Saturday by Ian McEwan

–Saturday by Ian McEwan–

My rating: **** and 1/2

Of late I have found myself ebbing away from critiquing books and movies. Blame that on the academia hell that medicine is. But off and on, comes a book so breathtakingly fresh–it gives this whole new lease of life to my hobby of reading. Ian McEwan and his latest book, Saturday is precisely that.

Spanning just a single day (yup, its the Saturday that gives the book its name), the novel sees Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon waking up in the middle of a Feb 2003 night and drifting about near his window overlooking a posh central London street. A comet flashes him by just that very instant but as he’s about to wake up his asleep wife, he hears the loud rumble of the aircraft. What he thought was a comet is in fact a plane coming down in flames. As it happens in such moments, he starts off on a thinking frenzy… contemplating whether he should sign in at his hospital (negates that as the plane’s going towards Heathrow direction–far removed from his own borough), fixates himself on the plane, its state of passengers… with one thought leading to another, Perowne starts introspecting bigtime. On everything. His wife Rosalind, his two kids–the blues rocker Theo and the poet daughter, Daisy; his job, his friends, sick mother, father-in-law, life, present political state of affairs–the impending Iraq war. But of course, all this doesn’t stop the actual Saturday to dawn. And with this new day comes a host of incidents–Perowne shopping for his family reunion, his visit to Lily, his mentally demented mother and on his way to a Saturday squash match, his brush with a ruffian called Baxter. Later that day, the re-intrusion of Baxter in his life brings probably his worst fears alive.

Saturday boasts of probably the most liveliest of first person monologues I have had the chance to read in contemporary literature besides Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Neil Cross’s Always the Sun. The characterisation is par excellence. With only one character–Henry–allowed to lay open his psyche in 300 pages, this is one amazing and thoroughly entertaining character study. Right from his constant blabbering to himself and his analysis on almost everything his eyes fall on to his introspection on family, age, politics, literature, children, God, fate–I saw eye to eye on almost every sentence of him. Every word rung a knowing bell, so its no understatement that for me even the tiniest of movements that Henry made, made me hold my breath. I could almost feel his fears, vulnerabilities, triumphs… seldom have I found a connection so astutely made by an author with his reader.

The setting couldn’t get more contemporary and topical than it is–watching Henry reacting to the whole plane incident and the media coverage of the incident the following day is a telling account of how deeply politics and national concern have permeated our everyday lives. Though I do doubt if the general people found the neurosurgical procedures almost as much a delight as I did, it was indeed a pleasant surprise to see an author incorporating these in the most unpretentious way (Robin Cook, please read this). But of course the moments one does get illusioned into believing that this is indeed an autobiography of a surgeon is when we find Henry suddenly and randomly introspecting “scientifically”. Then be it people walking down the street described in a fit down to their neurotransmitters or Henry deducing the neurological disorder of a ruffian who’s about to give him a second punch. Numerous tiny touches like these coupled with those in which Henry checks himself from his thoughts, trying to focus in on the present (dunno how many times that’s happened with me) and yet finding it difficult to hold back a dam of thoughts–you almost feel sitting next to Henry. Hearing him speak about life. Which makes it sometimes a bit too shocking and difficult to read (the whole sequence of Baxter’s re-intrusion and the turn of events thereafter sends chills down the spine–its that real). But since the book culminates at a feel-good, safe juncture (again, entirely plausible in context of the main character), it does make one think about the importance of a family–our natural confidantes, in events of tragedy and humiliation.

I guess just for evoking such a deep interest and empathy from his reader in a seemingly anonymous life of a human being in a remote corner of a metropolis and how his life, his opinions, his expectations from others get their shape from experiences big and small, pleasant and unpleasant, McEwan deserves a pat on the back. It might seem a banal and futile exercise in fiction as I clinically dissect it here, but trust McEwan to rope all that self-analysis, all those perceptions of a single human in the classiest, richest, most enjoyable and possibly the most quotable prose ever. Its like amidst all those larger-than-life thrillers, convenient A to B adventure fiction and hyper-intellectual magic realism and fantasy fiction is this beautiful book that chronicles a life of one of us.

There’s something McEwan does fundamentally right in this book and that is, he writes about a layman, breathes life into him and takes us on a roller-coaster ride with him as he experiences the weakest and strongest moments in a single day, a Saturday. I am touched by how thoughtful and ultimately humane it is.

PS: Can’t wait to read McEwan’s other works. If critics are to be believed, this isn’t even his best. God, what is this guy!

Clear by Nicola Barker

My rating: *

This is one mammoth excuse for a book. The writing is downright atrocious– the writer makes a big pretence of being humorous by injecting side-comments in brackets in every damn line, which after a point of time makes reading absolutely impossible and really gives the impression that Ms Barker simply couldn’t be bothered. And in an attempt to be this central nutcase of a character– one gets to swallow lots of layman slang and swear words.

