(Chorus of GR friends : Say it, go on, you know you want to...)
but it was pretty ghastly for me. It was str...moreI'm not going to say that this novel is bad
(Chorus of GR friends : Say it, go on, you know you want to...)
but it was pretty ghastly for me. It was strangled to death by a style you could describe as inane wittering, a crew of characters all of which are loveably eccentric and a plot that Ms Desai believes will take care of itself as the inane wittering puthers all over the loveable eccentrics.
You'll only find 4 and 5 star reviews for The Jewel in the Crown on this site. And it is, indeed, a towering achievement. Towering! Magnificent! So .....moreYou'll only find 4 and 5 star reviews for The Jewel in the Crown on this site. And it is, indeed, a towering achievement. Towering! Magnificent! So ... er... what went wrong for me?
Do you remember James Joyce said that if Dublin burned down he wanted them to be able to rebuild it by reading Ulysses, meaning that every brick and stone, every chemists shop and stretch of beach, every busker and cabman's shelter was to be found in Ulysses in its exact location and condition in the book, not one atom changed around, so that in many ways Ulysses is not to be described as a work of fiction at all. (Joyce also took on the task of writing a book where if the whole English language was eaten by Godzilla they'd be able to reconstruct it again from Ulysses. But I digress.)
Paul Scott decided to do the same thing for the last days of the British in India. Brick by brick, house by house, room by room. Historians of interior decor 1945-65 can look no further. You have just won the lottery.
The bathroom is airless. There is no fan and only one window high up above the lavatory pedestal. At the opposite end of the bathroom - fifteen paces on bare feet across lukewarm mosaic that is slightly uneven and impresses the soles with the not unpleasant sensation of walking over the atrophied honeycomb of some long forgotten species of giant bee - there is an old-fashioned marble-topped washstand with an ormolu mirror on the wall above, plain white china soap-dishes and a white jug on the slab; beneath the stand a slop-bowl with a lid and a wicker-bound handle. Here too is the towel-rack, a miniature gymnastic contraption of parallel mahogany bars and upright poles, hung with immense fluffy towels and huckabacks in a diminishing range of sizes, each embroidered in blue with the initials LC.
Half way through that not untypical paragraph I was medically dead for about a whole minute.
So that was the first thing. The next thing I didn't like was the plot. Even before I started I didn't like it - the blurb announces that this is the story of a brutal rape perpetrated in somewhat mysterious circumstances upon an English woman in India. Yes, that's right, the self-same central plot of E M Forster's A Passage to India (which I thought was pretty good). How strange - it was obviously deliberate on the part of the author to lift this rape plot from Forster and re-do it, rock bands and film directors do this all the time, so why not authors? But this particular plot is kind of a drag, really. We've been down this symbolic road already - naive imperialists defiled by intimacy with the conquered peoples - it's all too crude for me. You could argue that Forster lifted the plot from Daisy Miller by Henry James and replanted it in India, and I daresay it isn't original to HJ either. Now it is true that the plot is hardly the main point of this novel because as Dr J said about Pamela, if you read this book for the story you would hang yourself. Meaning that moss, stalactites and your fingernails all grow faster than the plot in this book. So if your plot is just the hook you're hanging other things on, then get a more interesting one.
The next thing I would like to complain about is the length of many of the sentences. Paul Scott was evidently a major fan of the late Henry James and he likes to run amok with those clauses - there's a kind of effete machismo about the long sentence. It can be fun but it can so very easily be too much of a good thing. Dig the following (he is talking, as he always is in this book, about race relations) [note, the maidan is a public space in the town] :
Or is this a sense conveyed only to an Englishman, as a result of his residual awareness of a racial privilege now officially extinct, so that, borne clubwards at the invitation of a Brahmin lawyer, on a Saturday evening, driven by a Muslim chauffeur in the company of a Rajput lady, through the quickly fading light that holds lovely old Mayapore suspended between the day and the dark, bereft of responsibility and therefore of any sense of dignity other than that which he may be able to muster in himself, as himself, he may feel himself similarly suspended, caught up by his own people's history and the thrust of a current that simply would not wait for them wholly to comprehend its force, and he may then sentimentally recall, in passing, that the maidan was once sacrosanct to the Civil and Military, and respond, fleetingly, to the tug of a vague, generalised regret that the maidan no longer looks as it did once, when at this time of day it was empty of all but a few late riders cantering homewards.
