Tales Of The Alhambra

This week's column for the Sunday Guardian.

Restoration in progress in an Alhambra courtyard

In an alcove of the former palace of the Nasrids in Granada, you can see artisans hard at work in restoring faded friezes. Under their hands, the Alhambra comes back to life; the results, evident in the courtyards of the complex, are remarkable.

Writers of fiction have, over the years, engaged in Alhambra restoration of their own. These are recreations of the lost glory of Al-andalus, notably, of its civilized intermingling of culture and religion. The contrast with today’s polarized times couldn’t be more stark.

In English, among the first and most influential of such books was Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving, better-known for his stories of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. First published in 1882, these folktales and fabrications are often overblown and over-romanticized:  “Surrounded with the insignia of regal sway, and the still vivid, though dilapidated traces of oriental voluptuousness, I was in the strong-hold of Moorish story, and everything spoke and breathed of the glorious days of Granada, when under the dominion of the crescent”.

The room Washington Irving is supposed to have inhabited

Visit the Alhambra today and you’ll come across a plaque outside the room that Irving is supposed to have lived in when he wrote his tales; the actual location, however, is in a section closed to visitors. Repackaging the West's fantasy of the palace, the audio guide quotes Irving liberally, and locally-published editions of his book are available in every souvenir store.

The vanished grandeur of Arab Ghranata is also the subject of Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, the first novel of Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet. This elegiac story of the fortunes of a Moorish family after the Reconquista shows Ali to be a better polemicist than novelist. Laden with dialogue, it recounts the strategies Granadians adopted to ensure their survival, from conversion to conciliation to conflict. The Alhambra here is a brooding presence from where edicts are issued by its Catholic conquerors, personified by the real-life Ximenes des Cisneros who once famously ordered that Arabic books be burnt in the city’s public square.

More successful as a novel is Amin Maalouf’s Leo Africanus, originally in French, which tells of the 15^th and 16^th century journeys of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, the titular hero. The first section is set in Granada, where Leo is born and spends his early life, and has a vibrant Arabian Nights tonality, with picaresque characters and tales from a lost homeland. In “this palace of the Alhambra, glory of glories and marvel of marvels”, the penultimate Sultan presides over extravagant parades and hedonistic parties, willfully ignorant of the storm to come.

A view of the Alhambra from Granada's Paseo del Padre Manjón

In these and other such works, the Alhambra is emblematic of bygone brilliance, a place whose epitaph wasn’t composed in words but in the form of a sigh heaved by Boabdil, the last Sultan, at his last sight of it. In making use of a vanished Moorish past in The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie has something more ambitious in mind: a conflation of Granada with Bombay-turned-Mumbai: “Just as the fanatical ‘Catholic Kings’ had besieged Granada and awaited the Alhambra’s fall, so now barbarism was standing at our gates. O Bombay! Prima in Indis! Gateway to India! Star of the East with her face to the West! Like Granada…you were the glory of your time. But a darker time came upon you, and just as Boabdil, the last Nasrid Sultan, was too weak to defend his great treasure, so we, too, were proved wanting.”

The narrator, Moraoes Zogoiby, claiming descent from Boabdil, visits Spain only in the final section, when he is incarcerated in a bizarre replica called “little Alhambra”. The theme, however, is prevalent from the start, not least in the form of the paintings of his mother, the redoubtable Aurora Zogoiby. One of them is termed “a Bombay remix of the last of the Nasrids”, not a bad description of the novel itself.

Europe’s own red fort, then, still tantalizes. It’s a monument to past possibilities, a testament, in Rushdie’s words again, “to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers”. Now that’s worth restoring.

When Fiction Is In Fashion

Today's Sunday Guardian column

With much fanfare, Banana Republic recently launched a clothing line inspired by Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, with coats, capes and jackets in lace, faux fur and sparkle. They’re not suitable for wearing at train stations, one supposes.

While this is clearly tied to the recent movie version of the classic, here are some copyright-free suggestions on how other heroines can inspire fashion, too.  If you’ve read it, flaunt it.

