The Hungry Tide

My rating: **

Though “it” isn’t anything quite a mystery for any avid book-reader, but still “it” has to be mentioned here. And by “it” I am referring to a section of books which are praised eloquently by the critics, have review stars or bestseller tags covering their jackets like badges of gallantry and yet when you read them–you keep feeling all through if there’s something wrong with you, if you are really missing a point. And then it finally dawns— the actual culprit is the book. That same godawful thing you have been holding for days wondering when exactly would you start enjoying it.

The Hungry Tide is just that–an overhyped, pretentious, unbelievable and terribly boring book.

My grouse with the book is that there isn’t a single thing that works in its favour. To start off, the book fails in the very genre it tries so valiantly to achieve–that of a mixture of character study and the adventure novel. To achieve anything in the former category, the characters have to be atleast believable enough. And to make them believable, I personally feel there isn’t a better tool than effective dialogue.

Sadly, that’s nowhere to be seen in this book–except for some stilted and decidedly boring pieces of conversations, there are reams and reams of flashbacks which read like some character-theses one writes to pass English Lit exams. And then, to fulfil any yardstick in the adventure category, the narrative needs to both be gripping and believable and though in the latter parts, there are some instances (like a sequence chronicling a rainstorm and tide-inflow) that can be termed as interesting, they are too few and far between to offset the flatness of the rest of the book.

Its grossly over-written too and the first part of the book (titled “The Ebb”) which stretches for a good 170 pages are definitely one of the most unexciting pieces of fiction-writing I have ever read (I mean how exciting is it to read a girl sitting at a boat’s perimeter and observing every movement in the scenery waiting for some bottle-nosed dolphin to surface or a boy reading some childish folk-tales left as notes by his grandfather for that long) .

Of course, I kept reading for I was curious to try out Ghosh (being a fan of Indian writing in English, he was one of the few authors I hadn’t read), but I don’t see any reason why anyone else should. Ghosh’s writing has got this “constructed” tone all through and not for a moment I got sucked into the conflicts or drama in this book (something that isn’t even remotely present in writings of Rohinton Mistry or Vikram Seth). Sure he can pen good English and has a knack for static descriptions but Hungry Tide’s a woefully bad way to put even that sole point across.

Overall, a thoroughly unreadable and uninteresting piece of writing with a pathetically cliched climax. Stay away at all costs!

PS: please don’t even compare this to a gem that Life of Pi was. I would have recommended this book highly if this was even a patch of what Martell’s work was.