The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Writing authentically and engagingly about a country which is not your own, to which you have in all probability a thin connection, where you haven’t lived for a substantial span of time is anything but easy. Consider the legions of writers of popular fiction whose books are populated by cities and nations from the far corners of the earth. But, these are little more than painted backdrops - the product of superficial research and even shallower thinking.

The Dervish House, on the other hand, is set in Istanbul, far from its author’s stomping ground and yet it is intelligently conceived, brilliantly described where Vasilevousa Polis (the queen of cities) – Istanbul is as much a character as are the six others whose intertwining stories form the central thread of what I suppose is essentially a thriller. Most of these characters live or work at a converted 17th century tekye or dervish house – a building where a Sufi brotherhood would have once gathered. The year is 2027 and Turkey has just joined the European Union.

Can Durukan is a precocious nine year old who has a heart condition and must wear ear plugs to protect him from all noise. Can explores the world outside his house with bitbots – nanotechnology rules the roost. His neighbour Georgios Ferentinou, a retired economics professor, comes from an ancient dying community – the Greeks of Istanbul. He passes his time by running a sort of futures market for terrorist attacks. The dervish house also contains a shop that deals in religious antiquities, run by Ayşe Erkoç, an erudite and independent woman who seems the antithesis of her husband, Adnan Sarioğlu, a commodities trader who makes millions from dodgy deals in natural gas. Leyla Gültaşli is an unemployed marketing graduate who lives in one of the flats at the dervish house. Her family gets her job convincing venture capitalists to invest in a company experimenting on using DNA in the human body to store information and turning the body into a computer. Finally, Necdet Hasguler is a part of a religious order who’ve reoccupied the tekye. The book, in fact, begins with Necdet who the narrative zooms into; from far above the Bosporus, we plunge into a tram on which Necdet witnesses a suicide bomber trigger a bomb whose only consequence is the decapitation of her own head. Immediately after, Necdet begins to see visions of jinn.

There are many parallel but interconnected stories in the Dervish House. One that really stands out for its novelty value is the quest an eccentric client sends Ayşe on – the discovery of a mellified man – a cadaver which is preserved in acoffin filled with honey which then apparently has significant medicinal value. McDonald has picked this up from a reference in a medieval Chinese manuscript about a curative practice in Arabia. This was the only weak element in the book. I particularly found the manner in which the quest was resolved very Dan Brownish. Nonetheless, The Dervish House is a great example of how wonderfully creative and gifted its author is. What I really appreciate about McDonald is he seems to want to give his readers something that’s original, intelligent and yet completely fun. The Dervish House is in fact the third in an unconnected trilogy, all set in the developing world of today, only in the future. I’ve read and loved the first – River of Gods and I’ve just started the second – Brasyl.

Postcards by Annie Proulx

At the beginning of Postcards, Loyal Blood, the son of a Vermont dairy farmer accidentally kills his girlfriend, Billy, in the midst of lovemaking. He hides her body in the fields and flees Vermont, telling his folks that he and Billy are setting out to make a life for themselves. Loyal wants to punish himself for Billy’s death through his exile from his family’s farm which he loves and by denying himself any gratification that life might offer. The rest of the book follows the members of the Blood family through the changing circumstances of life in rural 20th century America. But, the story is really about Loyal more than anyone else. He keeps in contact with his family by writing them postcards which Proulx begins each chapter with. In fact, he keeps writing postcards for decades addressing them to his parents, brother and sister well after they die or drift away. In none of these postcards, does he include a return address or any way for them to contact him.  

Loyal drifts as well, from job to job, trapping, mining, hunting... and from state to state. Meanwhile, his father commits suicide and the Blood farm is sold off to pay debts. His brother, Dub, goes south to Miami where some dodgy work brings prosperity. His sister, Mernelle, wins a lumberjack husband through a lonely hearts ad and his mother Jewell finds independence after a lifetime of insular duty. There is a fatalistic atmosphere hanging over the whole story, almost karmic, as each character tries to fruitlessly improve their lot. 

Everyone’s heard of Brokeback Mountain. But, very few have heard of Annie Proulx. I read her short story after watching the movie. It was minimalistic and deeply moving. Proulx (pronounced /pru:/) most frequently writes about rural characters in pastoral settings in places like Idaho and Wyoming. She writes poignantly and authentically. Her characters are credible and intensely developed. Her narrative is Spartan and her discerning observations are in the dialogues of those who populate Postcards. These people speak to you immodestly with their rustic diction and you hear the severity of their lives in each lapse of syntax. There is, in fact, no need to say anything more. Proulx truly has a distinctive way of writing.  

