Not Child's Play

This appeared in today's DNA.

PIGEON ENGLISH Stephen Kelman

What is it about child narrators that Man Booker Prize judges can’t resist? Off the top of one’s head, one can recall Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner, 1993), DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (winner, 2003), Emma Donoghue’s Room (shortlisted, 2010) David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (longlisted, 2006) and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (longlisted, 2003). Now, there’s Stephen Kelman’s debut novel, Pigeon English, on this year’s shortlist at the time of writing.

The 11-year-old protagonist of this novel is portrayed as endearingly innocent; indeed, there’s little that is arch and precocious in his utterances. An example of the sort of style that Kelman adopts for his narrator’s consciousness comes early on: "My jumper's blue. My uniform's better. The only bad thing about it is the tie, it's too scratchy. I hate it when they're scratchy like that”. This is the sort of thing it’s very easy to like; equally, it can annoy with its faux-naif posturing. And there’s a lot of this in Pigeon English.

It’s the voice of Harrison Okupu, recently re-located from Ghana with his mother and elder sister to one of London’s poorer housing estates. (His father and infant sister remain in Africa, planning to join the rest of the family as soon as they can.) Harrison is a quick study, picking up the ways and language of his schoolmates easily enough. We hear much of their schoolyard games – in a sign of the times, one of their pastimes is called “suicide bomber”. Casual delinquencies, with knives, gang initiations and petty theft, are very much a part of the daily routines of some of those in his ken. 

With wide-eyed naiveté, Harrison also conveys his impressions of new experiences such as travelling on the tube. When he isn’t obsessing over whether he’s wearing the right kind of sneakers, he muses on the differences between his homeland and England, from the way barbers behave to the way traffic does. His Ghanaian backdrop, then, serves the important function of establishing him as a stranger in a strange land. This is a report from the inner city by an insider with an outsider’s point of view.

When a boy is stabbed to death outside a fast-food restaurant, Harrison, with some of his mates, decides to play amateur detective to bring the miscreant to book. With this as the plot device, Kelman has him keeping tabs on other boys, as well as sparring with his sister and her mates, acquiring a girlfriend of sorts and gradually becoming more attuned to the ways of the world in which he finds himself. Death and dying are very much on his mind, serving both as a foreshadowing of the future as well as a reflection of his environment.

Harrison’s predicament is one that elicits affection, not to mention compassion. However, the tone of voice employed has many repetitive simplicities and overstated pieties, and these can grate after a while. “I saw a bird nest in the tree,” he informs us. “It was very sad. The birds all fell out when the tree came down.” Then again: “Do you know what's a superhero? They're special people who protect you. They have magic powers. They use them to fight the bad men. They're very great”. The use of schoolboy argot, too, is overdone, with words such as “hutious”, “bo-styles” and “dope-fine” appearing on almost every page.

Curiously enough, there’s also the voice of a pigeon that butts in from time to time. This winged creature, roosting on the balcony of Harrison’s house, is given to gnomic, mock-prophetic pronouncements such as “I do know the shape of a mother's grief”.  As a device to incorporate another minority voice, this comes across as unnecessary.

Immersing oneself in a child’s point of view can be a rewarding experience for the way in which it brings to life the gap between what is seen and what is understood. Despite being affecting in parts, and revelatory of the lives of children in violence-prone neighbourhoods, Pigeon English is only partially successful in this regard.     

Diners' Club

This appeared in today's DNA.

THERE BUT FOR THE Ali Smith

What if a stranger comes to dinner and turns the lives of the hosts upside down? That was the premise of Ali Smith’s last novel, The Accidental. What if an acquaintance comes to dinner and refuses to leave? That’s the premise of her new novel, There But For The.

The plot, such as it is, is pithily summed up right at the start: “There was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party.” It’s a sentence that encompasses as well as sets off the events of book, in somewhat the same manner as the first page of Toni Morrisson’s Jazz provides the plot in a nutshell, leaving the author free to riff on it thereafter.

