Book of the Month: The Hindi Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan)

A frequent mistake many in the West make about distant countries like India is that they represent homogenous cultures. In Britain, for example, many natives wouldn’t have a clue as to whether a brown skinned person is from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is another matter that the aforementioned three countries used to be one country until sixty years ago, and ruled by the British for almost two hundred years. Undivided India was partitioned into the Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan in 1947, when the British rule came to an end; later, Pakistan, following a war between India and Pakistan, in 1971, was divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The partition of India forms one of the strands of Monica Pradhan’s 2007 debut (and, to my knowledge, only) novel, the suggestively titled The Hindi-Bindi Club.

I first noticed The Hindi-Bindi Club two years after it was published, prominently displayed in the about-to-go-bust Border’s Book store. There was a glowing blurb from the Observer which described the novel as a ‘cracking . . . and charming tale.’ On the back-cover was a summary of the noel which purported to tell the stories of two generations of Indian women, living in America. That sounded a bit like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck club. Having recently read The Joy Luck Club (which I had liked) I made a mental note to read The Hindi-Bindi Club (I am always willing to read ‘cracking and charming tales’) one of these days, preferably after I had forgotten The Joy Luck Club. In due course I did forget The Joy Luck Club. But I forgot about The Hindi-Bindi Club, too. Until last week, when I spotted it in the second-hand book-shop I have taken to frequenting in the past few months. (The old man who runs the book-shop is knowledgeable and likes to chat, and his shop-assistant is not entirely unattractive.) It cost only a couple of quid and I bought it. I finished reading the novel in a couple of sittings, which—I have no hesitation in suggesting this—suggests that the novel is a very easy read.

The Hindi-Bindi Club runs a fine line between genre fiction (Chick Lit) and literary fiction that tells the story of the immigrant experience in America (Indian, this time round) and the associated issues (clash of cultures, values, and the balancing acts that the immigrant parents as well as their ‘American’ children have to make all the time etcetera.) I am inclining towards The Hindi-Bindi Club being a Chick Lit. Not that it bothers me. It has all the positive attributes that I have come to associate with chick Lit.

The Hindi-Bindi Club tells the stories of three Indian women, who become friends in America. The women come from very different parts of India; indeed one of them, Saroj Chawla, comes from Lahore, which is in current day Pakistan. Chawla’s Hindu family escapes to India during the partition, after losing all its wealth (and the lives of a few family members). While the family succeeds in India, Saroj continues to hanker (in her mind) after her idyllic childhood in Lahore, before she was violently uprooted. She has never had a sense of belonging, she says, in India. The other two women, Uma and Meenal, come from Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (now Mumbai) respectively. The three women’s sub-cultures, in India, have about as much commonality amongst them as the Brits have with the Portuguese Culture. (Going on a drunken rampage through the city centres on Friday nights is frowned upon in the Portuguese culture.) Yet the three women have become friends in America by dint of the following factors. (1) They all belong to the Indian Diaspora, which, when they first arrived in America, was small. (2) They live in the same area. (3) They are all housewives whose husbands hold down White-Collar jobs and, over the years, have become prosperous by hard work. Of the three Uma has shown herself to be a rebel by marrying a Phirangi (which, the novel informs you, is an Indian word for a white foreigner). Uma’s husband is an Irish American, and by marrying him she has incurred life-long enmity of her father who, back in Kolkata, refuses to forgive her for bringing on shame to the family, a grudge he takes to his death. (The Indians in the novel reveal interesting race prejudices; it would appear that Indians of certain generation heartily disapprove of Indians marrying whites. If an Indian does marry a non-Indian, it is a calamity. They couch their concerns in cultural terms and the difficulties in adjusting to living with someone from another culture, but, you can’t help feeling that, underneath it all, is the belief that only a ‘good Hindu spouse’ would do, and everyone else is inferior. Later in the novel, Meenal’s husband, who is a surgeon, cuts off their daughter—also a doctor and therefore, one would assume, more than capable of making up her own mind—completely when she marries a white Rock musician. When the daughter’s marriage fails because of husband’s infidelity, the father’s first response is ‘I told you so.’ I wonder how representative the views of some of the characters in this novel are of the real Indians. I once heard the author Louis de Bernieres say in a literary programme (I forget the context) that the only system more labyrinthine and convoluted than the British class system was the Indian caste system; so complex was the caste system that—Bernieres hazarded a guess—even the Indians probably did not understand it fully. Pradhan’s novel does not touch upon this subject at all, perhaps because Pradhan, a second generation Indian in America, does not understand it herself (if one follows Bernieres’s hypothesis).)

The three women—Meenal, Uma and  Saroj—are close friends, which means that their daughters, when they are growing up, are forced to spend extended periods in one another’s company, as their mothers host, along with other Indian women in the area, gatherings which the daughters label as the Hindi-Bindi Club. (Bindi, Pradhan helpfully informs us, is an Indian word for dot, which traditional Indian women wear on their foreheads. Hindi is a language, not to be mistaken for Hindu, which, we are told, is a ‘religion/way of life’.)

The three daughters—Kiran, Preity and Rani—are the younger generation of Indian women in the novel with their own narratives.

None of the women is lacking in drama in her life. Saroj, outwardly happily married to her husband—she has no intentions of leaving him—, who is no Don Juan (‘A few thrusts and the party is over’), is secretly having an affair with another Indian man, on whom she had had a crush as a teenager in India before her marriage, and who, conveniently, is also settled in America, making a fortune). Her husband, Sandeep, is a flirt and never loses an opportunity to flirt with Meenal in any function. Meenal has a secret crush on Patric McGuiness, Uma’s husband, and suspects that her surgeon husband, Yash, might have had flings with work-colleagues although she has no proof. The only secret-free marriage amongst these three, it would appear, is between Uma and the phirangi. Meenal, when the novel opens, is recovering from a double mastectomy following breast cancer. Meenal’s close brush with death has opened the doors of her minds to let in all manner of Eastern philosophies which she believes has brought her closer to God and made a better person. Uma might be happily married, but she has her own demons to conquer, such as her mother’s suicide when Uma was young. The dead mother, it turns out, was an amateur writer and has left behind her musings on life, in Bengali, in tablets, which are distributed amongst Uma’s five sisters. Uma’s plan is to make an anthology of her mother’s writings, but some of the sisters are reluctant to part with their inheritance.

Now to younger generation of Indian women. They are all married to white American men. Although the marriage of one, Meenal’s headstrong daughter, Kiran, has ended badly, the other two are happily married. One of them (I forget which one) is a rocket scientist (I mean an actual rocket scientist) but has discovered the inner artist in her. Another one suffers from clinical depression—it might be the rocket scientist who is clinically depressed; I really can’t be sure; there are so many dramatic things happening in the lives of these women that it is difficult to keep tracks. One other—probably Preity Chawla, Saroj’s daughter— used to be a secret bulimic in her younger years and, once, as a teenager, while in India on a holiday with her parents, had a crush on a Muslim boy before her mother came down more heavily on her than a Japanese sumo wrestling champion on his opponent. Now in her thirties, Preity is plagued with a desire to trace this boy, a desire that her alarmed mother warns her, would bring nothing but trouble. Kiran, the headstrong doctor, announces that she is not averse to the idea of a semi-arranged marriage, which sends her aunties from the Hindi-Bindi Club into a kind of frenzy American psychiatrists would have no hesitation in diagnosing as a manic episode, as per the DSM criteria. Names of all sorts of single / divorced Indian boys from ‘good families’ are suggested, but it does not work out as either Kiran does not like them, or they don’t connect with her. No marks for guessing that Kiran finally settles for another white American boy (cue for her father to throw an apoplectic fit), but there is a twist. This American man is living as a paying guest in Pune, India, where Kiran’s grandparents live, and is learning Marathi, the mother-tongue of Kiran’s family. What are the chances of that happening, eh?

As this saccharine-sweet novel comes to an end, Kiran is getting married in Pune, in the traditional Hindu ceremony in the morning and a Christian one in the evening; all the protagonists have sorted out their problems neatly (even Kiran’s father, under immense pressure from his family, gives his blessings, although it could have been more effusive than ‘It’s your life; do what you want’); and Kiran is dancing merrily into the sunset. It all ends happily.

Pradhan certainly knows how to weave a story; the prose flows easily, with sprinkling of witty observations and remarks at regular intervals, which bring a smile to your face.

There are a fair number of main characters (a total of six), most of them painted in broad brush strokes. It is not surprising that the character that lingers the longest in your mind when you finish the novel is Meenal, who is the least dramatic of the lot. Pradhan has obviously developed the character of Meenal with a lot of love and care. By comparison, there is a sense of incompleteness to other members of the Hindi-Bindi Club.

