Time it was, oh what a time it was Tuesday, Aug 14 2007

Michael Redhill’s Consolation

They die – the dead return not – Misery
Sits near an open grave and calls them over,
A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye –
They are the names of kindred, friend and lover
Which he so feebly called – they all are gone!

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Preserve your memories”, the song says, “they’re all that’s left you”. Michael Redhill’s Consolation is about precisely that struggle: the fight to redeem the past, hold on to the dead, keep the image of our loved ones fresh in our minds. It is a novel about the terrible tug-of-war between human memory and the forgetful earth, about the extremes to which our hunger for what has been lost will take us, how it will make us scratch about in the dirt for the smallest crumb of what once was.

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By this still hearth, among these barren crags Monday, Jun 18 2007

Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses

In what I’ve always considered his finest poem, Alfred Tennyson offers us a unforgettable portrait of a Ulysses who, having seen and known “cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments” and having “drunk delight of battle…far on the ringing plains of windy Troy” now finds himself trapped in domestic suffocation, “an idle king, by this still hearth, among these barren crags, matched with an aged wife”. It is a life that Tennyon’s Ulysses finds unbearable, and it isn’t long before he sails off into the sunset on yet another quest, leaving his kingdom to “my son, mine own Telemachus”, who, he argues, is better suited to govern the kingdom anyway. It is a glorious escape, a rising of the heroic spirit to its true proportions, and it would be a dull heart indeed (not to mention a deaf one) that did not beat faster on hearing Ulysses’s rousing call “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”.

But this, after all, is only one side of the story. Stirring as Ulysses’ embarkation into the unknown is, it is also an abandonment – one that comes close on the heels of thirteen years spent gadding about while his wife and son struggled to keep their home from being taken over. There is something deeply chauvinistic and self-centered about Ulysses’ heroics, his prodigious spirit masks a contempt for things womanly and domestic, a restlessness with the idea of commitment, of being tied down, that is, alas, too much a part of what we consider masculine. No one, after all, can accuse Ulysses (at least not the Ulysses of Tennyson’s poem) of being that most unglamorous of all things – a family man.

But what happens to the people that Ulysses leaves behind? To the debris of wife and family left trailing in the wake of these adventures? That is the question that lies at the heart of Per Petterson’s IMPAC winning novel Out Stealing Horses (translated by Anne Born).

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The Dark Side Sunday, Jun 10 2007

Haruki Murakami’s After Dark

“You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock
The Two
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you.”

- W.H. Auden, The Two

That sense of dread, of something sinister lurking beneath the surface of things, is the keynote of Haruki Murakami’s new novel After Dark, a searing and magical book that is part poetry and part noir, like reading a combination of Resnais, Godard and Hideo Nakata in novel form, with shades of Bunuel thrown in for good measure. Set in the witching hours between midnight and dawn, After Dark takes its main protagonist, the nineteen year old Mari, on a Persephone like descent into an urban underworld, a landscape of bars and seedy love hotels and all night supermarkets that is at once a kind of inverted negative of the city and an existential dystopia, a place that is both science fiction and frighteningly everyday. Add to this a second line of narrative that could come straight out of Beckett, and you have a minor miracle of a novel by someone who is indisputably one of the greatest writers of our time.

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Average Tuesday, May 22 2007

Amitabha Bagchi’s Above Average

I’ve generally stayed away from the recent spate of ‘IIT’ books, having winced through a chapter or two of Chetan Bhagat, but Bagchi’s book came well recommended, plus a book about an opera-loving rock-crazed teenager growing up in Mayur Vihar in the 90’s comes (literally) too close to home to be ignored.

Calling Above Average a novel, is, to me, something of a misnomer. It’s more like a collection of modestly well written vignettes loosely cobbled together into a book. The overall effect is of spending an afternoon with an old friend listening to him reminisce about the good old days. A few of this friend’s war stories are genuinely entertaining, but most have only the value of nostalgia, and you listen to them politely, because, well, the person telling them is such a nice guy.

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Sins of the Father Wednesday, Mar 14 2007

Akhil Sharma’s An Obedient Father

[some spoilers]

I’ll be honest. Till a week ago, I’d never heard of Akhil Sharma. Then his name popped up on the Granta list of promising young novelists, and I figured it was a shame that there was an Indian born writer, writing about India, potentially in the same league as Grushin and Shteyngart, who I’d never read.

An Obedient Father is the story of Ram Karan, a petty official in Delhi’s education department and a petty lowlife in everything else. Ram Karan is the ‘money-man’ for his superior, Mr. Gupta, who in turn is a minor cog in the greater political machine that is the Congress Party. As chief factotum, Ram Karan’s job is to bully principals of schools under the education department’s jurisdiction into giving ‘donations’ to the department that will eventually find their way into the Congress’s electoral fund. The story opens in May 1991 (exactly two days before Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination) with the Congress rallying to meet the emerging threat of the BJP in the upcoming General Elections. This election will come to occupy centre stage in the novel, as Ram Karan’s boss defects from the Congress to stand for election on a BJP ticket, setting off a sequence of political machinations involving violence, larceny, betrayal and murder, all of which, as a miniscule player in a high-stakes game, Ram Karan will have to negotiate without being trampled.

This is only part of the novel’s plot however. It’s real tension lies in Ram Karan’s home life, where his daughter Anita, having been recently widowed, has come back to live with her father, bringing her nine year old daughter Asha. We soon learn, however, that Ram Karan had raped Anita (his own daughter) when she was a little girl, emotionally damaging her for life. This crime has lain dormant for years, hushed up by shame and fear of social censure, but when Anita catches Ram Karan making advances to her daughter (his granddaughter) her barely repressed outrage explodes, and father and daughter find themselves trapped in a bitter contest of suspicion and accusation on her side and self-justification on his. Ram Karan eventually dies, but the trauma of his abuse continues to poison his family.

