The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time: Book review

The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time: ***

Amongst a host of them, probably the most efficient or shall I say the most salutary asset of “The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time” is its spotless, pure and a sickeningly cute narrator’s voice. Me being me, wouldn’t have cared two hoots to type the whole book here, but in an attempt to just appear saner have typed in two of my favourite-st dialogues:

’’I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.’’

and, this: ’’Our mind is just a complicated machine. And when we look at things.. we’re looking at a screen inside our heads… People think there is someone in their head looking at the screen and they think, this is their special human mind which is called a homunculus, but this homunculus is just another picture on screen and when homunculus is on screen (because the person is thinking about it), there is another bit of brain watching the screen . And when the person thinks about this ’’another bit of brain’’, there’s yet another bit watching the screen but the brain doesn’t see this happen because people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another… Feelings are just pictures on the screen in your head about tomorrow.’’

Just a day of reading is all it takes to hear (and not read) Christopher, as he babbles about everything under the sun. But given the 268 pages he’s been assigned to write his first ever “detective” book he’s actually quite triumphant in solving the mystery of the murder of a neighbourhood dog, given that he’s afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome (a mild form of autism) and motherless. The book is his own memoir of how he solves the two mysteries of the dead dog and the “dead” mother and how his own probing judders his own life.

The USP of this book is, as I commented earlier, the untainted, undiluted first-person narration by Christopher. Which must be probably the most challenging portion for Haddon, whose intention of actually aiding his readers have a full-blown view into his narrator’s disassociated mind is a hugely ambitious (and consequently, a triumphant) effort. With Christopher taking the centre-stage and writing his own “secret diary”, the whole book seems to have this whole raw, wet-in-the-ears energy about it with the invasive Asperger’s neither leaving Christopher’s voice nor the reader’s thought for even a second.

Then be it Christopher’s self-absorbed, self-aware and emotionally flat speech (“The idea of a constellation is very silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted..” or ’’I didn’t reply to Mrs Alexander because she was doing what is called chatting’’) or his sheer inability to treat others as people and read their faces (“I kept a piece of paper in my pocket with lots of faces drawn on it and took it out when I didn’t understand what someone was saying… It was really difficult to decide though because people’s faces move very quickly”) or even his esoteric self-stimulatory behaviour (“4 red cars in a day make a Good Day… 4 yellow cars in a day make it a Black day”)—every aspect of a child with Asperger’s flows so unconsciously through the book that the work can well become a chronicle of the cryptic syndrome though its very instinct seems quite departed from this very fact (the name “Asperger’s” finds a mention solely on the blurb). The narration seems so drenched in the character’s soul that there’s not a single encounter where the medical side seems ham-handed and is stuffed into the pages. Its Christopher’s diary and so shall it be till the last sentence.

And Haddon is largely helped by his publishers who bring about Christopher’s photographic memory and his obsession with pictures, patterns, font-plays and mathematics in pages that are adorned in such numerous pictures, mathematical equations and different fonts that I won’t blame anyone who labels this as an amateur work. Unlike some other ostentatious efforts like “Catcher in the Rye” and “A Child Called It” where the child-narrators seem rather too hard-pressed to pose as child-narrators, Haddon’s Christopher can much rival Arundhati Roy’s exquisitely etched out Estha and Rahel for both novelty and honesty. There’s none of the sloppy sentimentality attached to a child with “special needs” for his whole sense of being is so removed from normal, that an expectation for him to suddenly recuperate or see the other side is, frankly speaking, impossible.

And any sympathy that Christopher gains as a narrator (like when a policeman laughs at him or he sits haplessly at an underground station for hours, afraid about the crowd around him or even when the mystery about the murdered dog unveils) is purely unintentional, and simply put, incidental. As a matter of fact, the child himself is so casual about his abnormality that any special conduct of people towards him (read pity) only triggers warning signals. He isn’t an innocuous angelic bubble waiting to be hugged. He hates strangers, he calls others stupid, he patronizes himself, he groans loudly for hours with his head between his hands as he finds himself in a crowd and he carries a Swiss army knife waiting to be stabbed into anyone who touches him. And Haddon makes sure that his vulnerabilities and his reciprocations (however “seemingly” inappropriate) stretches out to the reader.