Pradhan introduces big themes in the novel, but therein also lies a problem. There are more big themes than the novel can justice to. The tragedy of partition of India might have been a subject for a novel in its own right; here it forms the background of one of the protagonists (who, incidentally, has other interesting things happening in her life) and you are left with the feeling that this strand has not been exploited to its full potential. The family tragedy lurking in Uma’s background, similarly, remains just one of many dramatic events in the novel and the author perhaps has missed a trick in not exploring it further. Uma’s search for her mother’s ‘tablets’ peters into nothing of significance, as if the author lost her interest in this strand of the novel.

The Hindi-Bindi Club is full of interesting titbits about Indian / Hindu customs. Indeed, at times, the novel reads almost like ‘Introduction to Indian Culture and Subcultures’, which suggests that the novel is aimed primarily at Western readers who, Pradhan must have a reason to believe (probably not without reason), are largely clueless about India and its culture. Most of the time it works; occasionally, though, it drags a bit, such as the overlong last section describing Kiran’s marriage to the Marathi-speaking American for Texas that includes half a page description (I kid you not) how a sari is worn. Apparently wearing a modern Indian sari is more than just draping a several feet long piece of cloth around your body; it is almost a science and requires a technique not easy to master; supreme hand control is essential, and if, like mine, spatial orientation is not your strong point, you are in serious trouble.

Pradhan probably also has an interest in Indian cuisine. At the end of each chapter are recipes of Indian dishes (with list of ingredients longer than M1), allegedly signature dishes of some or more of the characters in the novel. These recipes are not weaved into the narrative (for example, as in Anthony Capella’s Food of Love) and remain interesting add-ons. If you are not particularly interested in how to make a ‘chapaati’ or a stew of ‘Moong Daal’, you can skip the pages; you will miss nothing. (The recipes are delicious, though; I tried the Goan Shrimp Curry and it was yummy.)

The Hindi-Bindi Club is a novelistic version of a feel-good movie. It will not fail to cheer you up if you are feeling gloomy. On a rainy day, make yourself a hot cup of coco, wrap yourself in a cosy blanket (or a sari, if you are (a) competent and (b) a woman or identify yourself as one) and lose yourself in the world of Meenal, Saroj, Uma, Kiran, Preity, and Rani.

Book of the Month: Two Brothers (Ben Elton)

Call me snobbish but until recently I had not read any of Ben Elton’s novels, because Elton wasn’t literary enough for me. I changed my mind after I heard him in a live interview when he was promoting his fourteenth novel, Two Brothers. This was partly because the interviewer, a pompous sounding man, no doubt a lecturer in some provincial town, treated Elton throughout the interview with the kind of amusing condescension one reserves for a dullard in the family whose attempt at whatever he is doing is rather pathetic but nevertheless needs encouragement for no other reason than human kindness. Elton, on his part, gave back as much as he got (he even asked the interviewer at one stage how many novels he had written that were published). I liked that. I also liked that Elton gave the impression (with considerable success) of being supremely unconcerned about literary critics not taking him seriously. His novels sold by the millions (apparently) and that would do for him.

I decided to read Two Brothers. Partly because, having decided to read Ben Elton, I felt his fourteenth novel was as good a novel as any of his previous thirteen, but also because Elton said that it was his most personal novel, based on his family’s history. It might not have been a literary novel (Elton couldn’t give tuppence about it) but it was a novel with a serious theme, with Holocaust as its background.

Two Brothers, as the title implies is the story of two brothers. Two Jewish brothers, except that one of them is not Jewish, as he is adopted. The novel is however not just about the two brothers, Paulus and Otto; it is also about their parents Wolfgang and Frieda Stengel; Dagmar Fischer the rich Jewish girl both the brothers are in love with, and Silke Krause, their Aryan friend and a budding Communist,  the daughter of the Stengels’ friend who is secretly in love with Otto. The story unfolds against the backdrop to the novel is the Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, from the days of the Weimer republic to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. The novel traces the early happy years in the lives of the Stengel family—Wolfgang is a jazz musician while Frieda is training to be a doctor. The family survives the post First World War chaos in the 1920s before the family’s fortunes brighten a bit, only to sink again in the Great Depression and the rising anti-Semitism in Germany. The time of the novel is set in two time periods: the 1920s’ and 1930s’ Germany and the Britain in the 1950s where one of the brothers has been living following the Second World War. I shall not reveal which of the two brothers was adopted and which survived the war and the Holocaust, although I do not think Elton means it to be the secret; the identities are revealed long before the novel reaches its end. The surviving brother has been working in the British Foreign Office and, a decade after the war ended, has received a letter from East Germany from Dagmar, who—the reader is informed in the initial chapters—married the other brother before the outbreak of the war, expressing a wish to meet him. The brother who has anglicized his name to Michael is eager to meet Dagmar except that he is quite sure that the writer of the letter is not Dagmar—who, he is convinced, perished in the Holocaust— but a Stasi agent who has a very good knowledge of the Stengel family history. This is a trap to lure him. MI5 are of the same view and meet with Michael prior to his proposed travel to East Berlin. Michael has a shrewd guess as to who has written the letter, but he still is determined to travel to the city of his birth and meet the writer of the letter. This is not the only twist in the novel. Elton packs in more twists in the novel than on a winding country road in the South of France.

At almost 600 pages Two Brothers is a huge sprawling novel. Elton does know how to spin a yarn. The prose style is pacy, and at times gripping. A quick and easy read, which, despite the unpleasantness of the subject matter, amusing at times (without being irreverent). Elton paints his characters with a broad brush; he is not one for subtlety. Paulus is the calm and calculating one; he has a plan for everything, the sort of boy whom you can easily visualise sitting in Dragon’s Den asking searching questions to the would be entrepreneurs, calculating potential profits. Otto is the headstrong one, whose response to any conflict is an invitation to the other party to step aside and have a fight. Frieda, their mother, is nobleness personified. Most of the characters drawn are of only two shades. The character of Dagmar, who comes to play a pivotal role in the lives of the two brothers, on the other hand, has no depth. The heavy style of exposition becomes a tad clunky at times. The atmosphere of terror (for the Jews) unleashed by Hitler and the Nazis is described in a manner that has the force of tornado, with language that is at times florid. Perhaps Elton was of the view that the the nature of the atrocity perpetrated by the Nazis could only be conveyed adequately by prose that pulled no punches. The result, at times, is reiterating the obvious. Thus, in a chapter on the Night of Broken Glasses, after describing at some considerable length, using stark images, the violence unleashed against the Jews, Elton informs the readers that it was apocalyptic. Elton has done historical research for the novel, and is driven by the need to demonstrate it. The novel, at times, reads like a history lesson, as the invisible, omnipotent narrator feels the need to stop the flow of the fictional narrative and educate and remind the reader that Hitler was an evil man. It gets a tad jarring after a while. The dialogues are a curious mixture of clichés (“Only Jews could produce an Einstein”) and slang which is more British than German. The characters refer to each other as “mates” and use words like “wankers” to express contempt. Even allowing for the fact that this is an English version of what the fictional characters say in German, seeing as the period of the novel is Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it seems a bit ersatz.

Two Brothers is a novel that is, for all its weaknesses, remarkable for the author’s sincerity. In the Afterword, Elton tells the reader the inspiration behind the novel. The reader learns that Elton is Jewish from his father’s side, and the family’s original, German Jewish name was Ehrenberg. Elton’s uncle, Gottfried Ehrenberg, after enlisting in the British army in 1943, changed the name to Geoffrey Elton; and Elton’s father, Ludwig, followed suit, and anglicized the name to Lewis Elton. Elton then goes on to inform that a cousin of his father and uncle, Heinz Ehrenberg, was an Aryan child who was adopted by his Jewish parents and went on to serve in the Wehrmacht. It turns out that some of fantastic sounding “set-pieces” in the novel have been taken from real life stories from Elton’s family. Thus, the end of the noble Frieda—she volunteers to accompany Jewish children being sent east when she is not required to go, and is gassed on arrival—theatrical as it may sound, is how Elton’s great aunt (grandmother’s sister) died.

Perhaps Elton could have written a family memoir instead of novel with unnecessary and unconvincing twists.

Book of the Month: Food of Love (Anthony Capella)

I remember reading somewhere that the film rights of Anthony Capella’s 2004 bestseller, The Food of Love, were bought by the Warner Brothers. I do not know whether the film was ever made.  This is not surprising. Capella’s debut novel has all the ingredients that are de rigueur for a feel good Hollywood flick which will fetch tidy earnings at the Box Office. For a start, the novel is based in Rome and other scenic parts of Italy. There is a romantic triangle involving two friends and a young woman. You probably do not need me to tell you what unfolds: the young woman falls for the wrong guy to begin with, thinking him to be a chef of great promise. His interest in her, on the other hand, lies strictly south of the border. Driven by the desire to explore the inside of her underclothes (and stick her photograph on the inside of his cupboard to join the multitudes evincing his past conquests), he plays along, enlisting help from his friend who, conveniently, is a chef of great promise—and we are talking Micheline standards here—and, equally conveniently, so that the plot gets nicely rolling, falls in love with the young woman himself. However, being a man of honour etcetera, he does not reveal his heart’s secret to the other two. After the obligatory misunderstandings, heartaches, travels through picturesque parts of Italy, and a lot of sex, it all ends well. That is as may be, you might say, but why should the Americans audience be interested in an Italian Mills and Boon romance? Because the young woman in the novel is American.