What really kills the whole book is the absolute lack of direction or motivation in the book. I picked it up thinking it would be a joyride peeking into the lives of thousands of spectators enjoying the David Blaine spectacle… but the observations by the author are so downright routine and so below-mediocre in sentiment, that I felt like tearing this book apart after 2 hours of reading. And don’t even get me started on the nitwitted, boring characters (esp a pseudo-philosopher called Solomon) and the pointless interactions between them–pages on pages are wasted on rudderless conversations. The book’s so outrageously and unnecessarily over-written, one simply doesn’t fathom exactly what is the author’s point?

Its really a shame that cr*p like this actually gets published and some critics actually deem this superficial piece of writing as innovative!

My take– don’t fall for the enticing blurb and cover. This is one of the most uninteresting, pretentious, senseless, shoddily-written books I’ve read EVER. An advice for Ms Barker–you desperately need a break!

Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

Notes on a Scandal: ***

As a reading experience, Notes on a Scandal can well boast to be one of the better written works in contemporary fiction, but beyond that its little else. Which is a pity because the wit and the sheer intelligence of Heller as an author which keeps you rivetted bigtime for most of the book, suddenly fades in the last few pages.

Its surprising too, for the book’s got everything working in its favour–a superbly etched out, thoroughly believable protagonist; a creative writing style which attempts to view at a “forbidden” teacher-student affair from a fresh angle and a pace which can leave many thrillers panting for breath. And yet, it fizzles out completely towards the climax.

Sans this decidedly underwhelming conclusion, the rest of the book is genuinely addictive and just as a proof of the author’s proficience–she manages to hook us with the first person narration. Any lesser author, and this would have been one unreadable monologue which I wouldn’t have read beyond the 10th page.

I won’t get overtly indulgent here and start quoting any lines from the book because that would really take away almost all the entertainment value for any prospective readers. All I’d say is that its a subtle study of the psychology of an obsessive individual and charters the graph of her relationships (particularly with one teacher whose “scandal” gives the book its name) with style and speed, and though it doesn’t quite end up as bold or sinister as the blurb or the title might suggest, its candidness does warrant one read.

Youth by J.M. Coetzee: Book review

Youth (J.M.Coetzee):*****

Is this a satire meant to puncture the monotony and constancy of the mundane, routine existence that infects every metropolis like a plague or a personal diary of a student whose constant self-critique has gradually paved way for stiff self-contempt, and finally reduced him to a psychotic victim of extreme pessimism. Youth’s paramount flavour is as dual as its main protagonist’s conflicts with the world around and inside him.

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Amongst the more recent works of the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, Youth, “on the surface level” narrates the life of a “seemingly” slim and looselimbed simpleton from Cape Town, South Africa in the 1950s who earns his bread and butter working industriously as tutorial-assistant, dummy-coach, library-assistant and even as a statistician for the Municipality simultaneously. Managing comfortably a no-frills-no-thrills life through these multiple vocations, this child-man, all of 19 years believes “each man is

an island, you don’t need parents” which explains his ambivalence to relationships –blood and societal.

A constant faith that keeps him buoyant is that “love will cure him. The beloved, the destined one, will see at once through the dull exterior he presents to the fire that burns within him”, rejuvenate him, and transfigure him into a poet beyond compare. Till then, resting in his cocoon, he’s happy being “obscure and ridiculous for he believes that it is the lot of artist to suffer obscurity and ridicule until the day when he’s revealed in his true powers.” After two failed affairs in his native town, fearing an impending revolution, this potent poetry-lover, diligent mathematics-student arrives in London in search of true love and an inspirational ground to transform all his dormant visions and imaginations into fecund lines of poetry.

Absorbed initially by the job-search which eventually lands him in the IBM as a computer programmer where clearly he struggles to find a logic in the routine clerical mess he’s landed himself into, he experiences his first major conflict between his id (his primitive instinct to become a world-renowned poet) and his superego (which tells him that he dare not give up for failing would be too much like his father). Not able to balance these extremes, his ego shrinks and he finds refuge in self-justification and self-criticism. The constant rebuke from his conscience about his social origins keeps accentuating his isolation making his preconceived notions about people around him wilder and vaguer. Lonely and adrift, even his search for true love culminates into random, hurried, even downright embarrassing affairs.