But it only takes a tiny slip of your perceptive mood to erode the effect of this work as the emotionally flat narrator starts to seem irritatingly repetitive. The moment you begin to judge this work as yet another work of fiction, even Christopher’s matter-of-factly style of expression starts appearing shallow and nit-witted. Sans the Asperger’s syndrome, the book is actually quite devoid of a decent plot and unless you are ready to see the world through a different pair of eyes, don’t expect a bone-jolting experience.

More than the humdrum of Christopher’s surroundings, it’s his perception of world that should be looked for and appreciated. The story per se resembles a played-to-death next-door soap and one might guess the twists and the turns sooner than the unpretentious title suggests, but that shouldn’t be why you read the book. You should read it to step into the shoes of someone who’s so illiterate about the people around him that he can’t tell the difference between a question and a rhetorical, a frown and a deep breath, a snigger and a laugh. A tickling and prickling tragicomedy, “The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time” throbs with so much life that it leaves you all warm and smug. Touché.

PS: Was just wondering if my being in UK, where the book’s based, and in the medical profession has to do anything at all with my liking for this work. Err.. Umm.. Maybe you can ignore this post-script.

Critical Judgement by Michael Palmer: Book Review

Critical Judgement (Michael Palmer): ***and 1/2

No need for pondering over sentences for days on stretch, no need to indulge into the magnificience of carefully etched out paragraphs, and absolutely no need of even imposing your version of the title or the left-ajar climax. Simply because thrillers have grave disregard for such linguistic frills, and why shouldn’t they? Detached from these arduous and cloggy formalities give them more than enough space to develop in all directions into an instantly stimulating and electrifying capsule that has you sweating, panting and breathless with each sentence. One of my all-time favourite medical thrillers, Critical Judgement, is all this and more.

Coming to the plot (ah! these obligatory fillings of a review), Critical Judgement tells the story of a surgeon (Abby) who leaves her job at a high-profile hospital in San Francisco only to move with her fiancee (Josh, who’s been sacked at his workplace) to a suburbian

Californian town with a wilfully deceiving name–Patience. While Abby finds herself suddenly stepping into the shoes of the Head of the ER team of the Patience Regional Hospital, Josh finds an equally well-paid job at the town’s sole employer–which doubles up as the country’s foremost battery manufacturer, Colstar.

Trouble starts trickling in as Abby, much stressed from the explosive workload and responsibility, starts encountering patients with seemingly simple, but undiagnosible symptoms. In jest, Abby calls them NIWWs (No idea what’s wrong) until a violent incident in which a Colstar employee, Willie Cardoza, in a manic fit, zooms his 4×4 into a tennis court almost killing three old ladies. And this obscure insanity also seems to have caught up with other Colstar’s employees–Angela, (who’s turned into a self-multilator), Josh (who’s suddenly become maniacally ill and has threatened Abby physically) and Ethan Black (the son of a supremely influential Ezra Black, the financier of Colstar, who jumps off a high-storey building when visiting his psychiatrist). The outlandish fury and rage in these Colstar employees kindles Abby into investigating the cause of the eruption of these sudden cases, but she doesn’t have to go far as one of her colleagues, Dr. Lew Alvarez seems to have all the answers to her NIWWs and violent cases–cadmium spill from Colstar.

Running an Alliance against the Colstar, Lew and his small team, has infact been accusing Colstar of neglecting the health of Patience’s population and even forging laboratory results keeping the cadmium spill well under covers for years, but have been muted by the influential Big Daddies. As Abby becomes the crusader, she finds both her life and job in serious jeopardy, as she’s been penalised at every stage for her probing. Has Abby got the strength to outperform her enemies? How successful does she become in unraveling the mystery? Is it really the cadmium spill causing the mysterious illnesses? Is Colstar really the culprit?