The Lady Chatterley Collection. Get ready to shock with this daring re-interpretation of early 20th century English country house style. Featuring a range of ban-worthy tops and now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t skirts that are as easy to take off as they are to put on. Switch off that episode of Downton Abbey and get ready to hunt game.

Molly Bloom Bloomers. A long-overdue update of a perennial sleepwear classic, perfect for day-dreaming naughtily in bed all summer long. Think of it as an invitation to lounge to your heart’s content in cool shades of Irish green. One look and you’ll go yes I will yes.

Jane Eyre Enchantments. For the woman who’s fire within and ice without, a collection of scarves and gloves that’s been rescued from the attic and re-designed for a new era. Crafted for rides in the country as well as travels in the city, keeping you stylish for years. Reader, you’ll wear them.

Helen of Troy Trainers. Girl, you've got to be ready for anything. Today, you're a queen, tomorrow your heart may be kept hostage. Make sure you face every challenge with these sleek trainers, available in hues of the wine-dark sea. Don’t be like that haughty Achilles and leave heels unprotected. Every pair is guaranteed to keep your feet dry on long ocean voyages. (Guarantee will be rendered null and void if the wearer approaches horses of any description.)

Juliet Jumpsuits. Why let your teenage years fly by without making sure you look your best? These jumpsuits are made from a special Lycra blend, rendering them stretchable and thus ideal for leaping from balconies. Because there are times when we all need to get away from intruding nursemaids. Pair them with our platinum-plated accessories and you can be the belle of the ball. Make sure that from yonder window, the only thing that breaks is light, not your heart.

Emma Bovary Bargains. You may be lurking indoors looking bored, but we know you’re longing to be a bad, bad babe. Presenting a range of Parisian gowns to show you in your true colours. Agricultural fairs or carriage rides, you’ll be sure to raise their blood pressure every time. Buy as many outfits as you want now; you can always borrow from admirers and pay later.

Hester Prynne Pant Suits. They’re looking at you. They’re whispering about you. They’re wondering what you’ve done. Walk past a jealous world with your head held high, clad in one of our perfectly-tailored pant suits and you’ll be A-okay. After all, why conform when you can be in form? Available, naturally, only in scarlet.

Elizabeth Bennet Bridal Wear. Light and playful on the one hand, sharp and saucy on the other. If that’s what you’re like, here’s a wedding ensemble to match. With much pride and very little prejudice, we dare say they won’t be able to take their eyes off you. After all, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman possessed of a small fortune must be in want of a wedding gown.

Scarlett O’Hara Spectacles. When you’ve got your eyes firmly fixed on what you want, make sure they’re protected with this stunning series of sunglasses. In plastic and metal, for cutting-edge elegance that also shields you from the world. Make sure you stand out, whether you’re the maid of the plantation or hanging with the girls at the pub. One glance at you, and they’ll give a damn.

Rants From Underground

My Sunday Guardian column of November 11

“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man”. That’s how Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground starts, with an ellipsis that’s one of the most commented upon in literature. Here was a new voice appearing on the page with the immediacy of speech, self-important, embittered and unreliable.

 

Echoes of the underground man’s rant can be heard to this day. They’re in the work of Philip Roth, notably in his Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theatre. They’re in the novels of Thomas Bernhard, dripping with contempt, mainly against his country of Austria and its people. They’re in parts of Saul Bellow, especially those cantankerous letters in Herzog. They’re in Howard Jacobson, puncturing pretensions by the sackful. And they’re in the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine – whose prose style clearly inspired Roth, despite the former’s alarming anti-Semitism.

Most such novels are monologues, with the central character pouring out his grief and disdain to an imagined audience. They’re essayistic, dealing with harsh truths, the ones that we often brush under the carpet. (If you’re looking for likeable characters and well-developed plots, stay away.) It’s a form that The Matrix’s Agent Smith would have taken a shine to, with his whingeing about the planet: “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality—whatever you want to call it”.