Laura Patterson is an American student, spending a year on Scholarship in Rome, studying art history. She is twenty-two and is ripe as a mango to be plucked and devoured. After all you can spend only so much time studying frescoes by Cavallini, however fine they are. Unfortunately, the poor girl is not having any luck; all of her Italian blind dates are hornier than rabbits on Viagra, and no sooner than the statutory dinner is over, instead of going on a stroll under the moonlit night and whisper sweet nothings into her ears, they want to examine her uvula with their tongue, and stop short of getting her into bed only because they are still living with their mothers. Laura has had enough of the Italian men and is giving serious consideration to going back to dating Americans when, following the advice of her Italian friend, she decides to go out on dates only with those men who can cook, the decision being based on the premise that a cook would be dextrous with his hands. Cue to enter the first male protagonist, Tommaso Massi, who is a waiter in a Micheline Star restaurant called Templi, owned and run by a humourless Scandinavian by the name of Alain Dufrais, who seems to have missed his true vocation, which would be—judging by the way he treats his kitchen staff (that includes Bruno, Tommasso’s best friend and the second male protagonist of this story) and the customers (who are frogmarched out of the restaurant if their voices rise a decibel above the approved threshold)—the dictatorship of a little African country. Tammasso has spotted Laura while she is speaking on the phone to her friend (getting tips in dating); and has decided on the spot, in the grand tradition of virile Italian men, to get her into bed. Tammasso meets Laura fortuitously—the first of many expeditious serendipitous moments that propel the story forward— in a food shop within a week and— it is a measure of Laura’s naivety or Tammasso’s ingenuity—manages to give her the impression that he can cook. Except that he can’t. Therefore, when Laura, who has noted him down—in front of the hanging carcasses of hares in the food shop—, as a character from a Michelangelo drawing, and is further impressed that he did not instinctively try to grab her breasts (which is what the poor girl has come to expect from the Italian men between the ages of six to death), calls him—he has given her mobile number, you see—to get guidance on how to cook the hare (which should have rightfully belonged to Alain Dufrais’s kitchen) Tammasso has foisted on her, he has no option but to seek urgent help from his best friend Bruno. Bruno loves cooking; he is passionate about cooking; he is as committed to cooking as KFC are to chickens. He is a quiet and barely articulate man—his confidence has never recovered from the taunting he received from the other boys at his school about his big nose— except when it comes to cooking, when he can hold forth a scholarly discourse that can only be understood with the provision of study notes. Bruno agrees to help his friend in his mission to enter Laura’s underwear. All he has to do is cook mouth-watering recipes, which Tammasso can pass off as his own. Bruno sticks to his side of the bargain and helps out his friend in a number of hackneyed and barely comic situations revolving around the theme of Tammasso having to cook his recipes ‘live’ either in his own flat or in the house of Laura’s Italian friend, which involves smuggling Bruno in and out of the family’s kitchen without anyone noticing. It should come as no surprise that very soon Laura’s photograph joins the many others in Tammasso’s cupboard. By this time Bruno has discovered that he has fallen in love with Laura, but cannot bring himself to tell this to his friend, partly because of the awkwardness it would create, but also because, you suspect, he is incapable of stringing more than three sentences when the subject is not how to make a perfect ‘Tozzetti’. Tammasso curiously, and in contrast to his time-tested practice—which has served him well in his impressive career as a seducer of unsuspecting women—of dumping Laura and moving on to his next conquest, is still carrying on with her. Could it be because some of Bruno’s recipes have had the effect of pushing Laura’s libido way beyond the Richter scale, and Tammasso’s Italian ego is wounded, as he struggles to satisfy her? Laura tries to set Bruno up with her roommate, Judith, another American, but it does not work out; Bruno is not interested; also, Judith’s dress sense which suggests that she is colour-blind, and her tendency to laugh like a hyena on acid scares him. Meanwhile, Drufais is becoming more tyrannical and dictatorial than Robert Mugabway, and begins to pick on Bruno, favouring a Frenchman instead, who uses every dirty trick in the book to destroy Bruno’s recipes, which, as we have learnt, are mouth-wateringly delicious.  Bruno and Tammasso leave Templi and, with the help of Laura’s friend’s father—he too has become a fan of Tammaso’s cooking, his libido surging up more than the FTSE 100 during the Bull market after tasting the delights of his three course meal, except that it was Bruno who cooked it—take on a run-down restaurant, the only plus point of which is a raven haired, full-breasted waitress called Marie, whose hipsters look as though they are not commodious enough for her curvaceous derrière. Since Tammasso inexplicably decides to continue seeing Laura, they have to carry on with the charade, which, frankly speaking, is getting a tad tiresome by this stage. The restaurant, Il Cucko, needless to say, becomes hugely popular. Realising that the story, at this stage, is in danger of becoming more schmaltzy and sugary than a sticky toffee pudding, Capella introduces a dramatic element (and about time too). Bruno kisses Laura; Laura catches Tammasso in flagrante delicto with another woman and dumps him; Laura also tells Tammasso that Bruno kissed her, probably to prove that both he and his friend are a couple of perverts, and begins seeing her history professor, an American called Kim Fellowes, who is so stuck up he actually speaks in Italian all the time; Tammasso and Bruno have a blazing row; Bruno leaves Rome, driving aimlessly to North, through a succession of hills and valleys, stopping only to exercise his mandibles over T-bone steaks cooked alla brace near Tuscany, or to smack his lips over minestrone con pesto (with basil and farinata), the staple street-food of Genoa, or to taste soupy risotto from roadside osterias. The gastronomic delights regrettably fail to sooth the pain of his loss, till he comes to a small hamlet called Le Marche where his van serendipitously breaks down. Here, Bruno first samples the delights of a stuffed whole suckling pig and, in due course, of the equally well stuffed daughter of the woman who agrees to have him as a paying guest, till his van is mended, which, as can only be expected in these remote hills of Italy, takes several weeks. These weeks are nevertheless long enough to convince Benedetta, the inn-keeper’s daughter, that Bruno might shag her brainless, but his heart belongs to an American, to whom, she is aghast to hear, he has never declared his love; into the bargain the American girl thinks he is a pervert. Another serendipitous incidence: Laura with her new beau turns up in Le Marche, where, over a meal, the stuck up professor makes an ass of himself after he gets an allergic reaction to a mushroom, the name of which is roughly translated into English as ‘shaggy inkcaps’. As the professor is threatening to call his lawyers (in English or Italian is not clarified), Bruno steps out of the kitchen, and heroically and gallantly takes the blame, and urges the professor to sue him and not the semi-literate villagers. After Laura and the professor have left the village, Benedetta, having had enough of Bruno, gives him the heave-ho as gently as possible, telling him that he has to tell Laura how he feels about her. So off Bruno goes in his rickety van and returns to Rome. Where he finds that his erstwhile friend Tommasso is shacked up with the curvaceous Marie, and has transformed ‘Il Cucko’ into a successful pizzeria; and he cannot find Laura’s whereabouts. Bruno goes back to work in the ‘Templi’, his tail, for all practical purposes, lodged firmly between his legs, feeling rather sorry for himself. However, in a twist redolent of a Hollywood movie—but wait! This novel might still be be made into a Hollywood film—involving yet more coincidences—coincidences are coming, now, so thick and fast, you are beginning to wonder whether they do not come in pairs—that is too tedious to explain, Tammasso, who, unbeknown to Bruno, really cares about him, smuggles himself as a waiter into ‘Templi’; Laura and the stuck-up professor end up dining, with an entourage of hangers on, in ‘Templi’ where the professor again makes an ass of himself by proposing to Laura in front of everyone and is politely but firmly rejected; Bruno ends up preparing the dream meal for Laura and, for a change, owning up to it; and Alain Drufais ends up with his French disciple in a cupboard where the two discover the joys of homosexual sex. As the novel ends, Laura is back in America; Bruno is still in Italy, but ready to embark on his maiden voyage across the ocean, waiting only for Laura to arrange the visa for him; and the two of them are exchanging e-mails with each other about—you have guessed it!—more Italian food recipes.