Ooof... I need a lie down after a sentence like that. Was Mr Scott working with a typewriter on which the full stop key was about to break so he was trying to conserve its use? The full stop is such a pleasant thing. It is the reader's friend. It gives the brain a little pause, a little twiglet for our bird-thoughts to alight on for a second before the next sentence carries us aloft again. I like full stops.
The last thing I would like to complain about is that the characters who are given all the long monologues or who write the long letters are all tedious windbags. They don't know when to stop. I wanted to wring their scrawny necks. In my last example this guy is talking about the swanky country club in Mayapore :
The compulsory subscription was waived in the case of all but regular officers and two new types of membership were introduced. Officers with temporary or emergency commissions could enjoy either what was called Special membership, which involved paying the subscription and was meant of course to attract well-brought-up officers who could be assumed to know how to behave, or Privileged Temporary Membership which entitled the privileged temporary member to use the club's facilities on certain specific days of the week but which could be withdrawn without notice.
Oh my God.
No!
Finally, though, I just couldn't stand the company of the British colonial class in India, they were a hideous gaggle of superannuated racists so I abandoned this very remarkable and undoubtedly brilliant novel with relief.
note - I would like someone who five-starred this book to tell me if they actually liked the quotes above! Although if they do I'll probably back away slowly with wide scared eyes.
The perfect companion piece to Slumdog Millionaire, and if you didn't like that movie, you won't like this book for the same reasons. It's a no-nonsen...moreThe perfect companion piece to Slumdog Millionaire, and if you didn't like that movie, you won't like this book for the same reasons. It's a no-nonsense bulldozing mordant splenetic jackhammer of a story written as a tough slangy 300 page fast-reading monologue. It's a novel of information, not art. It tells you all about modern India with a traditional rags-to-riches fable. Our hero murders his employer unapologetically, and that's how he gets his riches. This is not rocket science. This is smashing a guy over the head with a broken bottle of Johnny Walker. But 90% of the book is not really the story, it's an anguished howl of rage about a distance of eighteen inches. In India, and indeed in other places too, the Rich and the Poor inhabit different universes. But the rich hire some of the poor as servants. This novel is the story of a servant who was a driver. In the car, the driver is separated from his employer (the word used here is Master) by the short distance of 18 inches. But economically, psychologically, medically, it's really 400 light years, as we know. And yet, every day, there they are, cheek by jowl, 18 inches apart, the one regarding the other with irritated amusement or annoyance or contempt, depending on mood, and being reciprocated with fawning fear and even awe. Our hero Balram is the rare beast (white tiger) who does not succumb to this fear and awe. But it's a struggle, and I was glad to be along for the ride.
In the London Review of Books, Sanjay Subrahmanyam almost trashes The White Tiger. His main beef is the language of the novel :
"What of Balram Halwai? What does he sound like? Despite the odd namaste, daal, paan and ghat, his vocabulary is not sprinkled with North Indian vernacular terms. His sentences are mostly short and crudely constructed, apparently a reflection of the fact that we’re dealing with a member of the ‘subaltern’ classes. He doesn’t engage in Rushdian word-play. But he does use a series of expressions that simply don’t add up. He describes his office as a ‘hole in the wall’. He refers to ‘kissing some god’s arse’, an idiomatic expression that doesn’t exist in any North Indian language. ‘Half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas’ and the Chinese prime minister is advised never to ‘let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull’. On another matter, he sneers: ‘They’re so yesterday.’ A clever little phrase appears: ‘A statutory warning – as they say on cigarette packs – before we begin.’ Dogs are referred to as ‘mutts’. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. This is not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text."
and then devastatingly:
"The paradox is that for many of this novel’s readers, this lack of verisimilitude will not matter because for them India is and will remain an exotic place. This book adds another brick to the patronising edifice it wants to tear down."