The setting is a tony neighbourhood in Greenwich, and Smith makes use of all the metaphorical associations of the area, from the implications of time’s passage to the underground foot tunnel. The novel comprise discrete episodes that range over past and present, delving into the lives and thoughts of those known to Miles, the intractable guest. There’s Anna, who met him during a European holiday many years ago; Mark, the acquaintance who brought Miles to the dinner in the first place; May, the elderly relative; and most of all the precocious ten-year-old Brooke, daughter of the neighbours  (reminiscent of the intelligent 12-year-old in The Accidental).  As the days pass and Miles refuses to emerge or communicate, barring through handwritten slips of paper pushed under the door, he becomes a minor celebrity in the area, with people believing that his actions mirror their individual concerns.

Smith’s style, as with her previous work, resembles nothing so much as an intelligent, loquacious conversationalist, albeit one who looks at you sideways. Truman Capote’s early novels were recently termed “the literature of the backward glance”; Smith’s writing can be said to deal with the glance that is oblique. The indirectness can prove to be a frustration on occasion, but there’s a probing intelligence and questioning of established verities that rise off almost every page. There is also much wordplay and punning, as well as some execrable ‘knock-knock’ jokes. All of this, however, indicates a concern with the way language is used to communicate as well as obfuscate. As one character says: “I only joke about really serious things”.

Smith’s targets range from the way technology shapes experience to the way we fetishize the actions of those who, in however small a way, stand out or go against the grain. A comment on Brooke’s report card, in fact, could well be a summing up of the author’s particular talents: “Her verbal dexterity is notable and she is wonderfully imaginative and of course we do not have a problem with that or with either of these things. But sometimes her infectious imagination can be vertiginous for her peers”.

Misspeak, Memory

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING Julian Barnes

The nature and length of the novella as a form compel writers to pay close attention to matters of prose and craft. This is why the best of them have a hand-cut, gem-like quality, with ruminative — although patterned — first-person musings on a given theme. Such, certainly, is the case with Julian Barnes’ elegant, incisive The Sense of an Ending.

On the first page itself, the narrator affirms that “...what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed”. This, then, is an impressionistic record, one that's hedged by constant -- and sometimes overdone -- reminders that what we're reading is the narrator's self-serving memories of earlier times. It’s not just that he’s unreliable: he’s also all too aware of his unreliability.

This is a story is told by Tony Webster, now in his sixties. He recollects, first of all, his time in school and friendship with the charismatic, precocious new boy, Adrian Finn. Almost from the start, Tony and his circle seek out Adrian’s attention and approval, and then keep in touch after they go their separate ways. Inevitably, Tony’s pronouncements on the people in his life tell us more about him than about them. Time and again, he reminds us that this record of the past isn't what it appears to be on the surface: “You can infer past actions from current mental states”.

Tony continues with his account of his life: education in Bristol, his wooing of and short-lived relationship with girlfriend Veronica; and then, in brisk, economical paragraphs, his marriage, job in “arts administration”, children, divorce, and retirement. In sum, “some achievements and some disappointments”.

This is when, pulling off an audacious structural move, Barnes segues into another section, dealing with the narrator’s days in the evening of his life. Circumstances bring him together again with Veronica, who had taken up with Adrian after their break-up, and he’s compelled to examine and re-examine his past assumptions, step by step. He now has to make sense of an almost Wittgensteinian fragment from Adrian’s diary, as well as mull over his interactions with the older Veronica, to solve a mystery springing from his past. As she tells him more than once, he is someone who just “doesn’t get it.”

Tony’s self-deluded, emotionally repressed ways bring to mind other fictional characters with the same traits, notably John Dowell from Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, as well as Stevens from Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It's also not by coincidence that one of the characters is portrayed as reading a work by Viennese author Stefan Zweig, for this, too, is a book about a person who obsesses over yesterday’s actions and omissions, often rewriting events in his mind.

There’s an aphoristic, crafted quality to much of the book. At one point, for example, the narrator quotes Adrian in a phrase reflective of its theme: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”.  Elsewhere, in a passage reminiscent of Nothing to be Frightened of, Barnes’ earlier non-fiction deliberation on death and dying, Tony says, “…the longer life goes on, the fewer are those to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life”.