What instantly separates Palmer from other thriller-jotters is his care for his book’s characters which infact feel so alive and kicking, that the book has an ineluctable cinematic ambience to it. This, and his graphic style of writing uplifts even the most mundane of sequences enlivening the reading experience thoroughly. Some of the sequences like the introductory defibrillation (unpleasantly graphic), Abby treating an eccentric Old Man Ives outside her neck-breaking schedule (deeply empathetic), the pretentious celebrity psychiatrist (inescapably comic), Abby’s decision to treat a killer rather than the killed (thrilling and true-to-bone), a claustrophobic patient recollection of her experience at MRI (stomach-churning) and the orgasmic end keeps afloat the belief of Palmer being a storyteller to vouch for.

The protagonist’s character, an ER doc, is on the predictable side of the fence as from the very premise you expect her to be the crusader, the saviour, the find-all-reveal-all belle and Palmer’s heroine, Abby fits in all these gloves, yet comes across convincing thanks to bountiful nuggets of vulnerability and conflict that’s thrown into her sketch. The third-person narration, though glues to Abby’s every move, every thought, surprisingly keeps the sentimentality-quotient close to neutral with extremes of alkaline and acidic emotions kept much at bay. Their pictorial descriptions consistently withstanding, Palmer populates his book with believable and distinguishable characters with equal success, even though the genre means that almost all the characters have a meagre life outside the incidents involving them.

The pace of the thriller is rocksteady and absolutely unwavering for if Palmer doesn’t have Abby stepping into the shoes of the investigator, we see her participating in some genuinely chilling ER histrionics or we might even find ourselves reading first person gruesome accounts of Colstar’s suddenly-venegeance-seeking employees. The surprise factor is 10 on 10 as the book’s so overgrown with unpredictable twists and turns that you might not realise you have actually skipped a day’s meal. More than justifying its ’’thriller’’ tag, since the catastrophe’s of a aesculapian core, even the ’’medical’’ prefix is more than suitable for this thumping 400 page fiction.

Testing of chemical weapons on innocent population, has indeed made to the headlines time and again, and with an appreciable amount of sensitivity with which the issue is dealt with, the author keeps the scare and seriousness much intact. The climactic showdown, swaying between wrenching unpredictability and hard-to-gulp unbelievability (the latter, solely visible in the fierceness of Abby which takes quite a huge leap to gallant levels of heroism) doesn’t try too hard to bring every thread of the plot to close, but the bemusing and horrifying epilogue more than makes up for that.

The author, being an M.D. himself has also instilled a decent degree of rawness in the ER histrionics, but let the seemingly honest and amazingly vivid sequence of events not blind you into believing that diagnosis at ER is always so fulfiling, well-defined, objective, active, glamorous and brimming, as the routine, repetitive and tiresome aspects get negligible prominence here (understandably so), and the fiction carries forward the legacy of painting a reasonably blushful picture of medicine in ER which had emerged with telly-tube’s babies like ER, Casualty and the likes. Its not gruesomely externally valid, but internally, the procedures and the few diagnoses made are masterfully written.

The bipolar reactions of the workforce (be it a nurse reluctant to treat a patient just because he’s the presumed criminal or Abby being unreasonably censured by her seniors for attending to that very criminal), the contamination running in the upper levels of hierarchy and the innocent dependence of the public on their doctors sears through with astonishing effect. However, since the author’s quite unapologetic about the generous sprinkling of medical terminology, I won’t really recommend it to the medically uninitiated or ignorant. The unobtrusive, simple language is a major plus though.

In all, Critical Judgement is a fantastic thriller, with dominant threads of the population being betrayed for their unflinching trust in the medics and venegeance acquiring phantasmagoric potency, sewn with perfection by the wilful and ferocious (if larger-than-life) Abby. As intoxicating, as the industrial toxicology at its helm, this memorable medical thriller begs to be read, and writing even a sentence more on it would give the plot away. Go read it and experience it for yourself.