Anthony Capella is an aficionado of Italian food—he has devoted the best years of his life chomping his way through Italian food—and his exceptional knowledge of regional Italian food shows throughout the novel (Capella used to write for Sunday Times on Italian food and recommended restaurants in Naples and Rome). There is a hint of magic realism, too, around food and Capella effortlessly lifts it to the realm of fairy tale when he describes the invigorating effect of Bruno’s dishes on the libidos of those who eat it. Not a page goes by without Capella, via his gourmandising protagonist, waxing eloquent about some or the other Italian dish you have never heard of. He is kind enough in many cases to supply recipes, too, the only hitch being you are unlikely to get the ingredients that go on to make these foudroyant dishes in your local Tesco. If your knowledge of Italian food starts with American Hot Pepperoni Pizza and ends with Tiramisu, you are in for a surprise. If you are a carnivore, you are in for a treat: there isn’t a body part of various herbivorous animals—from eyeballs to urinary bladder to the outer membrane of transverse colon—that, if Capella is to be believed—can’t be baked, fried or casseroled. To Capella’s credit, for the most part, the gastronomic tuition blends well with the plot; it is only on a few occasions that you feel that Capella is getting carried away with his culinary enthusiasm and ephorizes: thus, when Bruno travels out of Rome and drives Northwards, supposedly heartbroken, what the reader remembers most of this journey which ends in the warm and ample bosom of Benedetta, is not his heartache, but the exotic dishes he has cooked or eaten along the way. The last few pages of the novel comprise nothing but recipes of even more colourful Italian dishes—from fried zucchini flowers to peppers stuffed with rabbit.

For a debut novel, The Food of Love, a reworking of a Cyrano de Bergerac story—Capella obliquely acknowledges the debt he owes to the seventeenth century French dramatist by giving Bruno a big schnozzle—, is written with a great deal of self-assurance. At times it feels almost as though the novel was written for the cinema (it is little wonder that its rights were sold so quickly), reading it is like watching a movie, which is as much down to the formulaic constructive format of the story as to the author’s deft touch in writing. The novel overwhelms you with its rummage of melodrama, humour (a tad on the cruder side at times), emotions, and sensuality—a heady mixture of food, spices, and romance. 

The Food of Love is a joyous, exuberant celebration of Italian food. You can savour it in bite-sized pieces or gobble it down in one hungry sitting; you are sure to enjoy it. I hope the Warner Brothers bring out the movie; I would love to watch it.

Book of the Month: Gillespie and I (Jane Harris)

Gillespie and I, Jane Harris’s second novel is set, like her first, in 19^th century Scotland.

The story of Gillespie and I is told in retrospect by an octogenarian English spinster, Harriet Baxter. The year is 1933 and Harriet, sitting in her flat in Bloomsbury, London, is writing down what she calls her memoir, although, to be precise, she is writing about a two-year period in her life, in the 1880s, when she lived in Glasgow and became very close to the family of an upcoming artist called Ned Gillespie. Harriet’s association with the Gillespies ended on a traumatic note for almost everyone concerned and for a while earned Harriet notoriety which she feels, even though more than forty years have elapsed, she did not deserve.

As the decade of 1880 is nearing its end Harriet is (by the standard of that age) is a thirty-six year old spinster of independent means. After the death of her aunt, Harriet has travelled to Glasgow with the intention of spending a few weeks in the city and visiting the International Empire exhibition. In Glasgow Harriet gets acquainted with the family of Ned Gillespie, one of whose painting is hanging in the exhibition. The initial meeting between Harriet and Ned’s family is by accident when Harriet saves the life of Ned’s mother, Elspeth, who tumbles while walking and, incredible as it may seem, is in danger of choking to death having swallowed her dentures! After this initial, fortuitous, meeting Harriet wastes no time in getting close to the Gillespie family and spends most of her waking hours in the first floor apartment of the Gillespies. Ned Gillespie’s is a lower middle class family. There is a grocery shop that is run by Ned’s younger brother, Kenneth. Ned, who had taken over the running of the shop after his father’s death, has ambitions to be an artist. He is spending increasingly more time in pursuit of his art. His younger sister, Mabel, having split up from her boyfriend, has returned to Glasgow. Ned lives with his wife Annie and two daughters, Sybil and Rose. Into this cosy, domestic and closely knit family enters Harriet. Writing her memoir forty years later, Harriet has no hesitation in acknowledging that Ned Gillespie was a genius but for the most part his family was a burden on him. Harriet, comfortably off herself, notices that the Gillespies, while not exactly impecunious, are still leading financially uncertain existence. Harriet does what she can to help the family. This involves commissioning her portrait (which Ned’s wife Annie, an amateur painter herself, paints), showering the family with small yet frequent gifts etcetera.  Despite this Harriet is left with the suspicion, as time passes, that her near-constant presence in the Gillespie household is not appreciated by Ned’s wife Annie; also detested are Harriet’s gifts to the family. Harriet’s suggestion that Ned, Annie and their children come to stay at a house she has rented a few miles out of Glasgow is rejected by both Ned and Annie. To add to the family’s stress, the behaviour of Ned and Annie’s elder daughter, Sybil, unexpectedly and inexplicably deteriorates. Once a well-behaved and placid girl, Sybil’s behaviour becomes unpredictable and antisocial. Obscene drawings appear on the wall of the kitchen; during the Hogmanay ceremony a number of guests become unwell after drinking punch and it is strongly suspected that Sybil added rat poison to the punch bowl. Elspeth and Annie fall out over how best to deal and “cure” Sybil’s bad behaviour. Harriet does not much like Sybil compared with the angelic Rose. Then Rose disappears. She and Sybil are playing in a public garden (not far from the house where Harriet rented a room when she first arrived in Glasgow and which she has kept even after she moved into hr rented house). Sybil, who comes back to the house on her own tells the story that she was given a penny by a thin woman—a stranger—whose face is covered with a veil to get something from a nearby shop; and by the time she returned to the garden both the woman and Rose had disappeared. An extensive search organized by the Glasgow police; however, despite numerous claims that a girl fitting Rose’s description was seen in the company of a man at different times in different parts of the city, Rose cannot be traced. The disappearance of Rose has a devastating effect on Ned’s family, in particular Sybil, whose behaviour deteriorates to the extent where she needs to be committed to the local asylum. After a few months of futile search the police close the case. Some more months pass and then a member of public discovers Rose’s decomposed body in a wood. Subsequent investigation by the police leads to the arrest of a German man and his Scottish wife. The couple admits to having abducted the girl but make a sensational claim: the couple was approached by Harriet Baxter to kidnap the girl. They did not know why Harriet wanted the girl abducted; however her instructions were clear: the girl was to be kidnapped for a day only and she should come to no harm. That Rose ends up dead is the result of a freak accident. Harriet is arrested along with the German and his wife and is tried in the crown court in Edinburgh. Writing her memoir forty years after the trial Harriet becomes increasingly convinced that the new maid working for her who calls herself Sarah, is none other than Sybil, Ned Gillepsie’s eldest daughter.

Gillespie and I is a gripping tale, told with panache. Jane Harris’s prose is lush, witty and with clever turns of phrase. At more than six hundred pages this is not exactly a short novel. That it does not drag at any stage is as much to do with the crackling plot—taut, unsettling and full of unexpected twists—as with Harris’s prose that hides as much as it reveals. The prose has a kind of lilting fluency which, imperceptibly, creates a momentum of its own.

The protagonist of the novel, Harriet Baxter, is, like Madame Mao, small but lethal. As she starts narrating her story the impression the reader forms is of an art-loving, essentially good hearted, if ever so slightly lonely, woman who goes out of her way to those whom she calls her friends. This initial impression soon gives way to an uneasy feeling, as Harriet’s presence in the Gillespie household borders on being intrusive and her proximity to Ned in particular becomes forced. For an intelligent woman Harriet can be very obtuse; she has the ability to not take hint and the talent to latch on to any ambiguities and distort the messages to suit her emotional needs. All of this conspires to make Harriet, as a narrator, about as reliable as Hermann Goering’s lawyer at the Nuremberg trials. As the novel nears its end—Harris has one final twist in store for the reader—the reader can’t make up his mind whether to pity or loathe Harriet. Hers is a lonely, pitiful life but not less baleful for that.

Gillespie and I is an adroit psychological study of obsession, manipulation, and deception—both of others and of self. It is a clever novel that expertly manoeuvres readers’ expectations, and is remarkable for what is unsaid and unsayable.

Book of the Month: Started Early, Took My Dog (Kate Atkinson)

Kate Atkinson burst on to the British Literary scene in the 1990s with her brilliantly insouciant tragic-comic debut novel, Behind the Scenes of the Museum, which won the Whitbread (now Costa) award. This was followed by Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird, both of which attracted critical reviews which were lukewarm at best, although the novels, especially Emotionally Weird, marked Atkinson as a writer who had a great feel for humour.

After these three full length novels which could be described as literary fiction (plus a collection of short stories) Atkinson changed tracks and switched over to genre fiction. She began writing detective novels. She has published, so far, four detective novels featuring the slightly damaged yet clever and honest and uber-cool detective (is there any other type?) Jackson Brodie.

These detective novels have sold well and, in 2011, the first two novels were made into a BBC drama in which Jason Isaacs (hugely talented but much underrated) played the detective.

The intriguingly titled Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie.