At barely 150 pages, The Sense of an Ending is a resonant reminder that one can be succinct, not sprawling, when it comes to creating a compelling fictional world. As a tightly wound meditation on the unreliability of memory and the ways in which we mislead ourselves, Barnes’ work shows that in the right hands, brevity is still a virtue. 

Back To The Navel

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka.

NOON  Aatish Taseer

The great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “In all my writing, I tell the story of my life over and over again”.  It’s a statement that comes to mind when reading AatishTaseer’s third book, Noon. Following on the heels of a travelogue and a debut novel, this is another tale in which clear autobiographical currents can be discerned, many of them already covered in his two earlier books.

Planned as an episodic sequence rather than a conventional narrative, Noon plunges us from the start into the world of its protagonist Rehan Tabassum, son of an intrepid Delhi journalist and a businessman-politician from a neighbouring land, evidently Pakistan. (Although the country is referred to in the book by the names of two cities, the first, Port bin Qasim and the second – oddly and obviously enough – La Mirage.) The forlorn Rehan strikes alliances with both families: as a child, with his devout grandmother in Delhi, and later, with his step-brother, Isphandiyar, from across the border.

The novel also delves into the lives of others in Rehan’s orbit: notably, his mother, who re-starts her life in New Delhi after her return from London at the end of her association with Rehan’s father; and Amit Sethia, a rapacious industrialist with whom she subsequently has a long-lived liaison. The account of the latter’s motivations and rise to wealth seems to have been included as a way of making the novel encompass and understand recent changes in India and Indians, and this Naipaulian device doesn’t quite work, as the account lacks the personal texture of the rest of the book. Naipaul is a presence in other ways, too: sometimes stylistically, sometimes as a direct quotation from An Area of Darkness, and sometimes as unprocessed attempts to make sense of the plight of the individual against a historical backdrop.

In one lengthy chapter, Taseer employs an interesting and apt device to explore contrasting attitudes and beliefs between higher and lower social strata, namely, a theft at the Delhi farmhouse where Rehan is ensconced after his return from a US college. Domestic help – some new, some of long standing – is suspected, and varieties of police officials are called in. Unfortunately, the ramifications of this drag on for far too long; after a while, no new perspectives emerge.

The next section, describing Rehan’s time in his father’s land, is more evocative and insightful. He travels here, wanting “to enjoy my strange patrimony, with its many players and new country, to feel it more as an opportunity than an obligation”, and Taseer is candid about his protagonist’s need for parental approval as well as his life’s many absences. The register changes with the introduction of political machinations and blackmail, with some of it being reminiscent of Invitation, Shahryar Fazli’s recent Karachi-based novel.

Noon, then, emerges as a bit of a hodge-podge: a little insight and sensitivity blended with a lot of solipsism and self-indulgence. At one point, the narrator asserts, "The gaps in my life were too many, the threads too few". It shows.

Desert Of Forking Paths

This appeared in today's The Indian Express.

GODS WITHOUT MEN Hari Kunzru

As with Vikram Seth, so with Hari Kunzru: it’s difficult to pigeonhole their work. Kunzru’s novels so far have dealt with subjects as various as the different selves of a Zelig-like creature over the years; the life of a Sixties activist looking back on his revolutionary activities; and the intersection between the creator of a computer virus and a Bollywood star.  In all of them, one finds the ambition to not merely portray an aspect of our world but to encompass it, and this is also the case with his latest, Gods Without Men.

The novel features several interwoven storylines set against the backdrop of California’s Mojave Desert. Kunzru’s splintered narrative ranges over the centuries as he delves into the lives of those who find themselves in and around this sparsely populated, majestic region, particularly in the vicinity of the mysterious natural formation known as the Pinnacles.

There’s the grizzled WWII veteran constructing equipment to send out messages of love and brotherhood to the galaxy, trying to “connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit”; there are reports from 18^th century Spanish missionaries; there’s the misadventures of an ethnologist studying the region’s Indian tribes; there’s the disaffected London rock star fleeing an LA producer; there’s the ups-and-downs of the members of a hippy cult who preach that life-altering extraterrestrial contact is imminent. Connecting all of them is the story of a couple – Jewish-American wife, Punjabi-American husband – with an autistic child who find their lives turned upside down after a mysterious abduction.