He's right, it didn't matter to me that a guy who doesn't speak English is represented as using hundreds of idiomatic English phrases. But for me that problem is the same as the one posed by the question "how can this first person narrator remember conversations in detail which happened years ago and anyway, who the hell is she talking to?" - i.e. it's a device, we suspend our disbelief, we do it all the time : every time we watch a movie we could be asking ourselves (but don't) "whose point of view is this all from?". Who gathered all those documents together to form the text known as the novel "Dracula"? Well, no one, because Bram Stoker made it all up. How could Clarissa have found the time to write all those long, long letters in "Clarissa"? And so on. (note : Subrahmanyam was the only really dissident voice I found regarding The White Tiger so I thought his argument was worth considering.)
Postscript
The White Tiger is the 9th Booker Prize Winner I've read and redresses the balance between the Splendid (this one, Midnight's Children, Remains of the Day and Sacred Hunger) and the What Were They Thinking (Life & Times of Michael K, Hotel Du Lac, Possession, Life of Pi and especially, remarkably, horrendously, Vernon God Little).(less)
When the British go there will be no more communal trouble in India.
In 1947 approximately one million people were slau...moreIn 1946 Nehru told a journalist
When the British go there will be no more communal trouble in India.
In 1947 approximately one million people were slaughtered in a whirlpool of mutual hatred, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh against each other. The number of victims was never discovered. It was in everyone's interests to play down this Indian holocaust, because everyone was guilty, to one degree or another. And as Patrick French laconically observes,
mutual genocide never attracts attention in the way that a one-way genocide does.
Which helps to answer the Zen question : "If a tree falls in a forest where there are no ears to hear does it make a sound?" The answer clearly is : no. And always we hear the unarguable deathly tones of Joseph Stalin duly reminding us that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of one million men is a statistic. Is there a moral here? Yes, several, including - you have to get your story out, otherwise - no story.
Human experience is so often grotesque. On 22 July 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian guy living in London, was shot dead by the London Metropolitan Police. The investigation into the circumstances of this death has taken up acres of newsprint, miles of newsreel footage, two investigations and an inquest costing millions. The De Menezes family has been the object of universal sympathy in Brazil, in the UK and elsewhere. This was a big story. Let me contrast that with an average suicide bomb from the last ten years - let's pick at random 13 July 2008 - this suicide bomber killed "at least 21" in a market in the Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan province in Afghanistan at about 10.30 local time. Who were they? No one knows apart from their own families. Now contrast that with this 1947 Indian holocaust. We don't even know where the deaths took place, except in general terms - "villages in the south of Punjab", or say in train sidings in some shunting yard in Sind province. This million of human beings, just as unique and irreplaceable as Jean Charles de Menezes, were butchered and thrown into the meatgrinder of oblivion and in many cases the butchers went back to their work as if they'd just been off for a short refreshing break in the countryside. One guy quoted in this book remembers a work colleague disappearing suddenly :
We all thought he must have migrated. Out of the blue he came back and told us that he had been away doing important work. 'What was the work?' we asked. He replied 'I have been killing Muslims. I have killed seventy-two of them in 35 days.' That was how people thought at the time.
So Liberty or Death is a very dense book, three books in fact. One is an expertly conducted dance through the maze of Indo-Anglo-& latterly Pak-relations from 1890 onwards which includes many delighful and funny character assassinations on the way (no one escapes unscathed). Another is a very tedious slog through the intricacies of the same which often gets bogged down in the accounts of various spy vs spy vs spy nonsense. (I hate spy stuff, it's ghastly tedious. Two Le Carres was enough for me.) The third is where French himself busts through the fourth wall to become a character in his own history book - chunks of travel writing suddenly appear like a welcome zephyr from Kashmir, like a scent of patchouli on a midsummer evening, like - well anyway, there should have been much much more of that stuff, I loved it.