When one is writing a detective / crime thriller, one can opt for either the action or the psychological. An Example of action thriller would be The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s intention in The Big Sleep is very clear from the outset. He is out to entertain. The plot of The Big Sleep is not very intricate but never leaves the fast lane—Chandler wheels in corpses with alarming regularity—and does not give the reader time to think. Chandler does not waste time in developing psychological profiles of his characters either; characters are useful to Chandler only to the extent that they serve some purpose in moving the plot further (either by getting murdered or telling Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s legendary detective, who might be the killer). Chandler’s prose is stylistic (and hugely enjoyable) and the whole thing is over in roughly 250 pages).

Started Early, Took My Dog is as far removed from The Big Sleep as Saturn is from Sun, although, like Chandler, Atkinson has her unique prose-style, liberally laced with humour. Atkinson takes great trouble in developing psychological profiles of the protagonists, which, by necessity, involve a raft of subsidiary characters which have no direct relevance to the plot of the novel but serve the function of elucidating for the reader the personality profiles of the protagonists. Also, since Started Early, Took My Dog—while a complete novel on its own—is fourth in a series of detective novels featuring Jackson Brodie, Atkinson probably feels obliged to bring in characters, which might have played a less peripheral role in the previous novels (I read Case Histories, the first novel in the series, many years ago, but can’t remember anything about it other than it was a moderately enjoyable read), so that the fans of her novels can have a sense of continuity. It also allows Atkinson to bring some or more of them back into playing a more prominent role in future Jackson Brodie novels, which, I am sure, will come out.

The result is a novel that is almost 500 pages—witty almost throughout, and entertaining in part.

The plot of Started Early, Took My Dog has several strands. At the heart of it is the murder of a prostitute named Carole Braithwaite, in Leeds UK,  in the 1970s. Carole is found in her flat three weeks after she was murdered. The first person to reach the scene of crime is a WPC named Tracy Waterhouse, who finds in the flat a four year old boy, presumably the dead prostitute’s son. The flat was locked from outside, which suggests to Tracy that whoever murdered Carole locked the flat from outside before leaving, probably in the full knowledge that there was a little boy in the flat. The boy is whisked away from the flat by the Social Services and a rookie social worker by the name of Linda Pallister is in charge of arranging foster care for him. There is a veil of secrecy surrounding all this and Tracy’s attempts to make inquiries—both with regard to the boy’s fate and the progress, if any, made in the investigation of Carole’s murder—fall on deaf ears. Carole’s murder has taken place at the beginning of what would turn out to be the reign of terror of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe (a real-life murderer, serving an indefinite life sentence—a bit of post-modern device used by Atkinson). Carole’s murder however remains unsolved; she is not considered to be one of the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper. Zoom forward several years and we are in the first decade of the twenty first century. Tracy Waterhouse is in her fifties; she has left the police force and now is in charge of a private security firm operating in a local mall. All the police officers—senior and junior—associated with Carole Braithwaite’s murder are either dead or retired—except one: Barry Crawford; and he is due to retire in two weeks. Then, while on her stroll in the mall Tracy notices a known prostitute called Kelly walking with a little girl, shouting abuses at the girl and generally mistreating her in full public view. Tracy, on an impulse, ‘buys’ the girl from the prostitute for 2000 pounds. This provides the second strand of the story. Tracy, having illegally gotten hold of the girl from the prostitute (who probably was not the mother of the child in the first place), begins planning her escape from Leeds, preferably England, and, towards that end, is not above using her contacts in the underworld to obtain fake passports and travel documents for her and the girl. In case you are wondering where Jackson Brodie fits into this, please be advised that he is hired by a New Zeeland woman named Hope MacMaster, who wants to trace her biological parents. Hope is English but immigrated to New Zeeland with her parents—the Winfields—at a very young age. All that Hope knows about her background is that the Winefields—who lived in Leeds—were her adoptive parents, and that her birth name was Nicola, which the parents changed to Hope when they adopted her. Jackson Brodie is tasked with the job of tracing, if possible, Hope’s biological family. Jackson Brodie arrives in Leeds and his first port of call is Linda Pallister, now nearing retirement, who is still in charge of adoption and foster care in the Social Services. Linda however proves very elusive and Brodie begins to suspect that she is going out of her way to avoid her. In a situation that is possible only in detective fiction Brodie manages to gain access to Pallister’s office and goes through her files; and discovers the name Carole Braithwaite written on the Winfield folder, along with a photograph of a young girl who he thinks could be Hope when she was a baby. Soon Brodie discovers three more things: (1) Tracy Waterhouse was present when Carole Braithwaite was found murdered (Tracy proves as elusive as Linda when he tries to arrange a meeting with her); (2) another man by the name of B. Jackson, calling himself a private detective, is also going about making inquiries; and (3) he (i.e. Jackson Brodie) is being followed, probably by the other Jackson. Tracy, in the meanwhile, does not take long to figure out that she herself is being followed by leather-jacket wearing thugs who will not hesitate from using violence. Then there is a bunch of retired police officers, more shifty than the people featuring in BBC documentaries with titles like ‘Fake Britain’, who, you are not surprised to learn, have direct or indirect connections with the Braithwaite murder. Finally, to add more spice to what is already turning to be a vindaloo, there is a dementing actress called Kitty, who is filming—you have guessed it—a detective serial in which Brodie’s second ex-wife, Julia, is also playing a role. The dementing Kitty is in the mall when the prostitute is mistreating the child (did I tell you that the prostitute, in due course, also snuffs it?). It all gets resolved in due course and leads up to the corruption at the heart of the police force.

If all of the above has given you the impression that Started Early, Took My Dog is a taut thriller with suspense leaking out of every page, you would be partially correct. There is, as must be evident, from the summery above, a lot of suspense, but the story has a meandering feel to it. What I like to see (or read) in a detective novel is the writer getting on with the various strands of the story at a brisk pace. What I don’t necessary want to read is pages of descriptions of the protagonist’s (Brodie) previous failed marriages, his difficult relationship with his teen-age daughter, his impoverished childhood etcetera. It does not add much to the story-line (which is essentially an old-fashioned detective / murder mystery) in a way that is meaningful. Having read only one previous novel in the series (and forgotten about it), it was impossible for me to link this with the plots of previous Jackson Brodie novels (if there was a link); neither do these descriptions offer any great insight into Brodie’s personality make-up (he spends much part of the novel being duped by one or the other person). I think this has happened because Started Early, Took My Dog is a detective novel with literary ambitions. Nothing wrong in that. Graham Greene and John Le Carre and  Len Deighton have done it with great success in the past. What is dissatisfying is the two have not gelled together neatly.

The alter on which a detective / crime novel will succeed or fail is the skill with which the mystery is resolved. For me a satisfactory detective novel is one in which there are no loose ends; the explanation of the events taking place is plausible; and when secret is revealed in the final pages, it is as if you have emerged from a mist. Unfortunately, Started Early, Took My Dog, fails this litmus test. The dénouement, when it comes, fails to give you the emerging-from-the-mist feeling. Atkinson ratchets up the tempo several fold towards the end, and the narrative, which, for the best part is trundling along at just about manageable pace is, in the last fifty odd pages, suddenly full of action and melodrama not out of place in a Bollywood pot-boiler. This gives the reader a bit of a jolt as, until then, it has the pretention of being an erudite, intelligent psychological thriller.

There are too many loose ends in the story-line that has holes big enough to drive a schooner through. For example, one of the two major strands of the novel, the kidnapping of the possibly-already-kidnapped girl by Tracy Waterhouse, has no evident link to the other strand of the story, the murder of Carole Braithwaite. It is as if there are two novels within the novel that are running a parallel course, and never converge. Tracy’s action (of stealing the girl) remains ultimately unfathomable. Despite reams of pages devoted to her actions, we are still left in the dark as to why the staid and solid Tracy decides to risk everything for a girl on whom her gaze happens to alight in the mall. (Most people, when they see a kid being mistreated in a public place by woman who seems to be off her heads on drugs, would phone the police, not ‘buy’ the kid. There is nothing in Tracy’s background and family situation that prepares the reader for this highly unusual step the former policewoman takes. The girl (four years old), in turn, begins her clandestine existence with Tracy, whom she has never met in life, without batting an eyelid.)

What saves the novel from being a total let-down is Atkinson’s prose which sparkles with smart and waggish observation. That does not quite make up, though, for the weak story. Six out of ten.

Book of the Month: Stoner (John Williams)

Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American author, John Williams, who published only four novels in his life, none of which sold well (although the last one, Augustus, won the US National Book Award in 1973, the first time in the history of the National Book Award, when the award was jointly shared by two novels). After Augustus, Williams, a professor of English in Denver, Colorado, did not publish any novel for the remaining 21 years of his life.

Stoner was Williams’s third novel. First published in 1965, the novel attracted modestly favourable critical reviews; did not sell much; and sank into obscurity. It was re-published in 2013, almost fifty years after its original not-very-successful publication (and nineteen years after Williams’s death); and guess what? It is now heralded as some sort of classic.

