You can buy them. You can borrow them. You can download them. But are all those books out there really worth your while?
Herewith some brief assessments.
“Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it. Writing is now timid because writers are now terrified.” That, according to Hanif Kureishi, is one of the outcomes of the two-decade old fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
Such consequences and more are what Kenan Malik attempts to get to the root of in his From Fatwa to Jihad, a compelling look at the ways in which the world -- specifically, the United Kingdom -- has changed in the years since the book was burned in Bradford and Rushdie, in Martin Amis’ memorable words, “disappeared into the front page”. (For those who need reminding, India was the first country to ban The Satanic Verses.)
It’s a vast subject and Malik attempts to do it justice by compressed explorations of the nature of contemporary Islam, its relationship to the West, the origin and causes of multiculturalism and the nature of tolerance in liberal societies. These are interspersed with occasional interviews with some of the dramatis personae – not including Rushdie himself – as well as relevant biographical anecdotes.
One of the themes that emerge again and again in these pages is how politics for short-term gain inevitably leads to less-than-desirable results. Malik quotes Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, one of the founders of the Muslim Institute, as saying that “the conflict over Rushdie was never about religion. It was about politics, specifically between Saudi Arabia and Iran over winning hearts and minds of Muslims”. In a wider context, he marshals the arguments of sociologists and others who point out that contemporary Islamic radicalism isn’t an atavistic return to tradition, but rather, a response to the stresses of the present and the diminishment of identity.
It was politics again, this time at a local level, which was responsible for the policy of multiculturalism in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Malik traces this further back than 1988, touching upon opposition to the National Front thugs, the creation of bodies such as the Indian Progressive Youth Association and the 1981 Brixton riots. He outlines how municipal policies of creating a political framework to reach out to minority communities influenced the Bhikhu Parekh report on the future of multi-ethnic Britain, paving the way for multiculturalism at a national level. This “helped create new divisions and more intractable conflicts which made for a less openly racist but a more insidiously tribal Britain”. It’s ironic that the old left-wing dream of concerted action to bring about universal acceptance should come to this.
Early on in the book, Malik quotes Peter Mayer, then Penguin CEO, on his realisation that the publisher’s response to the Satanic Verses affair “would affect the future of free enquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we know it, but also, by extension, no civil society as we knew it”. Such a stance seems to be forgotten nowadays, what with the Danish cartoons controversy as well as Random House’s recent decision not to publish Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina. Malik refers to this state of affairs as an “auction of victimhood”, with everyone free to air grievances and be offended, all ignoring the advice of Justice Hugo Black from the US Supreme Court in 1961: “Freedom of speech must be accorded to ideas we hate or sooner or later it will be denied to ideas we cherish”.
Words to keep in mind as we enter even more polarised times, considering this month’s European parliament election results in which far-right and anti-immigrant parties across countries made significant gains. If you’re expecting another Enlightenment anytime soon, don’t hold your breath.
Considering that there’s a mysterious death on the very first page of Monica Ali’s third novel, it's surprising how turgid the bulk of In the Kitchen turns out to be. This, on the face of it, is the story of Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef at the Imperial Hotel in London, a Victorian establishment that, despite several renovations, is clearly past its prime.
Gabriel Lightfoot – neither angelic nor swift on his feet – is in his early forties, with ambitions of opening a restaurant of his own, and in talks with sleazy promoters to make this come about. However, when the body of Yuri, night porter and Ukrainian immigrant, is found in the basement, the chef’s ordered life begins to come apart at the seams. He develops a strange and intense obsession for Lena, another porter from East Europe, inviting her to stay with him, and this liaison puts a strain first on his relationship with his girlfriend Charlie, a spunky nightclub singer, and then on his mental health itself.
Much of the action of the book, but by no means all of it, takes place in the hotel’s kitchen and its environs, and the author takes pains to recreate the world of an executive chef, with his gustatory and administrative responsibilities. We learn about the selection of cheeses, the preparation of desserts, the duties, grades and volatile moods of kitchen personnel, the choices leading to the determination of a menu and – pay attention now, this could be important -- the temperature below which custard gets lumpy.
