The Fourth Canvas

by Rana Bose

Fiction. In the early 1970s a reclusive artist and philosopher disappears in Paris after completing a fantastic series of canvases that trace the rise and fall of empires. Eventually his bloated body is dragged from the Seine. The knowledge and insight die with him. Years later, Claude Chiragi, a graduate student in Montreal receives a mysterious painting and senses the relevance of the theory embedded in the artwork. His curiosity is instantly aroused, and he launches a global search for clues that will help him understand the message and unravel the mystery of the artist's fate. Embedded in the paintings are tell-tale historical clues, mysteriously coded, that predict imperial entropy in the future--from economic collapse and cultural decadence to a coup d'etat against civil society. Kidnappings, killings, undercover conspiracy and a trek into ancestral roots, lend to this novel its quality of intellectual mystery and gripping suspense.

200 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2008

About the author

Rana Bose is a well-known playwright in Canada and has had ten of his plays published by Seagull, Prestige, and The Canadian Theatre Review. All of these plays have been performed in Canada, US, and India and perhaps elsewhere. He has been an engineer, mentor, consultant, performance poet, playwright, and resides in Montreal and sometimes in Kolkata. He is also one of the editors of the webzine Montreal Serai.

Reviews

[Tina]

I picked up this book because it was the assigned book for a book club. The only reason I finished this book is because I have to run said book club. It was chosen by a community partner of our library and . . . let's just say we are not letting them choose the books anymore.

The basic premise of the novel is solid, which is how it does actually deserve the one star I'm awarding it. There was a little bit of interesting story there. But this was totally drowned by the massive amounts of purple prose and description that buries the reader in what feels like a never ending stream of pointlessness.

I do feel like this has an interesting story in it's 200 pages. It just should have been told in a much shorter tale.

[Rob]

(5/10) I'm not sure how this ended up on my to-read list -- I hazily remember a book review on a politics website I no longer read. But hey, there's no reason why an obscure conspiracy novel from a small press can't be just as rewarding as big-name or even canonical work. In this case, however, The Fourth Canvas shows that the personal idiosyncracies of the small press can be as much a weakness as a virtue.

The Fouth Canvas is pitched as an intellectual mystery novel, and it broadly follows that path, with a post-colonial group of disaffected academics trying to discover the secret behind a mysterious painting. Bose's strength is in developing characters and a milieu: there are a lot of great environmental details, and the characters never seem archetypal. There's also a refreshing post-coloniality (yes, I know that's not a word) to the novel, with protagonists from numerous ethnic backgrounds and a trans-national story. Bose's investment in leftist politics will become clear to the point of didacticism in the conclusion.

What Bose is not so great at is putting together a thriller, or really putting together a plot at all. Unraveling the mystery doesn't seem to require much of the characters, who regularly wander into the exposition that they need. The prose is pretty leaden throughout, and this really hurts the attempt to convince us that a certain character is a brilliant intellectual. On top of the lack of stylistic grace, the ideas presented as revolutionary and subversive are little more than warmed-over Vico that would be yawned at by contemporary academia. The novel's ending suggests that the whole point of the story was to convey a political message, but that message isn't one that you couldn't find in a muddled Counterpunch article. If you're going to write a didactic novel, at least make sure the lesson is interesting.

Convinced of its own originality, The Fouth Canvas sabotages what strengths it has. There's potentially itneresting material here, but I would reccomend the Illuminatus trilogy over this for conspiracy thriller/political polemic hybrid. If Bose was willing to get as crazy as Robert Anton Wilson, this would have been much more enjoyable.