The eponymous hero of Williams’s novel is William Stoner. Stoner is born to impoverished farmers in central Missouri, near Columbia. In 1910, at the age of nineteen Stoner enters the University of Missouri as a freshman. He stays at the university for the next four decades, until his death of cancer, in 1956. He does not rise beyond the rank of the Assistant Professor (not because he can’t cut the mustard, I shall request you to keep in mind, but because of departmental politics), and is not particularly renowned for his teaching method. He marries Edith, who has the kind of personality that would keep a Freudian analyst in business for years, and produces a daughter named Grace. Stoner’s career, like Greece’s economy, does not go anywhere; his marriage is not happy; and his daughter turns out to be a disappointment. Stoner takes an occasional initiative, like having an affair with a departmental colleague, a woman named Katherine Driscoll, who is several years his junior; but, does not have the courage to take it to its conclusion (although he loves with as much passion as his nature would allow) and lets her go, sinking back into the ennui of his dispiriting marriage and job. As he is nearing his retirement (his boss, Lomax, with whom Stoner has been forced to wage a long war of attrition, for reasons that are laughably trivial, can’t wait to send Stoner on his way) Stoner develops intestinal cancer. It would have been an injustice to Stoner’s sad life—with its sad trajectory until then—if the cancer were treatable. It isn’t; and Stoner, on the last page of the novel, dies.

Stoner is a novel about an unremarkable farm-boy, who goes to college and becomes a teacher. Nothing of real significance happens in his life, which, by conventional standards, occupies the position between failure and disappointment.

The problem with Stoner is that its protagonist does not come to life. He lives no impression as you close the novel. Nothing about his personality or behaviour or attitude either stands out. His inner life, emotional ambience of his mind, if you will, is never lit up. The guy, as the cliché goes, is dull as ditchwater. His motivations remain largely obscure. Take his marriage to Edith, whom he sees for the first time at a University party. The woman is colder than the Antarctic. It is not clear what her attraction is to Stoner, what it is that drives him towards the woman other than an innate trait of masochism. (Equally, why Edith, the daughter of a rich banker—the father would, predictably, lose his wealth in the Great Depression of the 1930s and—yawn, yawn—kill himself; but that is, at the time of Edith’s first meeting with Stoner, is decades away—decides to marry Stoner, who was financially never going to be able to match her parents’ wealth on his University salary, and, who has nothing whatsoever about him raising him above the mediocrity, is left unexplained.) Williams spends good many pages describing Edith’s erratic behaviour most, if not all of which is, it is strongly hinted, directed at  making Stoner’s life a misery and driving a wedge between him and their daughter, Grace. Yet, Edith’s motivations remain obscure. Is she nasty? Is she just on this side of madness? I couldn’t care. Then there’s Stoner’s great feud with Lomax, the physically handicapped chairman of the department. It all starts with some shyster student, also physically challenged, who Lomax thinks is the next Samuel Johnson, while Stoner thinks he is a waste of space. Stoner, despite urging from Lomax, fails the shyster. That puts paid to Stoner’s ambitions—if he has any—of becoming a professor of English. He then, as is in the nature of these things, starts shagging a younger colleague, who, going by her behaviour, seems to have a striking similarity to the temperament of Stoner’s wife Edith, in that it is not based on a  series of good and bad days, but good and abd moments.. The affair limps on for a few months. Edith becomes aware of it, but, curiously, is not bothered. The affair ends when Lomax tries to . . . I have actually forgotten what it is that Lomax attempts; however, the upshot is Katherine Driscoll packs her bags and leaves. Stoner watches her go and . . . well, that’s about it: the character of Katherine Driscoll has served whatever obscure purpose Williams has in mind for her, and she is banished out of the story. As regards Stoner’s daughter, Grace, it would have been a miracle if a child brought up by two oddballs—an alexithymic father with water instead of blood in his veins, and a mother who is so caricaturesque, she couldn’t be real—turned out to be a well-adjusted personality. Grace doesn’t. She gets her bun in the oven at a young age; forces the hapless boy to marry her; the boy has the decency to die in the Second World War; and Grace becomes an alcoholic.

Stoner, a novel about an obscure American academic (not unlike its creator) in the first half of twentieth century, who endures a series of personal and professional misfortunes (at least some of which are self-inflicted), it would be fair to say, is not a joyous novel. I don’t have a problem with that. My problem with the novel is: I did not find it riveting. Stoner, rather than coming across as a man who embraces whatever shit life throws at him (and there is a lot of it, let’s face it) with the equanimity and stoicism of a Yoga practitioner (or a recovering alcoholic), which, I suspect, is the author’s intention, comes across as a man constitutionally enervated of vitality. There aren’t any depths here that deserve prolonged attention.

Williams’s prose is precise and adequate, and, like the protagonist of the novel, bloodless. You feel indifferent to it, perhaps because it is indifferent to the man it depicts. It is monotonous and never shifts out of the slow lane. Stoner is a man of few words, but you do not get the feeling that he selects his words judiciously and delivers them expertly; rather he comes across as a dull man who has, for the most part, nothing interesting to say.

Stoner is not a bad novel, but I can’t understand what all the fuss is about.

Book of the Month: blueeyedboy (Joanna Harris)

Joanne Harris’s 2005 novel, Gentlemen and Players, was a departure of kind for her, who first shot to fame with her hugely successful 1999 novel, Chocolat. The theme of Gentlemen and Player was much darker than Harris’s earlier novels. Harris set out to write a thriller and wrote a gripping thriller which came with the de rigueur twist at the end.

Harris seems to have taken a liking for this genre. Her novel, blueeyedboy, is also a story full of suspense, intrigue and treachery that holds the reader in its thrall almost till the end.

The setting of blueeyedboy is a Yorkshire village. If you thought nothing possibly could be happening in a Northern British village that could be of interest to anyone who does not have a passion for church fetes and voluntary work in the village shop of bric-a-bracs, you would be compelled to think again after reading blueeyedboy. 

There are some very strange things happening in the outwardly tranquil village of Malbry (pronounced maw-bry—the reader is informed). For a start, there are rather a lot of people meeting their maker in sudden accidents. Or, are they, really? Because nothing is what it seems in this novel that has the most unreliable narrator since Toni Blair announced that Saddam’s weapons of mass destructions could strike London in 45 minutes.

The eponymous narrator of Joanne Harris’s novel is a 42-year-old single man bent on privacy and lonesome pursuits. Needless to say, he has very few friends in the real world (and, as the novel progresses, you are thankful on behalf of the rest of the humanity that this is so). Why is he called blueeyedboy? Because that is the identity he has assumed on the Internet. Blue is his colour, assigned to him when he was a child by his domineering mother. blueeyedboy keeps a web-journal, or weejay. It is, as he describes early in the novel, a ‘site for all seasonings’. You can make public entries on the site; and, for personal enjoyment, you can make restricted entries. Weejay is the only place, in a manner of speaking, where blueeyedboy can vent as he pleases, confess without fear of censure, where he can be himself, or someone else. It is a world, blueeyedboy informs the reader with some relish, where no one is quite what they seem. This anonymity is very important for blueeyedboy, who, by his own admission, is a very bad boy. He has created a weejay community called badguysrock. The name says it all; however, in case you haven’t grasped it, it is a forum for bad guys to glory in their crimes, to wear their villainy with pride, and to celebrate beyond the reach of police.

blueyedboy posts regularly on badguysrocks, and his public entries—he calls them fic, a diminutive for fiction. He also makes restricted entries. blueeyedboy’s public entries, the fics, have spawned a small community of loyal followers, which includes the obligatory psycho and a very fat and lonely woman from the USA, as well as a sad bloke from Leeds, UK, who is obsessed with big breasts and is addicted to reading pornography. These are the peripheral characters in the novel and we need not concern ourselves with them. There are two more followers, both women: one has the Internet identity of ClairDeLune while the other calls herself Albertine. And both these women live in Malbry. What are the chances of that, eh? A sad, lonely, possibly mentally unhinged, man, living in a Yorkshire village that is five miles away from civilization in every direction, starts a web-journal devoted to villainy, and in its handful of followers are two women who live in the same village. You could not find a more tightly wedged pair of coincidences. Of the two women, ClairDelune knows blueeyedboy in real life too, and is the daughter of a family friend. She teaches on a creative self-expression course in the local collage and her interest in the blueeyedboy is literature-linked (although you would be hard-placed to describe blueeyedboy’s fics as literature). She reads his fics on badguysrocks and posts comments calculated to encourage him in the same way a primary school teacher might encourage a bricolage created by a dullard in her class (but not dull enough to be shifted out of mainstream school). Albertine too posts on the weejay, but refrains from passing any comments on blueeyedboy’s entries. Finally there is JennyTricks, who posts comments on blueeyedboy’s fics of such vituperativeness that he is obliged to delete them.