Intersecting tales spread over the centuries with a science-fiction flavour: this inevitably reminds one of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The difference, however, is that the connections in Gods Without Men are explicitly spelt out, unlike the thematic hall-of-mirrors of Mitchell’s work. Kunzru carries off the voices necessary to pull off his overweening narrative arc, from the sardonic to the schmaltzy, from the tough to the tender, from the archaic to the current. While this is admirable, as is his re-creation of disparate worlds, a concern is that not all of the stories are as compelling. For example, the rock star’s escapades have a distinct whiff of the been-there-done-that.

After a while, it becomes clear that it’s the narrative of the couple with the child that is at the centre of this garden of forking paths. Fittingly, this tale is the one that’s the most well-rendered, with echoes of the cases of Madeleine McCann, JonBenet Ramsey and, closer home, the Talwars from Noida. In this manner, though the novel isn’t quite the contrapuntal symphony it sets out to be, it remains absorbing.

As the book progresses, there’s a sense of surfeit, of ever more dishes being laden on a groaning buffet table. Especially so in the latter half, when more characters are delved into – for example, the Iranian immigrants to America who find themselves participating in war games in the desert. While this may be well-done, one can’t help wondering whether it’s also overdone. The mechanics of the plot threaten to turn awry towards the end, with eeriness and doppelgangers thrown into the mix.

A piece of dialogue from Gods Without Men, uttered by the creator of a revolutionary stock-tracking software programme, sums up Kunzru’s overall intent: “There’s a tradition that says the world has shattered, that what was once whole and beautiful is now just scattered fragments. Much is irreparable but a few of these fragments contains faint traces of the former state of things, and if you find them and uncover the sparks hidden inside, perhaps at last you’ll piece together the fallen world. This is just a glass case of wreckage. But it has presence. It’s redemptive. It is a part of something larger than itself”. Whether Gods Without Men emerges as greater than the sum of its parts is, however, a moot point.

The Past Is A Foreign Country

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE ARTIST OF DISAPPEARANCE Anita Desai

The ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past. That was the intriguing epigraph to Anita Desai’s last novel, The Zigzag Way, and it’s a dictum many of her characters would subscribe to. The ones in her latest book, The Artist of Disappearance, are no exception. This comprises a series of three novellas featuring people who find themselves cut off from the mainstream of everyday life, brooding over former actions and inactions.

With characteristic delicacy and the incremental accumulation of small effects, Desai takes us into their hearts and minds. To begin with, there’s the reserved bureaucrat of The Museum of Final Journeys who, when posted in a remote, tedious outpost at the start of his career, chances upon a series of rooms in a mansion resembling a ramshackle version of Kolkata’s Mullick Palace. Here, he marvels at artifact after artifact sent from overseas, an experience that haunts him even many years later. In Translator Translated, an introverted college professor with a knowledge and love of Oriya proficiently translates a volume of a favourite author’s short stories, only to confuse notions of creator and translator when it comes to the same author’s new novel. (Language and its context: it’s a theme reminiscent of the author’s earlier In Custody.) Finally, in the title story, a reclusive young man lives in the burnt shell of his family mansion near Mussoorie, finding solace in nature, only to have his idyll interrupted by strangers from the city.

These are stories of lives half-lived, of the disappointment of destinations and of the ever-receding possibility of transformation. The causes, more often than not, turn out to be remote parental figures matched by a native irresolution bordering on timidity. Looking back on the years gone by, the bureaucrat realizes that “while others dreamt dreams and lived lives of imagination and adventure, my role was only to take care of the mess left by them”. And the translator could be speaking for all of the others as she muses while taking a bus journey: “We are all in this together, this world of loss and defeat. All of us, every one of us, had had a moment when a window opened, when we caught a glimpse of the open, sunlit world beyond, but all of us…have had that window close and remain closed”.