Even Eeyore and Marvin the Paranoid Android owe a little something to Dostoevsky’s original ranter, whose voice first emerged from under the floorboards in 1864. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote that the novel “cried truth from the blood”; later on, the existentialist brigade was quick to claim it as an early prototype of their own thought.

Rant apart, Notes from Underground is also unusual for its structure. The first part, set in the narrator’s present, takes aim at utilitarian theories and Enlightenment notions of progress during the author’s time; the second part, more novelistic, describes incidents that happened earlier -- incidents that contributed to the narrator’s going underground. The first is the ‘what’; the second, the ‘how’.

The initial section, in fact, underlines the view that the more specific you are, the more universal your appeal can be. On many occasions, the narrator mocks people and notions that Dostoevsky wanted to lampoon – in particular the ideas of Nikolay Chernyshevsky – and though knowledge of these might lead to a richer appreciation, it isn’t necessary know all about the Russia of his time to feel the force of the writer’s argument.

The unnamed narrator, a former civil servant in St Petersberg, has several unflattering observations to make about fellow humans. “The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful,” he asserts. He taunts himself with the “spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something”. (Those of you who have harboured the same suspicion at one time or another, raise your hands.)

In the more novelistic second part, which moves back sixteen years, there are episodes of frantic and comedic run-ins with former schoolmates during which the narrator reveals more of himself than he’d like. He then spends time with Liza, a young prostitute (a precursor to Crime and Punishment’s Sonya), when his impetuousness, petulance and vanity are even more on display. There’s a feverish pace to this section in contrast with what’s come before, mirroring the narrator’s state of mind. Here, too, one finds a critique of bookishness: Quixote-like, Dostoevsky’s narrator is full of fanciful notions, gleaned from the books he’s read, of how the world ought to operate.

All these years later, his words still resonate. What is to be done, he asks, “if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble—that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void”?  Void or not, such babble is a welcome change from all those novels content to simply record reality in the form of domestic dramas – but that’s a rant for another time.

Satire With Chinese Characteristics

This appeared in today's DNA.

LENIN'S KISSES Yan Lianke

In Tom Robbins’s debut novel, the countercultural Another Roadside Attraction, the attraction in question turns out to be the body of Jesus Christ stolen from a secret chamber in the Vatican and now on display at a travelling circus in Washington. In his new novel, Lenin’s Kisses, Yan Lianke uses a similar conceit to cast a beady eye on contemporary China, with the corpse being that of the gentleman mentioned in the title.

Swiftean satire is Yan’s weapon of choice. His earlier To Serve the People was banned in China because of controversial scenes of a soldier smashing busts of Mao to regain his libido; this was followed by Dream of Ding Village -- also banned -- based on an actual incident of an AIDS outbreak after a blood donation drive. Lenin’s Kisses is as bold, obviously using an imaginary scenario but one with many clear and farcical correspondences with China today. As translator Carlos Rojas says in his introduction, "Yan Lianke appears to delight in his ability to dance at the very margins of what is politically permissible".

The novel is set in and around a remote village inhabited by people with various disabilities. They’re resigned to their penurious lives after a crop failure due to a freak storm, but perk up when county chief Liu comes to them with a plan to buy and put on display the embalmed body of the communist leader from Russia, thus earning the region some much-needed revenue.

In order to raise funds to procure the corpse, the blind, the deaf, the crippled and the stunted create a travelling carnival. A typical show comprises, among other acts, a “one-legged flying leap”, “one-eyed needle threading”, leaf embroidery by a paraplegic and a polio-stricken boy’s foot-in-a-bottle routine.

The shows turn out to be a huge success and the performers are suddenly flush with funds -- this, of course, creates further problems stemming from rapacity and extortion. The move from communal life to entrepreneurial riches shows up people at their worst.

This is not to say that Yan takes sides. There’s also a wizened character named Grandma Mao -- an allegorical counterpoint to the ambitious county chief -- who has in the past set up a "mutual aid team” to create a “new harmonious society” in the village. She’s uncomfortable with the new get-rich-quick mentality, and is summarily told: "Granny, if you all hadn’t carried out your Revolution, we wouldn’t be having this famine".