The following paragraph, for instance, is entirely representative of this sort of thing: “Nikolai, the Russian commis, chopped salad onions with heart-breaking deftness and speed. Suleiman hovered by the Steam’N’Hold waiting for his souffle with evident anxiety, as though it were his firstborn son. Victor moved between the Bratt Pan, wilting off spinach, and the combi-oven, loading up potato rostis and cubes of butternut squash. A commis dropped a bowl of peelings and everyone clapped. Benny ran over to help him and ran back to his station, wiping his hands. A spit of fat from a wok hissed in the blue burner flame. In Ivan's empire the air pulsed with heat so that the grill chef appeared hazy, as though he were a mirage. He slapped a couple of steaks on the charcoal grill and took a hammer to a third, the sweat darkening the back of his white coat.”
Now, if this seems all too familiar, it’s because such territory behind the scenes in a large kitchen servicing a busy restaurant’s needs has already been staked out by Bill Buford in Heat or Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, among others.
That apart, Ali’s prose is quiet, undemonstrative, and in no hurry to score points. (With the occasional lapse such as when Charlie is described as being “as lovely as a summer’s day”.) She carefully delineates Gabriel’s shifting states of mind, the geography of London that he passes through, the interiors of restaurants and cafes he inhabits, and his current and childhood homes, among other locales.
Temperamental goings-on in the kitchen aren’t, however, the only thing that In the Kitchen is about. Gabriel also tries to mend fences with his father, a former textile mill worker who’s been stricken with cancer; repair a fractious relationship with his sister Jenny; and come to terms with memories of his mother, revealed to be suffering from bipolar disorder. His past, his present, his recurring nightmares and his clunky discussions on free will versus determinism with Nikolai, kitchen hand and Russian émigré, all contribute to his breakdown: “What if his life were a series of blunders based on misreadings, on misconceptions, on a series of childish mistakes? If he made choices without understanding, what kind of choosing was that?”
The book, then, posits an individual’s dire predicament with shifting ideas of England old and new, and as though to underline this ambition, there are also tepid debates on multiculturalism, on the state of the economy and on an evolving national identity. Unfortunately and inevitably, the phrase that comes to mind at this point is: “bite off more than one can chew”.
Though some scenes – such as Gabriel’s attempted rapprochement with Charlie -- are undeniably powerful, for large sections in the middle the dough is stretched very thin. The central character’s circumstances don’t change all that much, and the death of Yuri at the beginning comes across as an all-too-convenient ploy to capture the reader’s interest. Ali’s depiction of the condition of immigrants from Eastern Europe and what this is doing to England doesn’t shed much new light on the subject, and there’s an uneasy coupling of this with Gabriel’s own private crisis.
The upshot is that one finds oneself increasingly distanced from the chef’s predicament and, therefore, from this purported condition-of-England novel itself. The novelist may have selected with ingredients with care, but the outcome is decidedly stodgy.
In an essay from his recent collection, Clearing a Space, Amit Chaudhuri has written of the importance of exploring “the elisions that direct the binaries (East, West; high; low, native; foreign, fantasy; reality, elite; democratic)”. In his new novel, The Immortals, he continues to uncover such elisions by delving deep into the lives of disparate individuals living in the Bombay of the Seventies and Eighties.
The focus is primarily on Mallika, incipient professional singer, married to Apurva Sengupta, chief executive of a large corporation, and their sensitive son Nirmalya. The other pole of the narrative concerns Shyamji, musician and tutor, who instructs Mallika and then Nirmalya in the intricacies of Indian classical music. Others who wing their way in and out of the text include the Neogis, old friends of the Senguptas, a domestic retinue of cooks and cleaners, and others from Shyamji’s extended family, who also dabble in music.