In its exploration of taboos, in its nightmarish pathology of dependence and hatred, the novel is horrifying. Ram Karan and Anita seem trapped in a claustrophobia of self-loathing – forced together by necessity and hating each other for what has been done to / by them, they exist in a wild see-saw of recrimination and grudging reconciliation, made sharper by the ever present sexual threat that Ram Karan represents to the innocent Asha. Ram Karan, in particular, is a novelistic triumph. In him, Sharma has created an exquisite monster, a sort of domestic Caliban. Because the story is told largely through the eyes of Ram Karan, it’s easy to get swept up in the tide of his self-pity, and Sharma cleverly alternates the damning facts of this man’s brutishness with insights into his insecurity and vulnerability, painting a compelling portrait of a truly pathetic human being. Yet it is this very mediocrity of Ram Karan that gives him his particular power to inspire pity – he is such a miserable excuse for a human being that we can’t help feeling at least a little sorry for him, and have to remind ourselves of the terrible things he’s done in order to harden our hearts against him. This is Anita’s dilemma (made worse by the fact that she’s financially dependent on him and related to him by blood), and it also the reader’s.

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A Country Cracked from Side to Side Sunday, Feb 4 2007

Just got back from watching James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, which is among the nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary. A three part film, Iraq in Fragments tells the stories, in sequence, of an 11-year old Sunni boy in Baghdad, the growing Shia unrest in Najaf and Nasiriyah, and a Kurdish family in the North. It’s a visually stunning film, and a considerable cinematic achievement, combining brisk, almost chaotic editing with breathtaking use of colour and a flair for the dramatic. The last section in particular looks like every frame could be an award winning photograph all by itself.

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Babble Wednesday, Jan 24 2007

Babel

[some spoilers]

“To be intelligible”, Oscar Wilde famously said, “is to be found out.” It’s a dictum that director Alejandro Inarritu and script writer Guillermo Arriaga seem to have taken to heart. To watch their latest collaboration – Babel – is to be desperately hustled; like witnessing the professional hokum of a witch doctor, who hopes that if he chants his spells seriously enough you’ll believe in them without asking what they mean. Because that’s all that Babel is in the end: an exercise in beautiful gibberish, a testament to the idea that no matter what language they speak, people everywhere have nothing meaningful to say.

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The Invention of Pain Monday, Jan 22 2007

Martin Amis’ House of Meetings

“Russia is the nightmare country. And always the compound nightmare. Always the most talented nightmare.”

- Martin Amis House of Meetings

How could any novelist resist?

Martin Amis’ new novel House of Meetings is a book about the compound nightmare that was / is Soviet Russia – more specifically, it is the story of two brothers, one a war veteran and ‘heroic rapist’, the other a pacifist, who are thrown into a labour camp under the Stalinist regime and must spend the rest of their lives coping with the realities of political oppression, both during their imprisonment and after it. The book is also, nominally, a love story (the two are in love with the same woman) but this is at least somewhat of a red herring. As Amis unnamed narrator puts it, “I and my brother are characters in a work of social history from below, in the age of titanic nonentities.”

At this stage, it is reasonable to ask what Amis, born and brought up in England, is doing writing a novel about political oppression in Soviet Russia. “You must try hard to imagine it”, Amis writes, “the disgusting proximity of the state, its body odour, its breath on your neck, its stupidly expectant stare.” But what does he know about it? Isn’t he imagining it too?

The truth is (and this is the key reason why the book works) that House of Meetings is not so much an imagined account of political oppression as it is an account of what oppression does to the imagination, to the human spirit. Amis is not writing about a police state, he is writing about a state of mind. In the grand tradition of Dostoyevsky and Conrad (two authors he explicitly acknowledges as influences) this is a book not about oppression per se but about the idea of oppression and about the response of what we could once have called the soul.

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The Big Sikh Sunday, Jan 14 2007

Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games

Once upon a time there was a writer who lived in a world of great corruption and great hope, a world where everything glittered and only some of it was gold. He lived in a world where a dream shared by millions was turning sour even as it became real, where the small hopes of ordinary men were either flaring into great achievement or being cruelly snuffed out. And yet men dreamed, and believed in opportunity in a way they never had before, and yearned for things their parents or grandparents could never have imagined, and the frenzy of ambition was in every heart and no one was counting the cost.

And this man, this writer, decided to capture the spirit of that time by placing in its midst his most memorable character – a small-time crimefighter, a loner, a drinker, a realist, a man of few scruples and little ambition, not strictly law-abiding but honest, in his own way an idealist, even, perhaps a closet romantic. In this character’s strange blend of cynicism, street-smartness, ruthlessness and reluctant chivalry, in his capacity for both violence and wit, in his sense of irony matched with the bitterness of his grace, the writer created an iconic hero for his time, a man who contained within himself all the swirling contradictions of his age.

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Towards Bethlehem Wednesday, Jan 3 2007

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

“The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

- William Butler Yeats ‘The Second Coming’

The first thing you learn when you open Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is about the lack of visibility. “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.”, McCarthy writes. “Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” And it is this atmosphere of gloomy nearsightedness that is the keynote of his new novel.

Indeed, there is a sense in which The Road is a novel that centres entirely on atmosphere. The plot of the book is simple indeed – in a world devastated by some unspecified apocalyptic event, human civilisation (as well as animal and plant life) has been entirely destroyed, and the few humans who remain have turned to scavenging and cannibalism, eking out a miserable and shortlived existence among the stripped remains of their past. In this hellish landscape a man and his son are on a nightmare journey to nowhere, or rather to anywhere that they can get to, their only real objective to keep body and soul somehow together.

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