Yan’s structure is as unusual as his novel’s incidents. The episodic chapters range freely between time periods and come with footnotes that go into greater detail, often encapsulating the lives of those mentioned earlier. (At times, even the footnotes have footnotes.) Then again, the chapters and footnotes have only odd numbers -- Yan has explained that this is because the Chinese consider such numbers inauspicious which, for him, sets the requisite tone, but Rojas points out that it can also be seen as an indication of all that’s missing from the novel because of state censorship.

Satire, however, is a potion best administered in small doses and in this respect the novel is long-winded, with incidents being dwelt upon more than necessary. Yan’s brush is broad and his strokes are occasionally overdone: "Some families are so wealthy that when their kids take a shit, if they don’t happen to have any toilet paper on hand they’ll simply use a ten-yuan bill or two instead".

Many contemporary Chinese writers -- including recent Nobel Laureate Mo Yan -- use the grotesque and the fantastical to portray the state of their nation. Yan is no exception, also employing a sometimes droll, sometimes cutting sarcasm. At one point in the novel, a character tells another, “You can see, and therefore you see the entire world as dirty. I can’t see, and therefore I see the entire world as pristine and pure.” Yan is definitely among those who can see.

The Long And Short Of Stories

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Is there such a thing as a typical American short story? Some will answer that question by pointing to a banality of tone. Compared with their European counterparts, they will say, American short story writers are provincial, producing domestic dramas beholden to Chekhov in all the wrong ways, and following templates established by writing workshops such as the one in Iowa and influential magazines such as the New Yorker.

There is some truth to these assertions, given the number of stories written in a plain style and proceeding in a dreary manner towards inconclusive endings that don't throw much light on the whole. Then again, the work of those such as Ben Marcus, Lydia Davis and George Saunders and many others also demonstrates that there are those who create wholly distinctive fiction. It’s also unfair to tar those from Iowa or in the New Yorker with the same brush, especially as, in recent years, there’s been considerable variance in their stories.

This is driven home once again by a new Paris Review anthology where you’ll find the realistic, the comic, the experimental and the minimal – the Paris Review being, of course, one of the magazines that did so much to popularize the form from its inception in 1953. (Those of you who haven’t browsed the magazine’s online archive of interviews with prominent writers, poets and essayists should stop reading this column now and do so at once.)

Object Lessons, as the anthology is called, is a collection with a difference: here, twenty writers introduce short stories by writers they admire and in doing so, provide short classes on what makes a short story praiseworthy in the first place. All the stories here were originally published in the Paris Review, and as such the collection isn’t meant to be representative of the form. The editors point out that it isn’t a “greatest hits anthology” either; the authors were simply asked to select a personal favourite and then describe why and how they work.

Here, stories by writers who are well-known jostle for space with those lesser-known. There’s Raymond Carver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance’, Steven Millhauser’s ‘Flying Carpets’ and James Salter’s ‘Bangkok’ – but there’s also Dallas Wiebe’s ‘Night Flight to Stockholm’, Mary Beth-Hughes’s’ Pelican Song’ and Thomas Glynn’s ‘Except for the Sickness I’m Quite Healthy Now’.

The writers who’ve selected the stories offer insights that are several notches above the show-don’t-tell variety. On the Millhauser story, Daniel Orozco points out how the fantastical is rendered commonplace and “the magic of a boy’s childhood is recalled with the melancholy of the man who can never experience such again”. For David Means, it’s a well-chosen space break in the Carver story that gives it its power. On a Denis Johnson story, Jeffrey Eugenides asserts: “Compared to writing novels, writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out”.

There are few pedantic pronouncements and much close reading, which is why it makes sense to read the chosen story first and then double back to the appreciation. To read Dave Eggers on James Salter and Lydia Davis on Jane Bowles, for instance, is to gain a far richer appreciation of the stories when they’re still fresh in mind.

Here, too, writers known for specific styles pay homage to others with allied styles: Ben Marcus writes on David Barthelme, Ali Smith on Lydia Davis. There are other unsought correspondences: Mona Simpson chooses Norman Rush who chooses Guy Davenport; Ali Smith chooses Lydia Davis who chooses Jane Bowles.