There are no finessed, artificial climaxes to these narratives; rather, Desai’s technique is to place her characters in situations that take them out of their workaday milieu and then follow them and their actions with her pen, in a manner of speaking. The simplicity with which the tales unfold belies the artisanship that has gone into their crafting. The interweaving of the present and the past apart, there are other exercises in craft, such as the shifts between first and third person as well as between past and present tense in Translator Translated. (Here, and elsewhere, Desai also gives rein to the understated humour that is her other trademark. Of the atmosphere at a publishing conference, for example, she writes: “Terms proliferate that indicate the large number of academics in the audience: Subaltern. Discourse. Reify. Validate….Wasn’t ‘subaltern’ a military term?”)

The title story, however, the one that’s the most fleshed-out, suffers on account of being curiously bifurcated by the amount of time Desai spends on the activities of the intruders who encroach upon the central character’s Eden. The actions of this three-member film crew from Delhi who travel to Mussoorie in order to shoot a documentary on environmental degradation draw attention away from the titular character’s predicament and weaken the spine of the story -- even though it is because of this disturbance that he discovers a new, albeit more private way in which to express his inventive urges.

The Artist of Disappearance doesn’t exactly extend or deepen Desai’s concerns as a writer: the India she writes about, for example, is the same India she’s always written about. Yet, it is a filigreed and nuanced work, once again demonstrating her moving powers of description, of both inner and outer states. The past may be a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote, but in Desai’s hands, it’s capable of many domestic disturbances.

It's The End Of The Book As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

A lightly edited version of this appeared in today's The Hindustan Times.

THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE BOOK Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere

THE LATE AMERICAN NOVEL: Writers on the Future of Books 

If you read books on a Kindle, British novelist Penelope Lively recently said, you’re nothing but “a bloodless nerd”. Many of those devoted to the printed word share the same sentiment. For them, the impending demise of the book as we know it is cause for alarm, if not lamentation. What’s often ignored is the distinction between form and content: while we’re attached to the shape, size, feel and aroma of books, what we read are words. The medium, of course, alters the message as well as our experience of receiving it, and this, then, should really be at the heart of any such discussion.

Among the many elegies to Gutenberg, we now have two more volumes: the first, a curated conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere; and the second, a medley of contemporary American writers offering views on their future. The verbose and opinionated Eco and Carriere, however, prove to be somewhat backward looking. Much of the content of This is Not the End of the Book turns out to be ruminations on the books they own, the joys of collecting, the pains of the accelerating speed of change and digressive anecdotes on reading and bibliomania drawn from the world of European letters.

Their pontifications – and ‘pontifications’ is the exact word – can be tedious, sometimes even nonsensical, such as when Eco declaims that “the computer cannot be read in the bath or even lying on your side in bed”. There’s much anachronistic tut-tutting over the changing pace of data storage and accessibility, with a holier-than-thou tone throughout:  “The book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered”. Again, the same confusion between form and content.

In the preface, moderator Jean-Philippe de Tonnac at least asks the right questions:  “What is a book? And what will change if we read onscreen rather than by turning the pages of a physical object?” He goes on to muse: is it a sense of the sacred? An intimacy between reader and author? The feeling of existing in a self-contained world? Such subjects, indeed, are what the Italian semiologist and French screenwriter ought to have spent more time discussing. At one point, Eco even derides the photocopier, and later, Carriere makes awkward philosophical generalisations such as: “Every Hindu has his personal deities. And yet Hindus share a community of belief.” If this is how “two great men discuss our digital future”, as the volume’s subtitle has it, one feels sorry for the digital future.

In comparison, The Late American Novel is a breath of fresh air. This comprises several short pieces by contemporary American authors on their current predicament: some insightful, some uneasily tongue-in-cheek and some simply unsure. Editors Jeff Martin and T. Max Magee point out in their introduction that “the written word’s last big format change turned out to be a pretty big deal, fomenting revolutions and laying the groundwork for modern civil society, the scientific revolution, and modernity itself”. Now, therefore, “we wanted to hear from some of today’s most promising literary voices, to find out if they are optimistic, apathetic, or just scared shitless.” As Rivka Galchen ironically points out in her piece, if people just aren’t reading anymore, there’s a pretty big noise being made about the book’s impending demise.