Chaudhuri’s fiction has always had more to do with delicacy, nuance and the minutiae of the everyday, rather than grand national narratives, character development or plotted arcs. It’s no surprise then that he follows the same template here, as he traces Nirmalya’s coming of age, Mallika’s blanched dreams and Shyamji’s disillusionment over the years.
There’s an elegiac, long-summer-afternoon tone to much of the book, with Chaudhuri taking his time to explore moods, their gradations and his characters’ self-questioning ways. Of a character’s using the word “beautiful” to describe a Cuffe Parade flat, for example, he writes, “By 'beautiful' she didn't mean what she meant when wandering about an art gallery, or assessing one of her husband's graphic designs; as an adult sometimes pretends to use a word in a simple, clear, limited way for the benefit of a child, she used the word as the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie thoughtlessly used it, as an uncomplicated acknowledgement of well-being.”
The city of Bombay is the living, breathing backdrop to the characters’ peregrinations, and Chaudhuri carefully maps the spaces they inhabit: three-bedroom apartments in Malabar Hill; the taking of tea at the Sea Lounge and dinners at Tanjore; classical concerts at NCPA; buildings in far-flung Borivili; new developments in Versova; chawls in King’s Circle; and the genteel charms of Bandra’s Pali Hill.
There are times when his quiet prose carries a whiff of wry irony; at other times, one encounters an unhurried poet’s eye, as with this description of a Bandra lane following a spell of rain: “After the shower the gulmohur blossoms would have fallen from branches on certain parts of the road with a particular exactness and economy, precise carpets of bright red only in those sections of the lane where the gulmohur trees stood, then, an hour later, becoming pink, then, after another hour, a soiled pink fading into the tarmac's perennial, unsentimental grey.”
The creation and inevitable commercialisation of music also plays a large role in the novel, charting the ups and downs of Shyamji’s family when it comes to chasing fame and riches, and Mallika Sengupta’s fantasies of becoming a performing artist – as well as guest appearances by Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsle, among others. In particular, the philosophy-loving, jeans-and-kurta clad Nirmalya mulls continually over the nuances and origin of Indian ragas and the compromises that those he looks up to make to achieve popularity. Such discussions on music and its evocation, in fact, are among the book’s great strengths.
Because Chaudhuri’s is a miniaturist’s art, and because this is a more commodious book than his others, there is occasionally a feeling of formlessness and even indolence about the enterprise. Nirmalya’s solipsism and his family’s frequent shifts of residence are dwelt on for self-indulgent lengths of time. (Chaudhuri, in his earlier essays and poems, has written frequently about his own experiences of growing up in Bombay, and this is why there’s always the lurking suspicion that he’s unable to get away from dredging and re-dredging memory’s gold.)
On occasion there are tributary-like digressions into the lives of others, along with their back-stories, that don’t quite serve to thicken the mix, and in addition, the few shifts of location to London – following first, Shayamji and then Nirmalya – appear to be unwarranted. Admittedly, Chaudhuri’s concerns are broader than simply painting a portrait of Nirmalya as a young artist, but in casting his net so far and wide, he disperses attention.
At one point, the teenage Nirmalya, pondering over the pointlessness of his young existence so far, muses that “nothing in the end can cocoon you from the effort it takes to master something, from the fact that the returns are wrung reluctantly from the energy invested - but neither can you protect yourself from the banal and the everyday that comprise your life and make it safe and familiar for you”. That, indeed, could have been the epigraph to this sensitively delineated but languorous novel.
There have been novels about the atomic bombs dropped over Japan (BlackRain). There have been novels on the aftermath of India’s Partition (Train to Pakistan). There have been novels based in war-torn Afghanistan (The Wasted Vigil). And there have been novels regarding the aftermath of 9/11 (too many to recount).
Now, Kamila Shamsie bravely tries to weave all of these and more into her new work, Burnt Shadows -- clearly, an ambitious departure from her earlier novels. Though her even-toned prose and efforts to probe the changing psyche of characters over the decades are worthy of note, what lets the novel down is its linear, chronological structure that calls for many technical compromises.