The essay that stands out is by Aleksander Hemon, on Borges’s 'Funes the Memorius’. Hemon asserts that works by such authors “offer crucial evidence that it is impossible to conceptualise humanity without literature,” and goes on to make the case for Funes as the quintessential Borgesian character. Says Hemon, “Borges suggests that forgetting – that is, forgetting ceaselessly – is essential and necessary for thought and language and literature, for simply being a human being”. That’s worth remembering.

Why Penguin Random House Should Merge With Me

Dear Messrs Pearson and Bertelsmann,

Congratulations on the creation of Ranguin. I know you’ve decided to go with another name, but I like this one better so I’m going to stick with it.

When I read your statement that this company can “be more adventurous in trying new models”, I realized I have to present this opportunity to you without delay. It’s big, bold and, most importantly, will make lots of money for us. Pull your chairs closer.

I offer myself as an entity for Ranguin to merge with.

The three of us together will bravely face and profit from the new world of print and digital, with the option to venture into the fast-growing fields of home décor and Chinese food.

What books have you published, I hear you say. The answer: None, if you define publishing in that fuddy-duddy manner of mass-producing print editions. (That’s so 2009.) Look, instead, at the vast number of blog posts, tweets, comments and graffiti I’ve been responsible for over the years, you’ll know that I am, in my own way, a publishing powerhouse.

For a start, I’ve already thought of a multi-media project that is sure to be next year’s blockbuster. It’s titled 50 Shades of the Grey Album and brings together the talents of the Beatles, Jay-Z, Danger Mouse and E.L. James.

Combining our complementary skills and strengths is a move that can only be described as synergistic, not to mention evangelistic and realistic. (I would prefer an all-cash settlement, in small and unmarked bills.)

Looking forward to a favourable response. Oh, I think that’s Rupert on the line.

Regards,

Not Brought To Book

My Sunday Guardian column. Because soon, we may encounter bookstores only in works of fiction.

Anyone who likes reading probably has, at one time or another, dreamt of setting up a bookstore. As Orwell wrote in a typically clear-sighted essay on his employment in a London bookstore, it's "easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios". In reality, the experience made him lose his love for books: "Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening". Looking back, "It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles".

What we dreamers are left with is the consolation of reading books set in bookstores, most of them written by those without fear of Orwellian paranoiacs. There have been many such over the years: novels by Carlos Luis Zafon, Christopher Morley and Penelope Fitzgerald and memoirs by Helen Hanff and Lewis Buzbee, to name just a few.

At first glance, Robin Sloan’s just-published debut novel, Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, seems to be just this sort of book. As one reads on, however, one realises that it uses the state of print books and bookstores as a metaphor for changing times and largely as a hangar for a fantasy escapade.

Set primarily in San Francisco, it’s the story of Clay Jannon, who’s lost his job as a designer with the new-age firm of New Bagel, and jumps at the opportunity to work as a night clerk at the eponymous bookstore: “The whole economy suddenly felt like a game of musical chairs and I was convinced I needed to grab a seat, any seat, as fast as I could.”

The store turns out to be a place stocked by mysterious volumes that Clay is instructed by the owner not to delve into, volumes that he starts referring to as "the Waybacklist". These are checked out by oddball characters who walk into the store at night and seem to be using them to solve a long-standing puzzle.

Of course, Clay is unable to resist peeking into the books and finds them consisting of long rows of numbers, "an undifferentiated jumble". Like a good fictional protagonist he determines to solve the mystery, with the help of others such as his childhood friend Neel Shah and newly-acquired girlfriend Kat, a Google employee. Without giving too much away, the plot quickly involves itself with the machinations of a secret society known as the Fellowship of the Unbroken Spine and its efforts to crack a code handed down by a Gutenberg-era publisher, involving the typeface designed by his colleague.