Postcards wasn’t an easy read but the harsh intimacy of Proulx’s writing and her unique style were well worth it.  

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

This is a companion book to a TV series written and hosted by Fry. I haven’t seen the series but the book seems like an afterthought, a poor one at that. I found some of it downright boring. Fry spends anywhere between 2 and 10 pages on each of the 50 states, commencing each section with some vital stats and facts about the state. The only bits I found remotely interesting included a useless section on the origin of Indiana’s nickname (the hoosier state) and an even more useless piece of trivia; the state juice of Illinois (tomato; they even enacted a statute declaring it so). There is however a nifty quiz on American English at the back.  I am now enriched and armed with the knowledge of lexicon such as conniption (a fit of rage), brodie knob (the knob on the steering wheel), Bronx cheer (blowing a raspberry), fungible (interchangeable), docent(museum guide), keister (arse) and ukase (an edict).  

River of Gods by Ian McDonald

On some gaming sites, appraisals of new video games often refer to a learning curve. For instance, a game could have a steep learning curve which essentially means that you have to spend a lot of time learning how to play the game. Often, these sorts of games tend to be the most rewarding where a simpler game may quickly deteriorate into mindless routine. River of Gods is a novel in the vein of an edgy video game with a very steep learning curve.  

The book is unexpected, astonishing and challenging. Calling the River of Gods original is a grave understatement. McDonald gives us a techno-Hindu vision of India in 2047. The country has balkanised and in the north, two warring states emerge, Awadh centred on Delhi and Bharat with its capital at Varanasi. Much of the book’s action takes place in Hinduism’s holiest city. McDonald’s Varanasi has grown beyond its ghats into the sky with futuristic New Varanasi and orderly Ranapur, bastion of the Ranas, the political dynasty that rules the realm. The Ganges is but a trickle and the monsoon is four years late.  

The plot, in a near schizoid manner, surfs the stories of a large number of characters: a comedian who’s inherited a business empire, a middle gendered set designer, a Swedish-Afghan journalist, a Muslim civil servant, a Krishna cop (charged with bringing rogue artificial intelligence under control), his rural born wife, two American scientists, a mysterious omniscient girl with a glowing tilak on her forehead, a goon from the backstreets of Varanasi and many, many more! There’s a wholly new gender called the nutes who (in a spot of disorientation to the reader) have their own pronoun, ‘yt’ and as many times as you come across yt’s descriptions and yt’s dialogues, you can’t completely shake off your sense of linguistic uncertainty.  

Most of these characters are navigating their own lives through the trying times they live in. In the background to all of this, is a mysterious artefact is discovered inside a near-Earth asteroid. The asteroid and its contents are older than the solar system and the object within it continually flashes the faces of three individuals.  

To summarise anymore would be to do great injustice to a fiendishly complicated story. What amazes me is the depth of research McDonald must have committed himself to. The cultural references, rooted in a very genuine understanding of contemporary Indian culture, launch themselves at you with alarming regularity from the very first page. There’s a glossary at the back but I pity the poor firang reader because despite knowing Hindi and living in the country, I frequently found myself at the limits of comprehension. McDonald’s grasp of India is profound. He doesn’t just stop at catchy Hinglish phrases. There’s an incredible sense of ‘cool’, brutal, urbane and avant-garde juxtaposed on the ancient, filthy and chaotic.  

Amidst all of this, McDonald is intelligent and pensive: “How Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached. All journey is pilgrimage and India is a pilgrim nation. Rivers, grand trunk roads, trains; these are sacred things across all India's many nations. For thousands of years people have been flowing over this vast diamond of land. All is river run, meeting, a brief journey together, then dissolution.” 

River of Gods is an extremely trying book, but like a difficult video game, it’s also deeply rewarding. I am elated at having read two works (The Windup Girl) of speculative fiction set in  non-Western contexts, both of which have been equally brilliant. At one point, one of the characters in River of Gods ruminates that “to be human is to transcend the rules” and that’s exactly what McDonald has done and what an achievement... bravo!  

You can read an insightful interview with Ian McDonald here.  

Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson

Children’s fiction featuring not only time travel but quantum physics, wave theory and Schrödinger's Cat (literally) could be a bit of an overkill. At the centre of this overloaded burrito of a novel is eleven year old Silver. Orphaned after her parents and sister mysteriously disappear, she lives at her family’s ancestral house, a rambling property called Tanglewreck, warded by a selfish aunt with a nasty see-all, tell-all rabbit named Bigamist. The world is plagued by time tornadoes where random bits of the past such as woolly mammoths plummet into the present. Amidst all this, Silver discovers that she is a part of an old prophecy of the timekeeper and the child with the golden face who is supposed to be some sort of time saviour. Assisted by a tribe of mutant inmates from 17th century Bedlam, she bends space and time and travels with one of them to a remote planet called Phillipi on the Einstein line where she must confront those who wish her harm.  