 

There’s much ground covered here, from nostalgic memoirs dealing with the pleasures of the book’s physical form to the changing modes of consumption, creation and distribution of narratives. In one of the most insightful pieces, Benjamin Kunkel – founder-editor of the literary magazine n+1– updates Regis Debray’s theory of society moving through the stages of the “logosphere, graphosphere and videosphere” -- that is, the spoken and heard, the written and read and the audio-visual. Kunkel ponders on the coming “digitosphere” and whether the always-on stream of bits and bytes will make literature a subculture, “or, even better, a counter-culture”. (Publishers, of course, share this concern: a recent session at the World E-Reading Congress in London sought to answer the question: Can e-reading win the war against Angry Birds?)

In another piece, though Joe Meno confesses to “moments of wonder” while reading printed books, he asserts, rightly, that  “…throughout the history of narrative arts, storytelling has always adapted to changing forms and technologies, and has managed to not only survive but begin anew each time, introducing a whole other generation to the possibilities of reading.”  Kyle Beachy makes much the same point: “Clearly, the novel is built around the mechanics of the book. But to conflate the two is a mistake both easy and terrible”.

Anders Morton, too, offers a nuanced, hopeful view. We all desire narratives and create stories, he says  (“as opposed to the actual lived experience of unsatisfying fragments, random encounters, and passing glances” ) even it’s just on Twitter. And “if this means we need to redefine the definition of ‘writer’, that’s okay with me”. In a similar vein, there’s a probing, open-minded exchange of e-mails between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates on the appeal of fiction in the age of Facebook.

Nevertheless, one can empathise with Nancy Jo Sales when she points out: “Would my life in books have been the same if they had been coming to me via Kindle or iPad? I don’t think so. There’s something about the physicality of a book, the way it looks and feels and even smells…that makes it a living, breathing companion.” The printed book is a living thing, echoes Joshua Gaylord: “It has a spine”.  For those who fetishize the book as object, Victor LaValle has the right words: “The greatest gift the electronic age could bestow upon the novel is to keep it sacred, not sacrosanct.”

It’s Sonya Chung, though, who strives to look at the present in just the right manner. The pendulum will swing back one day, she writes, but meanwhile, “…whether you are optimistic or pessimistic, hopeful or dispirited, it is clear that our needs, desires, fears, and values are at stake; and what could be more exciting for literature?”  A new age of Modernism could be around the corner, in other words. As that quartet from Athens, Georgia, might well have sung: It’s the end of the book as we know it, and I feel fine.

Amazon Grace

This appeared in yesterday's The Indian Express.

STATE OF WONDER Ann Patchett

“If I want a plot,” American litterateur Elizabeth Hardwick once sneered, “I’ll watch Dallas”. Her disdain is shared by many novelists, especially of the so-called literary variety, who feel that novels have a higher purpose than that of the mere narration of events. There’s merit in such an argument; yet, all one needs to turn it on its head is to come across a writer who uses plot to reveal character and not subsume it; to illustrate theme, not be diverted from it. Take the case of Ann Patchett, who demonstrated this most notably in her Orange Prize-winning Bel Canto – and now does it again with State of Wonder.

This plunges us from the start into the predicament of the 42-year-old pharmacologist Marina Singh, half-Indian and half-American researcher with a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota. Her colleague has been sent to report on the progress of the company’s fertility treatment research in a remote location off Brazil’s Rio Negro, an Amazonian tributary. Now comes the shocking news that he’s died of a mysterious fever, something mentioned almost off-handedly in a letter from Dr Annick Swenson, who’s been heading the study and from whom there’s been no proper information or progress report for ages. It now falls to Marina to travel to Brazil and find Dr Swenson, report on her progress as well as try and discover the circumstances surrounding her colleague’s death.

