A Suitable Boy (A Bridge of Leaves, #1) in Never too Late to Read Classics

Oct 18, 2020 Faraaz rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: south-asian-literature

A historical novel comprising 1500 pages (around 2790 for my ebook) is enticing for a reader and lover of historical fiction. The fact that it explores a region and period so critical to my own sense of history and identity made it even more appealing. So for a book of this scale to cover just 1 year (1951) almost feels like a wasted effort, sort of 'much ado about nothing'.

Comparisons with other works of historical fiction like Middlemarch and War and Peace are inevitable given it's epic struc A historical novel comprising 1500 pages (around 2790 for my ebook) is enticing for a reader and lover of historical fiction. The fact that it explores a region and period so critical to my own sense of history and identity made it even more appealing. So for a book of this scale to cover just 1 year (1951) almost feels like a wasted effort, sort of 'much ado about nothing'.

Comparisons with other works of historical fiction like Middlemarch and War and Peace are inevitable given it's epic structure. This ultimately is where A Suitable Boy falls short for me. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace to understand a certain moment in history, when France and Russia went into war. He could not understand how vast segments of societies in both these countries supported and cheered on a war that was clearly suicidal for both sides. He explored the past, with the hindsight of the present/future.

Seth wrote A Suitable Boy between the years of 1985-1992. By then he would have seen three wars with Pakistan, two over Kashmir, brutal occupation of Kashmir, Sikh riots of 1984, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and violent Hindu-Muslim riots and pogroms. Seth explores politics in painstaking detail yet with all that research and benefit of hindsight, he is not able to provide any critical insight beyond the Congress worldview of a secular India. In the 1950s, this might have seemed optimistic, but by the time Seth wrote this book, sounds wilfully naive.

The main story revolves around Lata and the quest to find 'a suitable boy' for her. This is not dissimilar from a big Bollywood blockbuster from the 90s that built their plot on a similar storyline. This is not a criticism. South Asian weddings are massive and complicated. It's the world around this, the world of the early 1950s as the new nation state of India opens its eyes to Land Reform, Constitution building, first elections, political movements, religious disharmony and challenges of secularism that makes this setting interesting. And it is in this aspect that Seth, despite all the research and world building falls short.

The two characters I found most interesting, Zainab and Abida are pushed into the background over the course of the book in exchange for other side characters that lose your interest after a point. My rating of this book is more out of disappointment at what a literary work of this scale could have been.

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