Did this book tell me what I wanted to know?
Yes.
Does it have a really bad title?
Yes. For goodness sake, guys! Liberty or Death? Really?
Does the photo of the author on the inner cover put you off somewhat as it makes him look like someone on day-release from an institution?
After about page 200 I realised this was like eating Turkish Delight morning noon and night and my spiritual teeth were beginning to dissolve under a...moreAfter about page 200 I realised this was like eating Turkish Delight morning noon and night and my spiritual teeth were beginning to dissolve under a tide of sickliness which didn't ever let up. All these characters are so unbearably cute, even the less-nice ones. If post-independent India was crossed with Bambi, it would be Vikram Seth's endless gurgling prose. So I stopped reading and drove several three inch nails into my head, and I've been all right since then.(less)
I don't actually think this novel is the best thing since sliced armadilloes but for some reason the relationship between Jamilla and the hapless goon...moreI don't actually think this novel is the best thing since sliced armadilloes but for some reason the relationship between Jamilla and the hapless goon who gets foisted on her in a hideous arranged marriage kind of way has remained with me almost like I met them once. Jamilla was one of the coolest women ever. Or maybe just one of the most bad tempered. (less)
Just back from watching the movie and.... well... it kind of highlights the less great parts of the book, just because it's a movie. You notice...moreUpdate:
Just back from watching the movie and.... well... it kind of highlights the less great parts of the book, just because it's a movie. You notice the non-plot, you notice that the characters get dragged around from India to Pakistan to Bangladesh depending which big political event or war is happening as we make our way from 1947 to 1977; and we really notice how gushingly sentimental it all turns out in the end. All of these problems are there in the book but are melted, dissolved, and blended like tasty spices in a piquant dish. All is made good by Rushdie's fantastic prose style which is utterly stunning and makes the book a MUST READ. And the prose, even the bits read by the narrator, who is Mr Rushdie himself, is not in the movie. Because it's a movie not a book.
SUMMARY
Book : 10!
Film : 5.5
************
An earlier non-review:
Everyone knows Salman was once a humble copywriter for an ad agency. And he came up with a couple of good ones – famously, one for the National Dairy Council, when they were advertising cream cakes. The slogan was “Naughty … but nice” and the ads were televised around 1980.
I was listening to a lot of American pop stuff from the 50s the other day and what came up but Frankie Avalon, singing a daft song called “Gingerbread”
REFRAIN Ginger bread ginger bread ginger bread ginger bread Ginger bread ginger bread ginger bread ginger bread You're full of sugar you're full of spice You're kinda naughty but you're naughty and nice
Salman Rushdie – you’re busted. And you're outed as a Frankie Avalon fan.
I don't know why they do it but they do it a lot -
Brick Lane : A Novel
And there I was expecting this oblong of printed material to be
Brick Lane : A P...moreI don't know why they do it but they do it a lot -
Brick Lane : A Novel
And there I was expecting this oblong of printed material to be
Brick Lane : A Plate of Spaghetti
Anyway. Other reviews would have you believe that this book is terrifically boring, beaten only for tediousness by Some Variations in the Major Groups of Plankton of the Kamchatka Peninsula Littoral by R.K. Litkynshovskaya and P.I. Podgorna-Bialaczczka. So why did I really enjoy this novel? Could it be that after a while I accepted my fate in the same way our heroine accepts hers, and my heart, like hers, fluttered when the slightest thing out of the ordinary happened? Or maybe I'm a Samuel Beckett fan and don't realise it. It's very true I do love the music of Steve Reich, which could never be described as dramatic, and indeed has often been compared to Some Variations in the Major Groups of Plankton of the Kamchatka Peninsula Littoral. But really I think I prefer the company of Nazneen and her very aggravating husband Chanu over, say, Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal any day of the week. Not to mention most of my work colleagues and family members. Of course it may be true that should Monica Ali choose to write a graceful and compassionate novel about any of that rabble, I'd be glued to that too. (less)
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