The reason JennyTricks is so outraged by blueeyedboy’s fics is because of their verisimilitude to real life characters from the village, all of whom have died in circumstances more mysterious than the one surrounding the death of David Kelly. Also, they are all in some way or the other linked to blueeyedboy or his mother, Gloria Winter, so he says, and have committed the cardinal sin of insulting or offending or letting down the mother or the son in some or the other manner. If you were thinking that blueeyedboy and his mother are close, you would be wrong. True, they live in close proximity, in the same house, in fact. However, it would be fair to say that the relationship between the two is tortured. Gloria Winter, judging from descriptions provided by blueeyedboy—and we have already established that he has an unusual relationship with truth—, is a wicked-witch character straight out of books for children aged 8 to 12. The woman is more temperamental than my old banger and seems to have child rearing practices calculated to create what the counsellors call esteem issues in her children. Gloria Winter believes in the dictum that the best way to make your children obey you is to bit the shit out of them, a dictum she follows even in blueeyedboy’s adulthood. At the same time the woman is canny and is capable of low level cunning and petty subterfuge you wouldn’t usually associate with a woman who has spent the best part of her adult life cleaning houses in a Northern English village. Little surprise, then, that blueeyedboy, considers her to be about as trustworthy as a hungry python. In fact he would like her dead. He is devising a most intricate plot that would have had Hercule Poirot scratching his head (unless he remembers Curtain) to have the old biddy bumped off. And so clever and twisted is he that he is planning to implicate Albertine in his mother’s murder, killing two birds in one stone so to speak.

What has blueeyedboy got against Albertine? It all goes back to, you will not be surprised to learn, their childhoods. Albertine, the reader is informed, has grown up in the same village and has known blueeyedboy as a child. As an adult she was the girlfriend of blueeyedboy’s elder brother, Nigel. Nigel dies in a road traffic accident at the beginning of the novel, having left Albertine’s house in a rage after receiving a letter blueeyedboy claims in his fic he wrote. (Needless to say, blueeyedboy hates his brother and is not at all sorry that he is dead.) blueeyedboy is one of three brothers, but the other two have died in uncongenial circumstances. (Did I forget to mention this? I hope you will excuse me; there is so much happening in the 500 plus pages of this novel, so many twists and turns, that it is very difficult to keep track of everything that has gone on in the sad life and sordid mind of blueeyedboy.) Then there is the blind girl, Emily White, a ghost from blueeyedboy’s childhood. Blueeyedboy and Albertine are both connected to Emily. Emily’s mother, whom blueeyedboy nicknames Baby Blue (on account of her suffering from post-natal depression) in his fics, is so neurotic she makes Bridget Jones a paragon of maturity and stability in comparison. The snobbish Mrs White once employed Gloria Winter (blueeyedboy’s mother) as a cleaner and earned her lifelong enmity by dropping her for something trivial. (So, of course, she deserves to die.) Emily White and blueeyedboy are both ‘sensitive’ children. Not in the sense you and I understand sensitivity but in the sense that sends the boffins salivating to their journals. They both are gifted, or say they are gifted, with the unusual neurological condition called synaesthesia, in which stimulation of one sensory pathway involuntarily activates another sensory pathway so that the sufferers—although I am not sure that is the correct word—can taste sounds or hear colours. A local eccentric named Dr. Peacock takes great interest in blueeyedboy, only to drop him unceremoniously—thus sealing his fate—when Emily White turns up (who is doomed, too). But then is blueeyedboy really the one who he claims to be—a synaesthate—in the public entries on his weejay, or was the unusually ‘sensitive’ boy his brother whose identity blueeyeed boy has taken on in the Web-journal? And if blueeyedboy is not, at least not as a child, who he claims to be, then does he have any other special neurological condition of his own? As it happens, he does: mirror-touch-synaesthesia? How uncanny is that?

If all of this is getting a tad confusing, you wouldn’t be alone. I am getting confused myself, trying to keep track of so many characters that may or may not be linked with one another; may or may not be alive; and, if not alive, may or may not have died as a result of blueeyedboy’s machinations; and if he indeed was responsible for their deaths—and he might not be (responsible), and they might not be (dead)—it may or may not have anything to do with incidents involving blueeyedboy—who, of course may not be who he claims to be—and his mother, who may or may not be keeping tabs on our narrator including his Internet activities.

Harris knows how to spin a good yarn. The story of blueeyedboy unfolds gradually, in small fragments, with titbits of information and misinformation being drip-fed, which serve the dual function of keeping the reader engrossed (well, almost) and confusing him into the bargain. Harris does not let the pace of the narrative slacken and keeps the novel (and the reader) jollying along, administering medium voltage revelatory shocks at unpredictable intervals. However, there comes a time—and I reached it about page 200—when you are so psyched out by the twin onslaught of ghastly murders and their mutually contradictory explanations offered by blueeyedboy in his public and private journals that when you are presented with the 73^rd twist on page 370, you just take a gulp and steady yourself for the next bit of revelation which you know is going to be even bigger. It is all a bit too much. Some of the twists are so fantastic that you may wonder whether they had any purpose other than shocking the reader. For example, the true identity of blueeyedboy is different from what he leads the followers of his public web-journal to believe. Yet, two of the followers—ClairDelune and Albertine—live in the same village and have known the narrator from his childhood; so they must have known who he is all along. Moreover they know him as the person who has taken on this persona, since both blueeyedboy and Albertine attend a creative writing group run by ClairDelune, where blueeyedboy blathers on about his fics. The true identity of blueeyedboy, when it is revealed roughly halfway through the novel, does shock the reader, but it does not fit neatly into the plot.

Harris has obviously taken great efforts to develop the character of blueeyedboy—the tormented and tormenting narrator, more twisted than a coat-hanger. By contrast the supporting characters—including Albertine and Gloria Winter who are pivotal to the story—strike as two dimensional, their motives abstruse. Despite the reams of pages devoted to them, their inner lives simply do not light up. Albertine’s relationship with Nigel, blueeyedboy’s elder brother, is one of the many weak elements of the story.  The subplots involving Emily White and the neurological conditions, while interesting in themselves, are appendages which add to the bulkiness of the novel but little else. Perhaps they could have been subjects of another novel.

Harris’s prose is deceptively simple, yet it has the power of sucking the reader in with its gentle, balanced rhythm that is, for most part, enticing. Occasionally, though, it becomes a bit syrupy and cloying. As blueeyedboy releases yet another entry into the ether of the Internet, describing the colour scheme (various shades of blue) into which he has neatly divided his victims, or the taste and smell sensations evoked by colour words, the reader can be excused for resignedly thinking, here he goes again. If the purpose was to give the reader a first-hand experience of the sensory overload to which blueeyedboy is routinely subjected, Harris has done it brilliantly.

Blueeyedboy may be a (long, at times ponderous, non-linear) cautionary tale of how it is easy to lose the boundaries between the real and the fiction, to fade out your personal identity and take on an online persona on the Internet. It may be a tale of damaged childhoods casting their shadows into adulthoods. It may be a convoluted tale of murders. It may be a tale woven round exotic neurological conditions called synaesthesia and mirror-touch synaesthesia that (sans the murders) wouldn’t be out of place in an Oliver Sachs book. Finally, as Harris said in an interview, it may be a black comedy.

That is a problem with the novel: it tries to cram in too many themes and ends up being too clever by half. 

Philip Roth

Philip Roth, who died earlier this week, was one of my most favourite writers. I believe he was also one of the greatest fiction writers, not just of his generation, but in the last five decades.

Roth’s literary career was of great longevity. His first book, a novella (Goodbye Columbus), was published in 1959. His last novel, Nemesis, came out in 2010. He was also a writer of astonishing fecundity. Over a period of five decades, Roth published more than thirty novels.   

When Roth declared in 2012 that Nemesis would be his last novel, I had mixed emotions. As a great admirer of Roth and his prose style, I did not want him to stop. At the same time Nemesis had not exactly blown off my socks, and Humbling, the novel which came out a year before Nemesis, had left me feeling underwhelmed. We discussed Nemesis a few years ago, in our book-club. It turned out that I was the odd person out; everyone else loved it. Those, who, like me, had read several of Roth’s earlier novels, felt that Nemesis was up there with the very best of Roth novels.

Roth created several protagonists in his novels, the most famous of whom was Alexander Portnoy, the priapic, Jewish, American who can’t stop wanking (and can’t stop talking about it). Portnoy’s Complaint is one of the funniest novels I have read. The novel brought fame and notoriety to its author in equal measures. Over the years, Portnoy’s Complaint has deservedly taken its place in the pantheon of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Nathan Zukerman is another of Roth’s famous creation. Zukerman features in several of Roth’s novels, though not in all as the main protagonist, I think. The last of the Zukerman novels, Exit Ghost, came out in 2006 (which I have not read). The first three Zukerman novels: Ghost Writer, Zukerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, along with the epilogue (The Prague Orgy) were published in one volume (Zukerman Bound). These are some of my very favourite novels. The novels have, like many of Roth’s other novels, autobiographical elements, which, over the years, generated enthusiastic speculations about the extent to which Nathan Zukerman is an alter-ego of Roth (in Zukerman Unbound, for example, Nathan Zukerman achieves spectacular fame following a publication of a sexually explicit coming-of-age novel—not dissimilar to Roth—the fictional novel of Zukerman and its style being a departure from his (Zukerman’s) earlier, Jamesian style (I don’t think Roth can ever be accused of imitating the prose-style of Henry James, or, for that matter, any other novelists. Roth had a style of his own, which influenced other novelists).