With some more hurried and failed love affairs, its not long before he realises that “if there’s any mastering going on, it is London mastering him”. With this absolute belief ingrained, he shrugs off the job, indulges in a few more forgettable and absolutely futile stints at intimacy (including a brief homosexual one, just to see if in case!) and sways from poetry to prose to nothing. Puzzled and baffled, the harder he tries, the more he feels sucked into the English middle class until the combined effect of the wallop of neutral lives buzzing outside him and the constant conscience-pricking present inside him, he realises, have shrunk his life into yet another inconsequential existence. Is there a way to recuperate, or is it too late?

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Coetzee laces the life of his protagonist, John, with his passion of poetry and his backdrop of living in a British colony. Though the snippets informing the political background are penned with the needed color and candor, it’s only when you read the exhaustive observations of bygone authors and poets like Pound, Eliot, James, Beckett and Ford Madox Ford that you realise that Coetzee’s work is much above any amount of appreciation, any number of adjectives. The honest cluelessness of the poor chap in each of his encounters with the opposite sex and his colleagues and seniors (One should read his non sequiturs when his first girlfriend reads his diary or when he quits his third job to observe how pitiably humorous apathy can be!)

But perhaps, above all the flavours, Coetzee tragicomedy comes across a winner each time its protagonist runs into a self-questioning frenzy. Anything and everything that matters in the book happens in John’s mind and there’s so much caution and irony with which his psychology is dealt with that one can’t help empathizing (and smiling) with John as one witnesses him groping for answers everytime he’s faced with a new situation leaving him even more nonplussed, even more mystified.

His innocent faultfinding at the mechanised society when he questions “Is this indifference to the world a consequence of too much intercourse with machines that give the appearance of thinking? How were he to fare if one day he has to quit computers and rejoin a civilized society?… The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them.”

Watching the gaps between what he wanted to achieve and what he finally achieves widen, watching his conflicts climax in self-justifying affirmations, observing him falling back on self-sophistry each time he’s criticized or laughed at (he tells himself “I am hard enough on myself.. I do not need the help of others), seeing him degenerate slowly into an inactive, psychotic being trapped in his own questions and explanations and fallacies, finding him realising his blurred thought process for a moment when he observes that “ his colleagues think clearer than him… he has to pretend he understands everything when actually he doesn’t.. what is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail…. if he were a warmer person, he would no doubt find it easier: life, love, poetry ”… only to wrap himself finally up again in his dark blanket, where every breath taken is compared to his mentors—the dead authors—the obsession for whose work is so acute that its led him to believe that creativity is reproduced in only a set of situations, one just can’t help but question what causes John to deteriorate –is it too much self-analysis and soul-searching which actually injected complexity into a simple life, making him abhor his very existence or his setting unrealistic, unachievable targets for himself which triggers off a cycle of never ending self-criticism.

This hard-hitting, dark book which is so jampacked with raw emotion and brutal honesty and written with such cruelly precise prose that probably even a library full of fiction put together would find difficult to challenge, gives an awful lot of brain food to sink your teeth into.

A near perfect dissection of a human psyche, Coetzee’s penetrative, direct approach to writing lends this supremely identifiable book an air that’s truly a class apart!

Such a Long Journey: Book review

Such a Long Journey (Rohinton Mistry): *** and 1/2

H is later works had their names hidden behind pronouns and their deeds carefully veiled in satire, but in his very first work Mistry seems at a surprising ease in spilling the names of Indira Gandhi and Bal Thackeray all through and its this very no-words-minced attitude demonstrated in every layer of this work that makes it depart completely from its later, heavier siblings “A Fine Balance” and “Family Matters”.

P redominantly, Such a Long Journey, tells the tale of an average Bombay-ite, Gustad Noble’s life, who resides in a congested suburbian apartment building and works as a bank clerk. Beginning somewhere in 1971 against an inviolable background of Indo-Pak war, its principal track focuses on the unusual way in which this very national conflict affects Gustad and his family. The book starts off by building up the domestic skirmishes in Gustad’s life where we witness a father’s quenchless curiosity

as he waits by his door to grab the early morning newspaper to find that one crucial page that shall bear the torch for his elder son’s, Sohrab’s future. Like any father, his joy and excitement knows no barriers as he finds Sohrab’s name in the prestiged IIT passed entrants’ list not realizing how shortlived this delightful moment is, for Sohrab’s neither overjoyed nor interested in engineering. Worse, he accuses his father of making him the victim of his own unfulfilled dreams.

S hattered and emotionally bruised, Gustad stops acknowledging Sohrab’s very presence and retreads into his painful past, peeling off memories of the ruinous bankruptcy that scarred his own past and drove them forever into the constraining lower middle-class domain. Busy driving in the lanes of his psyche, he suddenly remembers his old friend, Jimmy Bilimoria whose disrespect for years of Gustad’s friendship by abruptly disappearing still shocks Gustad and his dilemma on receiving a recent letter from Jimmy asking for Gustad’s help is obvious. Jimmy, as revealed later, works for the RAW and requests Gustad to meet his right hand man, Ghulam Mohammed and receive a package containing the instructions within, which Gustad reluctantly, but finally obliges only to learn that the package’s contents could seriously threaten his vocation and safety. Where exactly is Jimmy? What’s the meaning of all this clandestine political affair?