Much of this is fun to read at the level of a light-hearted thriller -- despite the prose being occasionally sophomoric, such as when it comes to the narrator’s feelings for Kat. There are fascinating descriptions of what it’s like to work at Google, fictional or otherwise, especially the efforts to scan every book in existence. It’s also very much a novel of its time, with allusions to Kindles, venture capitalists and the digitization of everything on earth.

One wishes, though, that Sloan -- a former Twitter employee -- hadn’t over-reached himself by including so many heavy-handed episodes to remind us of the contrasts between reality and simulation. In the first half, these come thick and fast: webcam appearances, a model of a cityscape, a logbook replica and, for good measure, even an allusion to Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura. The problem is that these don’t go anywhere: as the book progresses, it concerns itself even more frantically with the mystery’s unravelling, setting aside questions of the future of books and data.

The print edition of Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is supposed to have a glow-it-the-dark cover, something I wasn't able to experience myself, having read the e-book. Despite the luminescence, it isn’t quite going to light up the worlds of those seeking the satisfactions of a book about books, being more of an enjoyable caper than anything else.

The Perils Of Writing When Online

My column for The Sunday Guardian

Is that the time? I’d better start writing this column: if I don’t get it done soon, I’m going to miss the deadline. Let’s see now, what's been happening in the world of letters last week? I know: what about some incisive comments on the politics behind the…

Beep! A text message from a restaurant breathlessly informing me of a never-before unlimited brunch offer. Haven't been there yet. But that means dragging myself out of the house on a Sunday morning. Delete.

…Nobel Prize that seems to throw up an unexpected surprise every year. When it comes to Literature, it leaves people scratching their heads and then remarking angrily that it’s high time Roth won it. Although, come to think of it, the same people nod their heads gravely, sometimes with a vacant look in their eyes, when it comes to other disciplines such as…

I’ll just take a second to check my Twitter timeline. Has anyone retweeted me yet? Not yet? Rats. This is like dropping a pebble into a deep well and waiting for a splash that never comes.

… Economics or Chemistry. Maybe it's just that those prizes attract less controversy because the disciplines are more arcane, so fewer people feel enabled to critique them. Surely then, there ought to be the same rigour…

Twitter once again. No RTs yet but what an interesting bunch of links to click on. There’s one that promises to be the funniest viral of all time, and how can I pass up the one that claims to cut through the malarkey surrounding the U.S.Presidential debates?

…when it comes to supposedly ’softer’ disciplines such as Peace and Literature? The fact is, everyone and his neighbour feels they can weigh in with opinions on the Peace Prize, and many point out, year after year, that Gandhi…

Thirteen unread mails nestling in my inbox. I’d better check: what if there’s something important? If you’re not prompt in replying, you’re behind the curve. Ten are spam, two are bills and one is from my bank offering me an interest-free loan. I’m tempted to reply with my name, address and bank details to the kindly gent from Nigeria who’s promised me an inheritance. This could be my lucky day.

…never received the Peace Prize and then nod sagely as if that tells you everything you need to know about the shenanigans of the Academy in Oslo. (But really, Academy members: the European Union?) Yet others will point out that in 1953, Churchill won the Nobel Literature award, but those such as Graham Greene or Jorge Luis Borges were ignored. Come to think of it…

Just one quick round of Angry Birds. I’ve been stuck at this level for a week now, and it’s just because of that one pesky piggie hiding behind a stack of boulders. What if I can manouevre the yellow bird to make that wooden edifice collapse and, oops, no, that didn’t work.

…giving Churchill the Literature Nobel may have been inspired because in years to come, he’ll probably be even more denounced as a thoroughgoing imperialist, but the quality of his prose, at least, isn't in doubt. No such discussions, however, cloud the minds of those who talk about the other winners. Not many, for example, stand up and proclaim that Keynes ought to be rolling in his grave because the award, in past years, has gone to those such as Hayek and Friedman. Then again, Amartya Sen's won it too, which just goes to show that …

I’ll just do a quick Google search on exactly how many disciplines the Nobel is awarded in, so I can take this argument forward. Oh, look: here’s a link to that YouTube cat video everyone was talking about last week. Amazing. How did they make the cat do that? Now, what was I supposed to be searching for? Oh, no: the broadband connection’s on the blink again. How am I supposed to get any work done?