Unsure of exactly how to proceed and beset by sweat-drenched nightmares of being parted from her father in Calcutta  – a side-effect of an anti-malarial drug – Marina flies to Manaus, a city on the Rio Negro, from where she must travel upriver to confront Dr Swenson and the little-known Lakashi tribe. This, of course, has all the hallmarks of a distaff Heart of Darkness, with Dr Swenson making for a compelling Kurtz. (Another resonance is that of the fable of Eurydice and Orpheus, specifically mentioned during an episode when some of the characters attend an operatic performance based on this myth.) The intelligent but pliant Marina must fight demons within and without to achieve her objectives, and while the format may be Conrad’s, the updated concerns here are to do with the ways of pharmaceutical companies, the ways of ‘modern’ and ‘unspoiled’ worlds, and the ways in which we uncover what matters to us.

Compelling characters apart, one of the many charms of this novel is the way Patchett creates a sense of place for them to inhabit. The icy-cold, open spaces of Minnesota; the tropical dilapidation of Manaus; and the lush, unpredictable rainforest: such are the contrasting backdrops of State of Wonder that come alive through telling detail.

It must be admitted that it’s not smooth sailing all the way. There are stretches in the middle where the narrative tends to turn sluggish, like the Rio Negro itself, and some incidents towards the end do strain credulity. Overall, though, Patchett’s pacing serves her well as she stretches the elastic tension between action and revelation without letting it snap.

State of Wonder, then, is a highly readable as well as unusual work. If this is what paying close attention of the mechanics of plot can produce, by all means let us have more of it.

Readable, Not Towering

This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian.

LAST MAN IN TOWER Aravind Adiga

Avarice runs through the pages of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower the way local trains criss-cross the city of Mumbai. In a plot that’s drawn from local headlines, the novel deals with the rapaciousness of realtors and the amorality of the self-interested middle class. The eponymous last man is one Yogesh Murthy, known to all as Masterji, an upright former teacher now in his 60s whose moralistic stance is the motor that drives the action to a gruesome finish.

Last Man in Tower’s events are largely set in one Vishram Society, comprising the dilapidated Tower A, built in the 1950s, and the smarter, relatively newer Tower B. This corner of an eastern suburb of Mumbai, surrounded by slums and next to the domestic airport, is, we’re ironically informed from the start, very “pucca”, being “middle class to the core”. Comprising retirees, cyber-cafe owners, real estate brokers and more, “the men have modest paunches, wear checked polyester shirts over white baniyans, and keep their hair oiled and short. The older women wear saris, salwaar kameez or skirts, and the younger ones wear jeans. All of them pay taxes, support charities, and vote in local and general elections”.

Adiga spends time and effort in delineating the lives and circumstances of the residents of this building; unfortunately, however, there’s little that’s unusual in this portrayal. The husbands and wives are uni-dimensional in their desire to keep up with the Jains, protect and care for their offspring and desire to forge better lives. All of these seem to be within their grasp when self-made real-estate mogul Dharmen Shah makes them a takeover offer that’s several times more than the market rate, in order for him to demolish Vishram Society and erect a multi-storeyed monstrosity in its stead.

Though the rest are won over by Mammon, it’s Masterji, indulging in memories of his deceased wife and daughter, who alone puts his foot down and refuses to vacate. Unmoved by the entreaties of his neighbours, pleas of his son and hostilities of Shah’s henchmen, Masterji believes he can find refuge in the police, the law and the media. Events, however, spin out of control, leading to a denouement hinted at early on when Adiga specifically mentions an Agatha Christie title on Masterji’s bookshelf, the one dealing with dark deeds on the Orient Express.

While the other characters are somewhat predictable in their actions and stilted dialogue, it’s interesting that Masterji isn’t painted in Mahatma-like shades. His intransigence over the years and habit of “controlling appetites and sorrows” is shown to estrange his former students as well as his son, and one can understand why his upright, rigid stance creates vituperation among others. His novelistic opposite, the gutka-chewing Dharmen Shah, is at least unabashed about his desires and motives, ignoring diseased lungs in his efforts to make his company, and his buildings, soar higher.