The action of the novel begins in Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, when the 21-year-old Hiroko’s life is ravaged by the dropping of the atomic bomb. It moves to Delhi in early 1947, when Hiroko arrives at the house of her deceased fiancé’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, James Burton.She strikes up a relationship with James’ legal assistant, Sajjad Ashraf, and the scene shifts briefly to Istanbul before going on to Karachi in 1982, where we’re introduced to Raza, a young man confused about his future, who travels to a mujahideen training camp with an Afghan associate. From here, the novel segues between the post-9/11 terrains of New York and Afghanistan.
Throughout, these tragic global events are the backdrop to the shifting relationships between various members of two families over the years: “Whatever might be happening in the wider world, at least the Weiss-Burtons and the Tanaka-Ashrafs had finally found spaces to cohabit in, complicated shared history giving nothing but depth to the reservoir of their friendships.”
With such a grand design, there’s always the danger that the need to keep the narrative moving, as well as provide connecting chronological tissue, will precede character development. That this is unavoidable to some extent (Hiroko’s character is the most fully realized) is ruefully acknowledged by the author herself when she has one of the characters tell another: “Both times you've entered my home it's been nuclear-related. Once was acceptable; twice just seems like lazy plotting”. (Perhaps this could have been avoided had the links been thematic rather than literal, as with the work of David Mitchell.)
In other respects, though, Shamsie’s care with the narrative is evident. There are striking impressionistic sketches of the cities that her characters travel through, and passages such as Raza's panic when faced with an exam paper, among others, are well-handled.
Setting aside the question of how the book’s structure impedes its ambition, BurntShadows is an intrepid look at how the scars of history -- like the bird-shaped radiation blemishes on Hiroko’s back -- are difficult to erase in an age when individual destinies become subservient to nationalistic ambitions.
In Jorge Luis Borges’s story, ‘Funes the Memorius’, a 19-year old finds himself in possession of a perfect memory, enabling him to remember every aspect of his life. He is, however, “almost incapable of general, platonic ideas”, recalling only details. Borges’s point is that some level of abstraction is a vital component of thought, of what makes us human. In Rana Dasgupta’s Solo, we find Funes’ antithesis: a character who, with what he recalls, fashions an alternative universe more vivid than reality.
This is Ulrich, a man nearing the end of “his life’s tenth decade”, now sightless (another echo of Borges) and ruminating over his past. From a squalid flat in Sofia, Bulgaria – a city in which he’s spent most of his life – he recollects his early fascination with the violin, his years in Berlin studying chemistry, a short-lived marriage to his charismatic friend Boris’s sister, working as a book-keeper, a fractious relationship with his mother and his supervision of a barium chloride plant.
These personal events are inevitably influenced by Bulgarian history: its Asiatic past, the tussle of fascist and communist parties between world wars, Soviet fiefdom and after. This life of another alienated man without qualities takes up half of the book and just as you begin to wonder what the point is, you reach the second half, comprising Ulrich’s daydreams “of strong young people filled with the courage he never had” -- inspired by a tale of parrots being the sole repository of the language of a vanished world.
At this point, Dasgupta turns a kaleidoscope to re-arrange the elements of Ulrich’s life into new patterns, depicting the other side of the chemical equation. Ulrich’s creations bestride New York City, a place he has never visited. Boris, an abandoned Bulgarian violinist, captivates the world with his art; Khatuna, a strong-willed woman from Tblisi rises via a series of relationships with powerful men; and Iraki, her brother, finds his poetic soul at odds with the environment into which he is thrust.
No object or locale is too humdrum to be transformed by Ulrich’s Bulgarian-stamped glasses, from a makeshift urinal to a WoolworthBuilding postcard to pig-farming to violin shops to the marbles that clink in the pocket of a village fool. As Ulrich says about music and chemistry, “an infinite range of expression can be generated from a finite number of elements”.