Many More Ramayanas

This appeared in today's DNA

BREAKING THE BOW: SPECULATIVE FICTION INSPIRED BY THE RAMAYANA Edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh

Shortly after the last episode of Ramanand Sagar’s televised version of the Ramayana, Romila Thapar wondered whether the series was “an attempt to project what the new culture should be, an attempt to expunge diversities and present a homogenised view of what the Ramayana was and is”. Such a uniform culture, she went on, “would be simple to identify and easy to control”.

Attempts at control have manifested themselves in various ways since then, from the brouhaha over the birthplace to the dropping of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay from the syllabus of Delhi University. Despite such attempts, as Ramanujan and others over the years have pointed out, the Ramayana is protean, with innumerable versions in India and South East Asia, each one reflecting different ideological and social perspectives. Authorship has changed hands, in Thapar’s words, from “bards to brahmans to monks to local storytellers”, and this is entirely how it ought to be.

Most retellings have taken place in the vernacular; in English, it’s in the genre of science fiction and fantasy that experimentation has occurred, two examples being the embellished recreation of Ashok Banker, and Ramayana 3392 AD, the comic book series produced by Deepak Chopra and Shekhar Kapur.

This is a frame that Breaking the Bow, a collection of Ramayana-inspired speculative fiction, leaves largely unbroken. Editors Anil Menon and Vandana Singh indicate in their separate introductions that the speculative in speculative fiction has always been a part of India’s storytelling tradition; this is indeed so, but many of the stories here marry the genre’s Western conventions with Indian themes making for an entertaining but sometimes uneasy alliance.

Given that 20 of the 24 contributors are women, there are many instances of Sita singing the blues (with Surpanakha coming second). Swapna Kishore’s satisfying ‘Regressions’, for example, features a “futurist agent” in a splintered Indian state travelling back into the past to redress gender equations, and Lavanya Kartik’s ‘Day of the Deer’ is a cheeky inversion that has Sita as double agent.

Feminism apart, there are environmental and political linkages, too. In the somewhat pedantic ‘Sita to Vaidehi’, Sucharita Dutta-Asane sets up resonances with present-day Naxalites, and in Abirami Velliangiri’s ‘Great Disobedience’, Rama and Lakshman are Valmiki’s pawns in clearing the Dandaka forest.

There’s also much planet-hopping and time-space melding, with middling results. In K. Srilata’s ‘Game of Asylum Seekers’, more energy is spent in defining the game than anything else; Aabha Daweshwar’s ‘The Good King’ features an ultra-modern Lanka, with Ravan juggling hybrid realities; and co-editor Vandana Singh’s apocalyptic ‘Oblivion’ has a sex-changing creature travelling through the universe in search of a demonic nemesis.

In contrast with such overstated sagas, Aishwarya Subramanian’s ‘The Making’ delicately compresses the bulk of the epic into a few pages using recurring motifs, while Sharanya Manivannan’s ‘Petrichor’ is an interesting take on the conversation between Hanuman and Sita in the Ashoka grove. Tabish Khair’s ‘Weak Heart’ is one of the few that delves into the mind of Ram, imagining what it’s like to live as a god.

Other contrasts arise from ways of telling. Pratap Reddy’s postmodern ‘Veidehi and Her Earth Mother’, set in Canada, has an unreliable narrator and a character who flees the manuscript,  while Shweta Narayan’s more realistic ‘Falling into the Earth’, set in California, dwells on the relationship between present-day versions of Sita, Ram and Lakshman.

At times, narratives compete on hallucinogenic ground. Neelanjana Banerjee’s feverish 'Exile’ features a role-playing Surpanakha in a futuristic Vegas club, while Tori Truslow’s hyper-real ’Machanu Visits the Underworld’ is an innovative tale  of Hanuman visiting the Thai version of Hades to bring Ram back.

