The Temple Goers by Aatish Taseer

I was so vexed when I finished reading this absolute crock of cow dung. I am so pleased that I forgot all about it such that now a fortnight later, the fickleness of memory won’t permit me to write more than is absolutely necessary, thus saving time and effort for more noble pursuits like cleaning my ears or staring at the wall.  

After whingeing about Islam and not getting any love from his Pakistani papa (stress on the second syllable) in Stranger to History, Taseer turns his attention to a novel set in his home country/city, Delhi (oh no Aatish, am I churlishly and inaccurately summarising your atavistic being?). Enter protagonist, Aatish Taseer (yes you read it right, he named the principal character after himself, how avant-garde!), son of a journalist and writing a book who on a sojourn to a neighbourhood gym, encounters and is compelled to befriend Aakash Sharma, a trainer at the Junglee Gym. The rest of the novel is a completely pointless look into Taseer and Sharma’s ‘friendship’ and the narrator’s observations of Hindudom.  

Into the realistic setting of Delhi, Taseer (I mean the author and not the character) adds the fictional suburbs and geographical entities of Jhaatkebal (my Hindi ain’t what it should be, but I think that means pubic hair), Sectorpur and Phasenagar. Was this a puerile attempt at humour? Tsk, tsk, methinks you should stick to criticising the Pakistani state, that’s naturally occurring parody that can’t fail even if presented through your writing.  

Taseer is trying to make some kind of righteous observation about the hypocrisy of caste in India. This is a bit rich considering that the biggest hypocritical casteist in The Temple Goers is Aatish Taseer (the author). Even in Strange to History, we see Taseer’s predilection for skin colour. In The Temple Goers, the author’s love of colour explodes like a tray of chemically enriched carcinogenic powders at Holi (those Delhi Holi parties must be a riot). Listen to this: “His skin was dark, dark to his gums. His colour was what Manto describes as blackish wheat. It meant that a paler second skin ran under a dark patina The fineness of his bones, his large mud coloured eyes and small, slightly hooked nose, along with the fullness of his dark, faintly pinkish lips, gave me an intuitive sense of high caste.” 

Was that the Brahmin in you speaking Taseer? Go figure, because in the real caste system, you, your mother and your associated posse come out on top, like the high priests of old. You dictate to us what to think, believe, do, read, watch and enjoy. You set so called standards and then pat yourself on the back for enlightening us, for delivering us epiphanies and for feeding us culture.  

Alright, so you had to write a story (given your ‘high caste’, mummy and all kinds of other things that are expected of the manor born) and despite your good language skills, you lack the talent to write what a reasonable individual would call a readable novel; but couldn’t you have spared us snotty commoners, your maternal sycophancy and not used your book as a platform to fawn over your mum.  

The strangest part of the book was the back where a number of important people (foreigners, obviously the most important kind of people) have commented. Antonia Fraser says “An amazing narrative, a kind of Muslim Odyssey”; The Financial Times says “Indispensable reading for anyone who wants a wider understanding of the Islamic world, its history and its politics”; and The Spectator says “This is a work that ought to be read by policy-makers for its insight into the thinking of angry young men.” Surely, these are all testimonials for Stranger to History? But, I am sure they bear little import in the presence of Sir Vidia’s remark “A subtle and poignant work by a young writer to watch.” Interestingly, Taseer has a cameo role V.S. Naipaul in The Temple Goers and in fact the novel’s title is drawn from something said by Naipaul’s doppelganger.  

Good grief, I seem to have ranted which is precisely what I didn’t want to do. But, I can’t help it. When I read what seem to be overwhelmingly positive reviews, comparing Taseer to a latter day Naipaul, I can’t help but feel angry. The Temple Goers is the perfect standard bearer for the decline of Indian writing. Like our films, it will soon be a caste ridden affair, the ranks of the rich and allegedly-intellectual entrenching themselves and securing their positions through their family connections, slick marketing and mediocre work.  

I am so very disappointed with Indian writing.  

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

After the death of his parents in an accident, Jacob Jankowski skips his final veterinary exams at Cornell and jumps onto a train which happens to be a travelling circus. Set in prohibition era America, the novel is told in a series of reminiscences from the present day where a 93 year old Jacob is living out his last days in an old age home and his memories of life with the travelling circus are sparked when one sets up shop across a nearby parking lot. The circus moves from town to town across America via the railroad with its very own train. Jacob starts off by doing odd jobs and then comes into the boss’ favour when his educational background comes to light. The story is mostly about how Jacob navigates the complex social dynamics of the circus, the divide between workers and performers, the impact of prohibition and economic decline and the acquisition of a belligerent circus elephant. Underpinning all of this is Jacob’s relationship with Marlena, the circus’ star performer and the wife of its unstable head animal trainer.  

I didn’t really enjoy this book. Circuses have always made me queasy and I particularly dislike clowns. The context aside, the story is sappy and ripe for movie conversion (out early next year with Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon in lead roles. Having said that, Gruen seems to have researched the subject of travelling circuses extensively; I for one never knew that American circuses travelled using the railroad.  Water for Elephants seems to be a very popular book and appears all sorts of best seller lists.  Still, just the mention of the big-top leaves me kinda unsettled.  I must have been a circus elephant in my previous life.  