Throughout, Adiga deftly contrasts the city’s intersecting ways of life. Slum-dwellers, construction workers and the homeless appear as a counterpoint to the more privileged, oblivious few. At times, though, the broad-brush satire – the dominant mode of Adiga’s earlier The White Tiger – is too heavy-handed. For example, while Shah is at a construction site, we’re told that “a worker’s family was spending the nights on the unfinished fourth floor, which one day a technology executive or businessman would occupy…[their] washing…hung in the alcoves where Versace would soon hang; their little bars of soap and detergent did the work that expensive perfumes would do. And they probably did it better”. Later on, in another pointed comment, random acts of violence are planned on no less an occasion than Gandhi Jayanti. To further belabour the point, every now and again stray dogs chase puppies, cats slash at butterflies, moths get caught in ceiling fans and crows’ nests are demolished

Not for Adiga, then, the more nuanced approach revealed in, for instance, Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park or Nalini Jones’ What You Call Winter, two other works of fiction centered on Mumbai suburbs. This take-no-prisoners style serves the author well on the occasions that he employs Dickensian exaggeration bordering on the farcical – notably, when describing the antics of the legal firm that Masterji seeks out.

The prose, though proficient for most of the book, occasionally descends into spiky, strange patches. At one point, describing a dizzy-headed Masterji, we’re told that “explosions of glucose – comets and supernovae – lit up his private darkness; a bacchanalia had begun in his hyper-metabolizing cells”. Quite an affliction. For all that, Adiga does keep the action moving, cutting between disparate characters’ actions and motives with a degree of skill. There’s a compelling quality to the second half, when events move with a quality of grim predetermination. Vivid scenes build to a climax, giving way to a coda in which hypocrisy and conscience are well blended.

One needs voices that run counter to the grand business-page narrative of India’s burgeoning, shining middle class, and Adiga’s book is a necessary one in this context. It’s not exactly towering, but Last Man in Tower does possess the virtues of being readable as well as discomfiting in all the right places. 


My reviews of some other books set in Mumbai: Nalini Jones' What You Call Winter; Anjali Joseph's Saraswati Park; Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing; Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva; Murzban Shroff's Breathless in Bombay; and a round-up of 'Mumbai fiction' from 2008. 

The Wild West Bank

THE ASCENT OF ELI ISRAEL AND OTHER STORIES Jonathan Papernick

Beyond the headlines of flotillas, occupied territories and militant attacks are the everyday lives of those in Israel, people living in the cross-hairs of history. Jonathan Papernick’s short story collection, The Ascent of Eli Israel, delves into some of these lives with candour and tough-mindedness, an approach that belies sensitivity towards their predicament.

Each of the seven stories in this volume -- published in 2001 and re-issued early this year – is a stained-glass window offering a view of the shifting locus between identity, insecurity and a search for grace in troubled times. It opens with the dreamlike Makchyk, set at time of Israel's creation, in which a boy coming of age ventures into no-man’s land and then into Jerusalem’s Old City in search of his father, meeting holy fools, strangers and Arab youth on his expedition. In many ways, this prefigures the stories that follow.

In the Malamud-like An Unwelcome Guest, a newlywed awakes in the middle of the night to find an Arab stranger in his house, laying claim to the property. The Art of Correcting combines theology with comedy; The King of the King of Falafel relies more on broad humour for its effects; and the “six million stars” that twinkle at the close of For as Long as the Lamp is Burning up-end the unsentimental tone of the rest of the volume.

The two stories which have the most impact are, first, the one of the title, in which a formerly successful TV show producer walks a solitary and sometimes unhinged path towards personal redemption among the hills of the West Bank; and Lucky Eighteen, in which two friends, one a provocative photographer, goad those around them at a time when provocations aren’t easily understood or tolerated. (Come to think of it, Papernick himself shares something of the spirit of this photographer.)

Throughout, easy stereotypes are eschewed and craft deftly employed to arrive at unexpected endings. With its astringent humour, barbed tone, and compelling sense of place, The Ascent of Eli Israel is a significant debut. As one of Papernick’s characters tells another, “Welcome to the wild, wild West Bank”.