Deborah Moggach is a
prolific British novelist who has published seventeen novels. Her 2004 novel, The
Best Exotic Merigold Hotel was made into a film a few years ago.
I haven’t seen the
film and the only reason I picked up the novel from the local library was
because I was looking for some light entertainment after finishing Howard
Jacobson’s collection of articles in The Independent, published under the
title Whatever It Is , I Don’t Like It. I liked Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It
a lot, and found it very funny, too; but, at the same time it was “heavy”
entertainment (I don’t know a better way of putting it).
I was looking to read
something which wouldn’t tax my brain cells, something I could read
without really having to take in the nuances (because there are no nuances),
without the need to pay much attention to the plot (because there is either no
plot or it is not incidental), and the sentences flowed easily enough without
being too clever.
The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel seemed to fulfil the requirements. The blurb
described it as an “addictive comedy”, “a glorious romp”, and “warm, wise and
funny”. I was a bit concerned that one review, according to the novel’s blurb,
found it “deeply poignant”; however, since that review was from Daily
Mail, I thought I could safely ignore it. On an impulse I borrowed
another Moggach novel, The Heartbreak Hotel, which,
according to the blurb was all the things The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel was,
and some more.
Did The
Best Exotic Merigold Hotel live up to my expectations? Well, yes,
although, as mentioned above, the bar was not exactly set high in this
instance.
The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel tells the story of a bunch of old biddies from
different parts of the UK who are shipped off to an Old People’s Home in
Bangalore, India, except that the chancers who have cooked up this scheme are
calling it the eponymous hotel so that the old codgers can deceive themselves
that they are on some sort of extended, indefinite even, vacation, and not a
retirement home. The brains behind this scheme are an Indian doctor named Ravi
Kapoor, a consultant in the increasingly overstretched NHS (no stereotype here)
and his cousin, Sonny, a wheeler-dealer businessman from Bangalore who has his
fingers in more pies than Dawn French can eat in a whole year. Kapoor has
migrated to England because he hates India. Why does he hate India? Because
India suffocates him. He is now a doctor in the NHS. During the day he takes
abuse from the patients who don’t want to be treated by a darkie, and in the
evenings he listens to Mozart. He is married to Pauline who works at a travel
agent, and hates his father-in-law, who is more randy than a Billy goat and has been
kicked out of every possible retirement home in the South of England because of lecherous behaviour which shows no signs of diminishing despite the
advancing years. The father-in-law, Norman, is camping in Kapoor’s house and is
making his life a misery. So Kapoor in the company of his enterprising cousin
(which is one way of describing him), Sonny, opens a retirement home in
Bangalore in a ramshackle bungalow owned by a Zoroastrian and his chiropodist
wife who is impossible to please. In due course the “exotic hotel” is full of
British geriatrics, who, for a variety of reasons, have decided that
Bangalore, India, is where they want to spend their last days. It is a diverse collection. There is Norman
the lecher; the obligatory bigot (who, I am pleased to inform, is slowly won over by India’s charms); an
over-the-top couple that gets on your nerves five minutes before you have met
them; a woman who—would you believe it?—was born in Bangalore in the days of
the Raj and had visited the Merigold Hotel—because it was a school—every day
till the age of eight when her parents cruelly uprooted and sent her to a
boarding school in England (which must have done something right because the
woman became a successful BBC producer); and a genteel, middle class lady
called Evelyn, whose children would rather send her to India than find her a
decent retirement home in England (with its enchanting smells of boiled cabbage
and stale urine). As the story
progresses (narrated mainly through the eyes of Evelyn) there are the expected
twists, coincidences, reunions, people falling in and out of love, and—am I
forgetting anything?— unexpected deaths (responsible, I guess, for the
poignancy detected by a critic).
Moggach leaves nothing
to chance, and packs the novel with clichés about India. The beggars, the
crowds, the call centres and the oh-so-well-behaved young men and women who
work there and make futile attempts to pass themselves off as Bobs and Marys
from Enfield to their British customers, the unfathomable serenity and
passivity of Hinduism that enables people to lead their terrible lives without
complaining, the mysticism, the exoticism of India—you name it and Moggach has
supplied it in the novel. The portrayal of India, or, of one of its sprawling
metropolises to be exact, is, despite all the clichés, compassionate. One does
not expect icy objectivity in novels such as this, but neither does, to her
credit, Moggach allow the novel to swoon in saccharine emotions. Well, just a
bit, not too much.
On her official
website Moggach says that The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel came
out of her reflections on getting older, about what is going to happen to us
all. She wanted to explore questions of race and mortality but also wanted it
to be a comedy of manners between East and West. The novel doesn’t offer any
insight into how Indians view mortality, unless the sayings from various Hindu
and Buddhist sacred books quoted at the beginning of each chapter (and which
have no connection with the contents of the chapters) are supposed to provide
the reader with insight into the Hindu way of understanding mortality. What the
reader gets is the British approach to mortality (denial, self-pity,
bitterness), only that these people are gathered in a crumbling old bungalow in
Bangalore instead os a miserable retirement home in Dulwich.
I give The
Best Exotic Merigold Hotel A minus for vocabulary, B + for efforts, and
C minus for entertainment.