In scope and ambition, then, Solo is breathtakingly audacious. That tremendous care has been taken over craft is evident even from a cursory glance at the chapter headings of the sections, or “movements” as they are called. The first comprises chemical elements – “Magnesium”, “Chlorine”, “Carbon” – which morph, in the second, into creatures of the deep: “Narwhal”, “Beluga”, “Dugong”.
Some transformations are pleasingly organic, such as in the two characters of Boris. Others are more contrived, such as TV and newspaper reports about a sportsman-turned-racketeer who becomes, in the daydream, Khatuna’s powerful protector. And some are merely playful, as in the character of music impresario Plastic Munari, an amalgam of Ulrich’s fascination with plastic and knowledge of uranium.
There’s a cool, ironic gloss to Dasgupta’s prose, at odds with the subject matter: “Life happens in a certain place for a certain time. But there is a great surplus left over, and where will we stow it but in our dreams?” Solo can, of course, also be read as a parable for the nature of creation itself: with what materials do we fashion art, and how does it make its way in the world?
At a time when so many novels in English, especially those from India, cleave to late-stage Romanticism, it’s satisfying to come across one in the camp of high Modernism. However, though Dasgupta’s disaffected surrealism enables one to stand back and admire the artisanship of his mirrored ball of angled reflections, the same quality makes it difficult to lose oneself in his self-conscious art.
In a recent analysis for The New York Times, Michael Gordon, the paper’s chief military correspondent, noted that “Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain.”
With his third novel, The Wasted Vigil, Nadeem Aslam takes it upon himself to demonstrate the validity of that statement in recent history through a set of characters from different backgrounds, all indelibly changed by the country that has been called, not without justification, the Graveyard of Empires.
There’s the 70-year-old Marcus Caldwell, doctor and perfume creator, an Englishman who’s spent most of his life in Afghanistan, suffering the loss of a wife, a daughter and a hand, yet remaining as stoic as his Roman namesake. There’s Lara, who arrives in the country to search for her missing brother, once a part of the Soviet Army at the time of their ill-fated excursion. There’s David, an American gems dealer and CIA operative, who’s mourning the loss of Zameen, Marcus’ daughter. And, among others, there’s Casa – short for Casabianca – the brainwashed and bitter Afghan jihadi, whose actions provide the spark that sets off a further conflagration in everyone’s lives.
All of these people, linked together in ways known and unknown, assemble for different reasons at Marcus’ large house in a relatively isolated part of the country near Jalalabad and in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. This dwelling, with its underground perfume factory, nearby lake and freight of resonant memories, becomes the theatre against which their tragedies are played out, and the narrative moves back and forth in time to create an effect of delayed, unhurried denouements that link the effects of the British conquest, the Soviet invasion, the depredations of the Taliban and the attacks by the US-led forces. As Aslam puts it at one point, “More and more these days, Lara’s interest is caught by personalities and events on the edges of wars, by lives that have yet to arrive at one of history’s conflicts, or those that have moved away from the conflagration – the details of lives being lived with a major battle occurring just over the horizon, or on the mountain above them.”
Less compelling, however, is the introduction of two other characters puzzlingly and relatively late in the book: Dunia, a spirited young schoolteacher on the run from fundamentalists for her allegedly freethinking ways, and James Palantine, part of an American special forces team in Afghanistan and the son of David’s sometime associate. These, along with a corrupt cleric and the actions of skirmishing regional warlords, seem to primarily serve the purpose of moving the action along and introducing more facile points of view at play in the beleaguered land. And Aslam belabours the point, “It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and, following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war – how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where the wheat was grown.”
There are many vivid images to be found in the pages of The Wasted Vigil, among them the spectacle of a cache of water bottles submerged in a lake: water concealed within water; the unearthing of paintings on walls smeared with mud to prevent them from being destroyed; and, most strikingly, a huge Gandharan statue of the Buddha half-submerged in a basement. As a counterpoint, there are many brutal episodes, with mutilations, torture, rape and stoning to death being an inextricable part of the narrative. All of which go a long way in underlining Aslam’s aim of portraying the country’s current state: “Where Richard the Lionheart displayed brute strength by breaking an iron bar with his sword, Saladin’s delicately sharp scimitar countered it by slicing a silk handkerchief in two. What had been lost is the desire to believe in and take pride in Saladin’s gentleness.”