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!

LOTR Fellowship of the Ring: Book review

Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkein): **and 1/2

Laurelled and re-laurelled as the benchmark in English literature, hailed as the monarch of fantasies, the pinnacle of allegoric writing, I embarked upon reading this “mytho-epic” much to the expense of some definitely comfy evenings and nights and the hangover after completion is so severe, that I really can’t be asked to sort out my notes and have simply typed them up below. However much I perceive this to be actually a set of three books, its honestly a single tale and this is the sole reason what kept this review a set of notes in my diary. But finally, after a verdict that has remained sealed in my notes for the better half of this year, by typing it I’ve helped it reach the actual audience (and not the moths).

Day 1 5:30 pm
The exquisite foreword has left me practically exasperated with the author’s level of honesty and

modesty both for his own work and the readers. Was enlightening to note that there isn’t any hidden meaning or “message” and the tale is just a story free of any allegorical significance or political reference. Immediately I am reminded of the umpteen interpretations starting from the decryption of Christian overtones to seeking links with the Second World War, the readers indeed gave new meanings to the phrase “reading between the lines”

Day 1 11:30 pm
No, I just have to admit this. This is the third time I struggled to keep my eyelids from shutting in an attempt to read through the Prologue. The excruciating detail of the background of hobbits, pipe-weed, Shire records and the Ring is so bereft of any fluidity and reads so much like some dictionary, that I better get some nap to regain some sanity. More tomorrow.

Day 2 4:00 pm
The first chapter catalogues the introduction of Bilbo, his eleventy-first birthday and his bequeathing the Ring to Frodo, his young cousin. Though the drama reeks of pretentiousness, Bilbo’s queer obsession with the Ring and his final departure save the day. Dialogues reek with formality with hordes of exclamations and it’ll take some time to get used to hilarious cognomens like Bracegirdles, Sackville-Bagginses, Brandybucks, Lobelia and the ilk.

Day 3 7:30 pm
Am now through the brief chronicle of the ring and its fairly captivating though the expression is downright pedestrian with the only relief coming from an exquisite verse about the Ruling Ring and the nineteen other rings. And yes, Gollum’s tale of yore is immensely appealing, but I can’t wait to get the actual journey started.

Day 3 11:40 pm
I am hooked. Finally Frodo’s journey commenced and what a pulsating start it is! One has to read the sentences to feel the ire of the sinister Black Riders, the strange grasp of the Ring on Frodo and the balmy council of Gildor. I have seldom read poetry that reeks with both tonal and emotional exactitude. The only gripe is an absolute dry conversation and clinically analysed geography. Am hoping that this would erase with the coming chapters.

Day 4 2:00 am
Still reading and the hobbits’ journey is quite intriguing to Mr.Maggot and then to Crickhollow with the bondage between the four subtly sealed and treated with a feather-hand. Readable till now.

Day 4 11:00 pm
The kineticity suffers thanks to the thoroughly repetitive geography but the excitement survives with Pippin and Merry vanishing into the willow tree cracks. However the introduction of Tom Bombadil as the saviour simply fails to cut ice. The verse does the opposite now—replacing dialogue, it stabs any attempt to intrigue the reader page after page. What’s more—a full length chapter on Bombadil’s house would send even the most rock-ribbed insomniacs snoring! From good to pathetic, the experience so far is… err… ummm..

Day 6 11:30 pm
Two days—can you imagine? From Bombadil’s house to the Prancing Pony, I’ve fought with my now-all-sore eyes and with my now-almost-dead brain to survive a petty 20 pages and hail! I have reached the shore! From the sickeningly repetitive geography (I half expected the author to give me distances correct to the quarter of a feet for every step of the hobbits, but then again there’s always the Supreme One for such nanomercies) to the formulaic turn of events to the maddeningly sleep-inducing verse, the following three chapters take the crown for giving me an experience of dozing inside the pages. Of course, the very occasional hiccup in the form of Barrow-wights was more than welcome. Are there any more such tortures in-store?

