and Fog (shot, naturally, in black-and-white).  In recent TV shows, the rain-sodden Seattle of The Killing or the forbidding icy wastes and power-thirsty imperial cities of Game of Thrones are so integral to the plots that the shows would be inconceivable without them.

In her classic 1956 essay on the subject, Eudora Welty called a sense of place “one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction”. That’s a memorable way of drawing attention to it, but, as these examples and more go on to show, it’s an angel that’s at least the equivalent of all the others that preside over the writer’s desk.

Out Of Focus

This appeared in the latest issue of TimeOut Mumbai

THE VILLAGE Nikita Lalwani

Nikita Lalwani’s second novel, The Village, comes five years after her debut, the Booker-longlisted Gifted. Unfortunately, it’s as charmless as the first one was engaging. The novel’s premise is uncommon enough, but the characters and their predicaments remain fuzzy and underdeveloped throughout.

The village in question is the fictional hamlet of Ashwer, five hours’ drive from New Delhi. This happens to be an ‘open prison’ where those convicted of murder, along with their families, are encouraged to lead productive lives. In this location arrives a small BBC crew intending to film a documentary. Lalwani’s narrative hews close to the point of view of the crew’s young director, Ray Bhuller, a woman of Indian-origin whose past we are told little about. Much is made of Ray’s fractious relationship with Serena, the film’s producer, and Nathan, the presenter – who, somewhat improbably, is a former armed robber from London’s East End.

Though we’re introduced to some of the inmates and their backgrounds, their lives and the daily rhythm of the village never quite spring into focus. Space, however, is given over to portraying the country’s heat, dust, hues and clothes. There are other clunky choices, too, such as Hindi dialogue being followed by an English translation. (At one point, “thakur sahib” is transcribed, without irony, as “sir lord”.)

One also reads with incredulity of Ray’s reasons to film the documentary, revealed in a conversation with Nathan: she wants to portray the “beauty, honesty, trust, dignity and inspiration” of the country, going on to talk of dismantling colonial prejudices. All the more strange then, that she allows herself to be a part of the manipulation that follows in getting the inmates to reveal more of themselves than they’d like.

 Halfway through the novel, Ray’s boss e-mails her from London to ask for the specific storylines and conflict that she plans to feature in her documentary. It’s a pity the novel itself doesn’t make more effective use of such elements.