Not the Booker prize shortlist: a long look at The Smoke Is Rising by Mahesh Rao

Despite an exhausting profusion of points of view, this is a fascinating drama of Mysore's halting journey into an uncertain future

Novice writers are often warned about using multiple points of view in their narratives. The earlier Not the Booker entrant Louis Armand could feature as the poster boy for that advice. The varying perspectives in Cairo overwhelm the story, confuse and distract. The book is so fractured, so out of control that it's nigh on unreadable. Reading that book, apparently, also gave me a certain amount of plural perspective phobia. When I started The Smoke Is Rising, I had a sickening sense of familiar problems.

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