Day 7 9:30 pm
With the advent of the Strider (Aragorn), some pep re-enters but the scorched-dry dialogues and the forced tale (and poem again!) of Tinuviel dampen whatever little punch that surfaces. The author’s obsession with physiography and geography is thankfully put in good use or maybe heading to the final pages for a glimpse of the map time and again has lent me some patience. The graph reaches its peak with Frodo getting stabbed by the Lord of the Nazgul and continues to enthral, (albeit inconsistently) until the Riders are drowned in the flood of the Ford.

Day 8 11:00 pm
Its almost impossible to forgive the unceasing and forced sermons splashed on page after page in The Council of Elrond had it not been for the Saruman-Gandalf dialogue which uplifts the feel of unseen power of the seemingly dormant enemy manifold. Yet, Rivendell’s beauty comes as unstuck as Bilbo’s never-ending chant about a mariner which can replace all the lullabies and cradlesongs there are in the universe!

Day 9 7:00 am
The summoning of the Fellowship, though slow, grips the moment it sets afoot outside Rivendell. The snow-storm of the Caradhras is as wonderfully realised before the swelling darkness of the gates of Moria. Of course, I have begun to appreciate the author’s prolificacy in imagination when I see the elven characters and read about the Elvish speech. The descriptive topographics don’t veil the hideous dour of the Mines of the Moria and the effect is amazingly consistent with chips of history wonderfully sewn in the dialogues. The Bridge of Khazad-Dum, the Balrog-Gandalf fight, Gandalf’s fall is probably the book’s first full-fledged fantasy escapade and a moderately gripping one at that.

Day 9 7:00 pm
The graph dips slightly but the relief from the balmy descriptions of Lothlorien can’t ever be denied with Galadriel’s careful speech, the amusing Mirror, the captivating dialogue and the soothing poetry. Almost spiritual in its aura, the rush indeed takes a back-seat for some pages with tid-bits of Tolkien’s much-acclaimed indulgence in the flesh of an Elven poem yet the arrival and the departure of the Fellowship into this elvish land is nail-biting.

Day 9 11:00 pm
A snippet of Gollum, a peek of the Orcs, and a sinister glint of the Eye is all that graces the remaining pages. The thrill is masterfully built up and the last chapter holds a menacingly attractive door for electrifying action in the next book. Strangely, the chink in the armour is the episode of Boromir succumbing to the lore of the Ring where the clichéd histrionics flow with surprising nonchalance.

To sum it up:

If you think fantasy fiction is all about a series of events in breakneck succession and adventure that keeps redefining the very meaning of the word “exciting”, look elsewhere for the first instalment of this ponderous trilogy is decidedly sluggish (read dead) and in fact so serial, formulaic and long-winded, that one literally struggles to finish it. If at all, one attempts to connect with the ongoings and the weak characters, any such endeavour is obediently crushed by Tolkien’s tedious, almost comatose style of expression. There are some flashes apparent here and there, but the generous trepanning of the grey cells done by the gawdawful geography and blanched and pale characters is never really compensated for.

There’s this complete indulgence into external detail, which might sum up to make a fantastic screenplay but for any book to be intriguing, the characters need to be drawn with honesty, with care so that they connect with the reader atleast somewhere. The moment an author accomplishes this task of reader-character adjunction, however real or surreal the tale’s background be, the reader travels then with the character, in the character’s world… the book! Sadly, Tolkien misses the point here and its the inclusion of excessive static detail (all those Elvish speeches and writings and dialogues in different languages) that kills the first part of the trilogy, atleast for me. Gasping to be edited, Fellowship of the Ring, as a book is simply not recommended.

PS: By the way, there’s always the cinematic interpretation to feast your senses upon. And you don’t lose any of the story as well! So catch up with the DVD!

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.