Operation Shylock was the first Philip Roth novel I read. The novel totally blew me away. I had not read anything like it before.  The narrator of Operation Shylock is ‘Philip Roth’. The fictional Philip Roth is in Israel, attending the trial of a notorious war criminal called John Demjanjuk. (John Demjanjuk, born Ivan Demjanjuk, is one of the several real-life charcaters which populate the novel. Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian born soldier in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War and was also a POW of Germany.After the Second World War he emigrated to America, in the 1950s. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel in the 1980s to face the charges of war crimes when several holocaust survivors identified him as the notorious ‘Ivan the terrible’ in the Treblinka Extermination Camp the Nazis built in Poland. He was initially convicted and sentenced to death, but the sentence was overturned by the Israeli supreme court which decided that there were reasonable doubts as to whether John Demjanjuk was indeed the notorious ‘Ivan the terrible’ in Treblinka. New evidence emerged in 2001 that Demjanjuk might have worked as a guard in another concentration camp in Germany. He was eventually deported to Germany from America; tried; found guilty of war crimes; and sentenced to five years in prison (he was 92 at the time). Demjanjuk was granted appeal against his conviction, and died, a free and innocent man in the eyes of the law, while the appeal was still pending). Operation Shylock follows the first trial of Demjanjuk, in Israel in the 1980s, covered, in the novel, by the fictional Philip Roth. While in Israel, the fictional Philip Roth, to his initial astonishment which soon turns into horror, comes across an imposter, who has the same facial features as Philip Roth (the fictional Philip Roth), and—you will have guessed it—is also called Philip Roth. So, there are two Philip Roths in the novel; one ‘real’ and the other an imposter, who is planning to steal the identity of the ‘real’ Philip Roth. Operation Shylock, which has the backdrop of the Demjajnjuk trial and the First Intifada, narrates the battle of wits between the two Philip Roths, as the imposter tries to destroy the ‘real’ Philip Roth (that is the other fictional Philip Roth in the novel) and spread the counter-Zionist ideology, is an extraordinary novel. It is very difficult to sperate the real from the fictional in this novel, the full title of which is Operation Shylock: A Confession. You might say that it is a bit narcissistic to create not one but two alter egos in one novel. John Updike apparently wrote in a sardonic review of Operation Shylock that readers should read the novel if they were interested in Philip Roth (Martin Amis levelled a similar charge while reviewing a Zukerman novel). I can say without hesitation that I wasn’t. Until I read Operation Shylock, which got me greatly interested in Philip Roth, and I went on to read several more.

‘Philip Roth’ appears in a few other novels, the last of which, I think, is the 2004 The Plot Against America. The Plot Against America is narrated by the child Philip Roth (though I can’t now remember if the narrator identifies himself as Philip Roth). The novel narrates an alternative history of America spanning the Second World War period. Franklin D Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 general election by Charles Lindbergh, who, in real life espoused non-intervention in the European war and was a member of the America First Committee (AFC) which was a non-interventionist pressure group (dissolved after the attack on Pearl Harbour). As was typical of the novels Roth wrote during this phase of his career, The Plot Against America novel is bereft of humour, and, relentlessly bleak and grim.

The Plot Against America was also the last of the Roth novels which greatly impressed me. Starting in 2006, Roth produced a novel a year, a total of four novels ending with Nemesis. These four novels are frequently described as Nemesis novels—presumably because they have the common theme of end and degradation. I was not hugely impressed by them and would not call them as Roth’s major novels. Indignation, which tells the story of a young Jewish man who is drafted in the Korean war in the 1950s and dies, was probably the best, and Humbling the least impressive.

Sabbath’s Theatre, Roth’s 1995 novel, is, for me, his last funny novel, the story of Mickey Sabbath, an out-of-work puppeteer and a penchant for whores, which shows no signs of moderating with the advancing years. It is also his last novel which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The novel had everything I had come to expect of a Philip Roth novel: coruscating wit, erudition and prurience. The novel was dirtier than the whole stack of Carry On films. Mickey Sabbath, without doubt, is a memorable creation. Sabbath’s Theatre is grotesque and unputdownable. It won the National Book award and was a finalist for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

Roth won the Pulitzer for the first time for his next novel, American Pastoral, considered by many to be a great novel. The novel is narrated by Nathan Zukerman, but Zukerman is not the protagonist of the novel. The protagonist is Seymour Levov, a successful Jewish businessman (all the protagonists of Roth’s novels are Jewish, though not all successful). With this novel began a period in Roth’s career, which is often described as his second wind. He was in his sixties, a time in life which, for many artists, is the beginning of declining creative powers. But not for Roth. Starting with American Pastoral, he published ten novels over the next decade. American Pastoral and the novels that followed also marked a departure of sorts in Roth’s prose style. Gone was the humour which made his earlier novels such a delight to read. Roth had a great comic gift. It is difficult to say whether it deserted him or whether he chose not to use it any longer (I read a few obituaries of Roth, but no one commented on it). Roth had a very bitter divorce from his second wife, the British actress Claire Bloom, in 1995 (she wrote a memoir, Leaving A Doll’s House, of her disastrous marriage to Roth, in which, needless to say, Bloom did not have many kind words to say about Roth). One wonders whether these bitter experiences had anything to do with the interminable bleakness and despair that seemed to pervade Roth’s later novels. American Pastoral was followed by I Married A Communist, another acclaimed novel narrated by Nathan Zukerman, this time about Ira Ringold. Viewed along with American Pastoral and Human Stain (which came out after it), I Married A Communist is often considered as one of the trilogy in which Roth depicted post Second World War history of Jewish men (majority of Roth’s novels have male protagonists) in America, particularly in New Jersey and Newark, with the backdrop of socio-political changes taking place in that country. When I first read American Pastoral, the story of the tragic life of Seymour Levov, destroyed by the folly of his daughter, who sets off a bomb in 1968 to protest the Vietnam war (and, later in the novel, becomes a Jain, a little-known religion in India, often mistaken to be a sect of Hinduism), I did not really know what to make of it. I could see that it was a remarkable book, with the riveting backdrop of the social upheaval in America in the 1960s and 1970s. But I did not like it. This was also the first Roth book I had read in which humour was completely absent. I Married A Communist confirmed for me, sadly, what I had suspected when I’d read American Pastoral: Roth was taking a long hiatus from humour, prurience and libidinousness (he did not return to it till the end). I liked I Married A Communist more than American Pastoral and the slightly unconvincing The Human Stain. Some reviewers said that Eva Frame, the wife of Ira Ringold in I Married A Communist, was a barely disguised (and not very flattering) portrait of Clair Bloom from whom Roth was divorced a few years earlier. If that were the case, then Roth’s portrait of his ex-wife was, all said and done, sympathetic, I thought (although Eva Frame destroys Ira Ringold).

When Roth was awarded the International Man Booker Prize in 2011, in a display of arresting churlishness, mean-spiritedness, and petty-mindedness, Carmen Callil, the founder of the Virago Press and one of the judges on the panel, resigned in protest (she disagreed vehemently with the choice of Philip Roth, but was overruled by the other two judges on the panel), and, on the day the award was announced, wrote a dyspeptic article in The Guardian, in which she animadverted Roth’s fiction. Roth, she put it to the readers of The Guardian, wrote only about himself. Or something to that effect. Callil was not the first one to level this accusation at Roth. Many of Roth’s novels, particularly the early ones are autobiographical. Indeed, Zukerman Bound was described by Martin Amis, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as an autobiographical novel about an autobiographical novel. Outside of the personal experiences, Roth mainly wrote about post Second World War Jewish men in America, tormented by several matters including but not limited to their libidos. That is as may be. To me, Roth wrote brilliantly. He was a master at creating a kind of quiet hysteria which sucked the reader in. Afterwards (as in Humbling and Nemesis) the reader might wonder ‘was that it?’ or ‘what was all the fuss about?’. But not while they were reading the novel. Even when, to my disappointment, the humour went AWOL from Roth’s novels, with very few exceptions, I never found his novels less than riveting.

Philip Roth won many prestigious literary awards in his career, but not the Nobel. I have no doubt in my mind that Roth was overlooked (as was John Updike, whom I rate slightly lower than Roth) because of the anti-American bias in the Nobel committee for more than a decade, beginning in the 1990s. For more than twenty-five years, during this period, not a single American author was awarded the Nobel, while European writers and poets, who were not known outside of their buildings, struck lucky.

Philip Roth was a great writer. A literary giant. His novels brought joy to my life. In her article in The Guardian in 2011, Carmen Callil predicted that no one would read Philip Roth in forty years. I think Callil could not be more wrong. Fifty years from now Roth would still be read and his work would continue to enthral future generations of readers.