S een through Gustad’s eyes, the rest of the book brilliantly sews together this political-thriller thread with everyday quandaries in Gustad’s family (like his daughter’s incessant diarrhea, his wife’s shift to black magic, the compound wall which serves dutifully as a public latrine and the recent notice about the wall’s demolition and compound’s further shrinkage to broaden the road plus the ongoing war) all of which coincide to bring the book into a very traditional, yet an entertaining finale.

S eemingly a heavy plot-driven work, Such a Long Journey surprisingly seldom loses out on its carefully drawn characters that so vastly populate it from the first to the last page. Then be it the bizarre and freakish Ms. Kutpitia whose witchcraft traverses through assorted evils and threats fittingly taking aid from hanging threaded lemons, chillies to formulating thick curries (containing everything from cinnamon sticks to lizard droppings) only to be dropped on a rabid neighbor’s head to burning lizard tails in oil cans (which ultimately smokes her house away); or the amusing Dinshawji whose profanity-laden mirthful one liners besides providing the comic relief accentuate his painful demise manifold or even Dr. Paymaster wherein Mistry takes a dig at the atrophied medical system of that decade through the rote learning by Gustad and Dilnawaz of the awfully repetitive prescriptions.

S tylistically, the book’s as polished as you expect any Mistry’s writing to be. Equally comfortable in lending distinct voices to almost every character, commendable is his ability to scoop even the tiniest of dilemmas of the seemingly inconsequential characters of which the most memorable is that of the pavement artist whose transformation of the solid compound wall suddenly instills the “yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he would call his own, something immutable” With a real gift for tiltillating satire, his amusive and depressive metaphors are never blunt in capturing the bittersweet emotions and experiences that everlastingly surround the characters, lending the sketches just the right amount of life.

O ne of the highpoints of the book is how the backdrop of Indo-Pak war, which besides being dynamically present in the dialogues and the various air-raid sirens, blackouts unexpectedly gains the foreground as the sixty lacs allotted by the Indian Secret Service’s RAW (in which Gustad’s friend is included) to provide financial and military aid to the then-freeing Bangladesh vanish suddenly. Besides handling this political-thriller angle with the required acceleration, the candor and the intensity couldn’t have been anymore tarter and sharp-worded to convey the immense price India had to pay for Indira Gandhi’s regime. In fact the overall effect is so spine-chilling that when Ghulam Mohammed utters “And his mummy (Indira) herself has many enemies. Makes more and more every day, from Punjab to Tamil Nadu. Any one of them could do it. I am a patient man. Her life is as easy to snuff out as Bilimoria’s let me tell you.. Like that’’ and he snapped the fingers under Gustad’s nose’’, one can’t help but ponder at the awesome foreshadow laid on the kernel responsible for Indira’s assassination.

Though, the thriller and melodrama make for a largely homogeneous read with the effect intact for both the genres, having a thriller edge means resorting to a traditional finale where the reality factor (that reaches its pinnacle towards the middle where everything seems completely out of protagonist’s control) conveniently reaches a conclusion, and rather too soon. Though understandably, it’s a tale of harmony and settlement which sort of justifies its absolute termination, but almost unwittingly, it is this very completeness takes away the lingering factor.

Of the paler characters, the fast speaking, fractured child-man idiot Tehmul Langdaa, whose intervention is perennial fails to strike a chord as much as the forced characters of Alamai and her son (Dinshawji’s family) who mute the already soggy-with-detail descriptions of the last rites of Dinshawji (much to my irritation) for Mistry’s expression lacks that much needed sympathy that’s evident when he observes a roadside paaniwala who begs for 20 naye paise even as Gustad’s lying half-dead on the road. In fact, in Tehmul’s case the overall effect is so cranky and nonsensically elaborate it almost appears that a joke has been made of the handicapped boy.

But despite its shortcomings, Mistry’s able to convey that indeed the longest journeys are the one taken by the mind and one realizes this every time years fall away as Gustad smells the spine of a classic or looks at an old Meccano set in Chor Bazaar. The rules of memory when traversing years in a single second leap are as incomprehensible as its failures, its speed and its powers and this theme comes across through the author’s unrivaled sensory acuteness that captures the rich texture of Indian life in all its resplendence.

Sharp, short and shrewd, the book isn’t as perfect as Mistry’s later works but still makes for one compelling read.