Throughout, Aslam essays a lofty, semi-mythic tone in his statements about the country, contrasting a glorious past with a parlous present. For example, “…this land that Alexander the Great had passed through on his unicorn, an area of fabled orchards and thick mulberry forests, of pomegranates that appear in the border decorations of Persian manuscripts written one thousand years ago.” Then again, “This country has always been a hub of things moving from one point of the compass to another, religion and myth, works of art, caravans of bundled Chinese silk flowing past camels loaded with glass from ancient Rome or pearls from the Gulf.” And there’s yet more: “The lapis lazuli of their land was always desired by the world, brushed by Cleopatra on to her eyelids, employed by Michelangelo to paint the blues on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel…”
The prose frequently tips over from the simply poetic to the unnecessarily lush. Some of the metaphors are arresting, being based on a specific reality: an explosion causes “the blades of a ceiling fan to curl up like a tulip”. At other moments, however, Aslam can be effete: “The beauty of the rose is considered a medicine. Healing through sight, through the act of looking with all veils swept aside”. Such lushness is accentuated by the often mannered dialogue: “The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breathe”. Not exactly guaranteed to leave the reader breathless.
The character of Casa, moreover, is more of a cipher than anything else, with his brainwashed and callous attitude predominating: “At the very core of him was the belief that human beings had little to offer but cruelty and danger”. It must be said that Aslam does show us moments when the putative terrorist reflects on his mindset with a degree of hesitation, but these are too few and unconvincing. (Those who have made similar attempts earlier have come up with equally middling results, such as John Updike with Terrorist and Martin Amis, with the short story, ‘The Last Days of Mohammed Atta’.)
Aslam’s heart is on his sleeve throughout these pages and, by means of some fervent late-stage Romanticism, he shows us a clear demarcation between the love stories of poetic, sensitive wanderers on the one hand, and the aims of brutal men who would be kings on the other. Those that succumb are “wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,” as Kipling put it more than a century ago.
Abraham Verghese is, of course, known for the sensitive, restrained My Own Country, about his experiences as a doctor fighting AIDS in the American south during the Eighties, as well as The Tennis Partner, a moving memoir of a close, complex friendship. His first novel, Cutting for Stone, is, however, sprawling, messy and a bit of a “loose baggy monster” as Henry James would have it. (People who like this sort of thing will call it “epic in scope”.)
This is the story of twins Marion and Shiva, conjoined at the head at the time of birth in an Addis Ababa hospital in 1954 to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, from south India, and Thomas Stone, a British doctor. Circumstances lead to the twins being brought up by two other medical practitioners, Hema and Abhi Ghosh, themselves immigrants from Chennai. The tale is narrated by Marion, now that he is “forty six and four” years old: “I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am”. His immediate urge, though, is to heal the wound between himself and his twin brother.
The bulk of the book is a love letter to an Ethiopian upbringing. There’s a torrent of information almost from the start, minutiae of everyday life as experienced by Marion and his circle. The density of detail overwhelms, and sometimes descends into list-making. An Arab souk, for example, contains “matchboxes, bottled sodas, Bic pens, pencil sharpeners, Vick’s, Nivea Crème, notebooks, erasers, ink, candles, batteries, Coca Cola, Fanta, Pepsi, sugar, tea, rice, bread, cooking oil and much more”.
Some heartbreaks and misunderstandings later, Marion flees to the United States to avoid being picked up as an Eritrean sympathiser, becoming a surgical intern at a Bronx hospital and rising through the ranks. This section is in a different key, often reading as a series of notes between surgeons swapping tales. Marion’s past catches up with him and he again encounters the central figures in his life, leading to a long drawn-out denouement during which affairs of the heart are finally resolved.