 Disappointingly, though, it’s the same main characters that appear time and again. Bharat, Kaikeyi, Dashrath, Indrajit and Sugriva, to take just a few, are mentioned in passing, if at all, though one would have imagined that their take would have provided an interesting counterpoint. A sense of playfulness is also infrequent – one thinks, for example, of Google Indonesia’s online version earlier this year in which characters used Google Talk, Maps, Gmail and Search to communicate and plan their journeys. The bravura exception here, though, is Kuzhali Manickavel’s wickedly funny ‘The Ramayana as an American Reality Television Show: Internet Activity Following the Mutilation of Surpanakha’. Manjula Padmanabhan’s ‘The Other Woman’ teeters on the brink of the cartoonish, but is at least unusual in featuring Mandodari and specifically mentioning the Ayodhya imbroglio.

Breaking the Bow’s riffs on the Ramayana contain highs and lows, then, but taken as a whole, the collection has enough brio to remind the reader once more that, as John Berger puts it, “never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one”. 

When Fiction Goes Digital

Today's column for the Sunday Guardian.

It’s been said many times that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for TV. Well, if Calvino, Cortazar and B.S. Johnson were here now, they’d be working on apps that redefine narrative. Robert Coover, in fact, wrote perceptively about the implications of hypertext decades ago, speculating on the emergence of “a third voice”, distinct from the priestly and the demotic. It’s just this sort of voice that may be emerging now.

Although they say people are reading less than they used to, it's also true that they're reading more on the Web, even if it's just status updates on Facebook. Publishers have been trying to ride this change, tailoring their offerings to synch with changing reading habits.

There’s Faber’s iPad app of Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Penguin app of Kerouac’s On The Road and, more recently, Sourcebooks’s Shakesperience. All of these comprise, apart from the text, a series of video interpretations, readings, interviews and glossaries.  Thus, these interactive encyclopedias, marvellously produced, use a different medium to provide, in marketing jargon, “an immersive experience”-- but they clearly don’t aim to do more than that.

Others are trying to turn low attention spans to their advantage. Last month, Amazon launched Kindle Serials, wherein readers could download and pay for volumes, one episode at a time. There are nine such serials so far, all of them in genres such as murder mysteries, sci-fi and detective novels -- no doubt because of their abilities to end episodes on a high, leaving the reader panting for more. Another digital publisher, Byliner, has also launched similar serials, the first two by Margaret Atwood and Joe McGinniss. (This is the moment to insert the obligatory Charles Dickens reference.)

Such ventures don’t play with established notions of a written text; others, however, are thinking differently. Take Coliloquy, a “technology-based provider of active fiction”, that also serves up episodic content, but makes the story branch out into different directions depending on reader feedback. So far, they deal with young adult, romance, and adventure, and readers can vote for not just future plotlines but also character attributes and locations, among other things. To me, this smacks of pandering to existing tastes, rather than setting out to create something intrinsically new.

What’s of much more interest is The Silent History, an app released this month by a team comprising Eli Horowitz, former managing editor of McSweeneys, as well as other writers and digital publishers, and “a team of contributors on five continents”.

Calling itself “a new kind of novel”, The Silent History sets out to provide the fictional record of a time in the near future when children are afflicted by a mysterious genetic mutation that renders them incapable of speech. (Fans of J.J. Abrams TV shows, take note.)

Within the app, first-person testimonials are released one day at a time, from Monday to Saturday -- among those released so far are one by nanny in New Jersey looking after a boy whose parents are away on cruise, by a diagnostician in Texas examining the pathology of the speechless and by a neurologist in Massachusetts stumped by the silent children but determined to know more.

What makes it even more innovative is a section called field reports: “site specific accounts of the many unexpected ways this silence is colliding with our physical world”. Such reports can only be read as and when you're actually present at the site being written about -- they’re unlocked when your device's location services synchs with the app.

Having read the first few episodes on my iPad, I downloaded the app onto my phone to continue reading, only to find, time and again, the annoying message that a server problem prevented the app from being “populated”.

Though they were prompt, professional and polite when I e-mailed to let them know, I couldn't help but think that there are times when there’s really no substitute for a printed book.