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

I started reading this book and then asked myself ‘what the hell am I doing?’ This is particularly true as you plod through an initial (and long) chapter on Montana’s environment, economy and demography. The reason Diamond includes Montana in his book doesn’t become clear until you are half way through the book. Only when I started reading the accounts of collapsed ancient societies did I get hooked. Diamond covers civilisations from a wide span of time and geography: the Polynesians of Pitcairn and Henderson islands who died out after their mother island of Mangareva collapsed in an environmental crisis that led to civil war on a piece of land which is only 5 miles long; the Norse of Greenland; Easter Island with its obsession with its celebrated carved stone heads (moai) and a tragic case of manmade ecological collapse; the Anasazi of south-west America; and finally the fall of the impressive civilisation of the Mayas. Diamond’s not completely pessimistic. He also offers us success stories from the past including some Pacific islands, the highlands of New Guinea and forest management in Tokugawa Japan. Diamond then gone on to analyse some modern nations including Rwanda whose genocide he correlates with the pressures of population density and resource scarcity, Haiti relative to its island neighbour Dominican Republic, China and Australia. Here’s a daunting picture of what’s happening in Haiti, surely one of the reasons for that country’s wretchedness.  It's clear from the very balanced perspectives presented in the book that Diamond isn't a tree hugging hippie but the picture he paints is anything but rosy. Collapse is a cautionary account of how even the cleverest and most successful societies disappear into oblivion when they use the environment as a bottomless larder. It contains very relevant lessons for our age.  

The Kingdom beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt

The events in The Kingdom beyond the Waves take place several years after its predecessor, The Court of the Air. It recycles some of its peripheral characters; particularly Professor Amelia Harsh who plays a very minor role in the first book is elevated to a central figure in this one. Harsh, is scorned by the Jackelian academic world for her foolhardy quest to locate Camlantis, Hunt’s Atlantis. Abraham Quest, Middlesteel’s richest and most successful entrepreneur throws his financial weight behind her and Harsh cobbles together a team to man a submarine which must travel up a hazardous river through the jungles of anarchic Liongeli to a mysterious crater lake which may hold clues to the disappearance of the legendary city. As they travel up the river, approaching the murderous Empire of the Greenmesh who turn all interlopers into mindless slaves, their progress is marred by a series of obstacles. It would seem that someone or something doesn’t want Harsh and her gang to realise their quest.  

A few days ago, I wrote that The Court of the Air has parallels in Mieville’s Bas Lag series. Hunt’s second book mirrors Mieville’s second Bas Lag novel, The Scar, in that they both seek out a mythical destination, left by an arcane civilisation. And as with the The Scar, The Kingdom beyond the Waves is even better than its antecedent. It’s faster paced and has the quality of a thriller but with otherworldly settings and characters. Despite my eyes which seem increasingly bloodshot and irritable lately, I couldn’t put the book down. Now, the most frustrating bit is that I can’t seem to find the next two books in the series except on Amazon who can’t find it in their hearts to deliver to India.  

The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt

It's not a comely thing to say but I have become some kind of steam punk acolyte. This bit of steam punk fiction takes place in an alternate reality that resembles our world and yet experiences magical phenomena and non-human sentient beings. The Court of the Air is the first instalment in the Jackelian series and the plot is centred around the powerful mercantile kingdom of Jackals which is reminiscent of Britain save that it shares a land border with its archrival Quatershift (a French topoganger) which is ruled by despotic Carlist communityists (fervent communists inspired by a Jackelian subversive).

Jackals is nominally a kingdom but its king is merely a figurehead who upon coronation has his arms ceremonially amputated (so that he may never raise his arms against his people). The real power of the land lies with its House of Guardians and a complex bureaucracy who whilst endorsing freedoms disallowed in neighbouring nations, keep sedition in check through armed forces with special powers known as the fey. The fey are individuals exposed to a periodically occurring phenomenon in a certain part of the country which mutates them into beings with supernormal powers. To control the fey, the state employs them and checks their powers with a torc. Those who are exposed to the feymist and refuse to become wards of the state, are incarcerated. Despite its power and its enemies abroad, Jackals does not seek conquest. It maintains its independence through its monopoly on celgas, a gas it uses to fly its airbound navy in vessels that resemble blimps.

In this surreal, quasi-Victorian world, we follow two orphans, Molly Templar and Oliver Brooks as both flee for their lives, the former into a perilous and eerie underworld and the other to the Steamman Free State run by diligent, religious and scrupulously ethical androids. All this whilst a mysterious quasi-state; a supposedly non-existent entity watches, diagnoses and remedies from the air.

The Court of the Air reminds me a lot of Mieville’s Bas Lag novels and since Perdido Street Station was written in the noughties, it’s possible that Hunt’s writing influenced Mieville. Beyond the presence of robots, there are a race of crab-like people, the remnants of an ancient, avaricious and bloodthirsty empire and a phenomenon that causes people to mutate. But, Hunt’s story, however fantastical, employs more conventional devices of storytelling including a standard build-up towards a summative battle. The Court of the Air also seems to reinforce the message that parliamentary democracy despite all its ills is unsurpassed as a system of governance and definitely not by one based on communist principles – perhaps the opposite of Mieville with his leftist leanings. What I especially liked was the ruined civilisation of the cannibalistic Chimecans who built vast underground cities thousands of years before the events in the novel, to escape the glaciers covering the surface – fascinating Meso-America inspired imagery. What I didn’t like was the far more than necessary infusion of the spiritual, both human and robotic.