From these pages, you’d know that the author is immersed in medicine, even if you were unaware of his day job. Surgical procedures and medical conditions are lingered on, sometimes discomfortingly so, with sentences such as: “…the cabalistic harmony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each other under the dome of the diaphragm”. You may exhale now.
There are inexplicable touches of magic realism – Marion can recall being joined to Shiva in the womb, and both later develop extraordinary olfactory powers – but these are tentative, not organically connected to the narrative. (Perhaps it’s just a Rushdie hangover, as is the naming of one of the twins “Shiva”.)
Some scenes have a vivid immediacy, such as Marion’s childhood game of blind man’s buff with Genet, daughter of a domestic help who will later play a tragic role in his life; or Hema finding herself on a plane about to go down. In addition, the character of Dr Ghosh is engaging and well-etched. Overall, though, the novel is crammed full of people, back-stories, explanations, historical tidbits, details and incidents, creating a centrifugal force that characters struggle to get away from.
Early on in Cutting for Stone – the title is taken from a declaration in the Hippocratic Oath – there’s a scene of Dr Thomas Stone amputating his infected finger; after this, his hand becomes even more adroit during surgery. With more cuts, the novel would have been more adept, too.
Given that he wrote over 20 novels, it’s striking that most of the well-deserved encomiums that marked John Updike’s recent demise mentioned only a few: the Rabbit novels, Couples, and occasionally, The Centaur. Much was made of his glorious prose style and his prodigious, generous and well-informed pieces of criticism. The sad fact is that the quality of his novels showed a clear tapering off from those early, resonant volumes. This was evident even in 2006’s Terrorist, a brave but middling attempt to understand the fanatical side of Islam. And now, there’s his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick.
As is clear from the title, this re-introduces us to the trio of Alexandra, Jane and Sukie, first encountered in 1984’s The Witches of Eastwick. While that novel of fickleness and fornication was based in the late Sixties, this one is set in the near-present. While that decade was “decaying into the Seventies and [they were] full of juice and stuck in the middle class”; now, “people are as unhappy about Bush as they were about Johnson and Nixon. It’s another quagmire”.
The coven of witches, now in their late sixties and early seventies, has separated: Alexandra is in New Mexico, Sukie in Connecticut and Jane in Massachusetts. Each one has been recently bereaved -- their decent, competent but rather dull husbands have “passed”. After some travels together, they decide to spend a summer in their old haunt of Eastwick, where they find that inevitably, much has changed – from the shops to the diners to the cuisine – but old lovers and enemies remain, with the capacity to arouse, annoy and occasionally do harm.
It has to be said that the novel only gains momentum in the second half, with the first being given over to the travels of the three. We’re treated to many pages of their reactions to the tourist attractions of the Canadian Rockies, Egypt and China while tourist guides ramble on about the allure of the pyramids or the Great Wall. Things improve somewhat once the the witches reach Rhode Island – “a trinity coming together to form a cone of power” – but the overall temperature of the narrative remains tepid, notwithstanding the novelist’s valiant attempt to navigate the contours of the female mind. What little witchcraft is practiced degenerates into an essay on particle physics, with the ending, too, a bit more convenient than necessary.
Throughout, however, the prose is burnished and descriptive, as always. Consider this sentence on the perils of living in New Mexico: “The dryness of her aging skin, the thinness of the desert vegetation upon the depth of rocks and minerals, the monotony of the sunny days, the mountain winds hollowing her out, Nature’s grand desolation unsoftened: it all added up to a fearful weight to push through the day”. This being Updike, sex and scenes of it also puts in an appearance, never mind the age of the practitioners. And descriptions of semen as “the ambrosial, eggy-tasting food of a savage goddess” don’t help.
The changed world of today is contrasted with yesteryear more than once, with some social commentary and the occasional crusty generalisation. But in this, his last novel, Updike’s art proves to be a lot less than spellbinding.