Tanglewreck comes off as an easygoing and yet completed overstuffed novel. But, I suppose it has the right elements to keep its target audience entertained. This is, in fact, Winterson’s first novel for children and I’ve never read any of her earlier work but she seems to be an accomplished writer. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, based on her own childhood experiences, are about a girl discovering her sexuality in a zealously Christian home. Despite not really having enjoyed Tanglewreck, I’m thankful for it acquainting me with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – a promising work which I’ve just started reading.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Toru Watanabe is a quiet and contemplative university student living in a dorm in Tokyo in the late 1960s. He is in love with Naoko, the girlfriend of Kizumi his best friend from school. Kizumi commits suicide at 17 and his death hangs over Toru and Naoko’s tentative friendship. On her birthday, Toru sleeps with Naoko immediately after which she disappears. After a year or so, he receives word that she’s sequestered herself in some sort of sanatorium in the mountains and that’s she ill, not physically, but emotionally. Toru visits her and meets her roommate Reiko, an older woman and an accomplished musician. Naoko asks Toru to wait for her to get well; something he seems prepared to do. Meanwhile in Tokyo, he meets Midori, an attractive and outspoken student. It’s clear from the very beginning that she fancies him but she doesn’t let on until much later in the book and when she does, Toru needs to decide between the Naoko’s elusive and abstract commitment and Midori’s ready and real affection.  

I found Norwegian Wood somewhat depressing. It’s also terribly languid, something all the Murakami books I’ve read so far share up till the halfway mark but things usually pick up from there. But, the mood and pace of Norwegian Wood seem deliberately sluggish. Apparently, this novel is a departure from Murakami’s signature style and I can vouch for that. I felt the tragedy glands were milked a little more than needed and definitely more explicitly than suitable. It lacked the subtlety of South of the Border, West of the Sun. The inevitability of Naoko’s death hangs around like an annoying moth throughout the novel. So, when she finally kills herself, all sense of pathos is lost. What I find unusual is how Murakami seems to consider moments of physical intimacy as meaningful and poignant to a relationship beyond the point that one would think plausible. Even when Toru reminisces about Naoko, he thinks only of the intimate times they have shared. In that sense, these infrequent sexual acts becomes milestones in his life and where Toru as a character may be justified in granting singular importance to them, it seems like Murakami feels the same way too.  

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

“I'm inoculated against diseases that haven't even been released yet” says Anderson Lake, a calorie man and a new age conquistador in Bacigalupi’s dystopian future. The future depicted in The Windup Girl is set in Thailand a century from now after the collapse of the world economy, triggered by the over-consumption of global oil stocks. Agricultural and food companies peddling their genetically modified seeds, call the shots, imposing embargoes and starving nations to their knees. To compel people to buy their sterile seeds, they release disease after disease which drives much of the planet’s plant population to extinction, poisoning and disfiguring humans. Even the genetically modified crops can only survive a few planting cycles before they themselves fall prey to the diseases with which they share their creators. Genetically altered cats called Cheshires, a whimsical gene ripped tribute to their namesake, proliferate on every continent, destroying what’s left of the food chain with their unstoppable feline instincts and man-given ability to change the colour of their pelts like a chameleon. The old global economy is called the expansion and people have abandoned its landmarks including high rises for wont of electricity to pump water and run lifts.

In this world, where food and energy are luxuries, life is quantified through calories. Unlike other countries that have fallen to the calorie companies, Thailand remains sovereign but seditious forces appear to be ripping at its existence. The Windup Girl follows a number of diverse characters in their race to fulfil their personal agendas which sometimes is as basic as survival. Anderson Lake runs a kink spring factory, a technology that harnesses what appears to be static energy to run things. But, his real objective is to gain access to the Thai seed stock, the secret of the country’s endurance in the face of the ecological siege. The calorie companies themselves are unable to keep pace with the mutating monstrosities that they’ve let loose. Hock Seng is a Yellow Card, a Chinese refugee who’s fled the near total massacre of his community in Malaya propagated by a fanatical Muslim group. Hock Seng works for Lake but secretly harbours ambitions to re-establish his once prosperous mercantile enterprise. Captain Jaidee is a White Shirt, part law enforcer, part thug from the environmental ministry, charged with keeping out the environmental poisons of the outside world. His officer, Kanya, works for a ministry which once ordered the quarantining and subsequent burning of her home village.

Emiko is the windup girl of the book’s title, a Japanese genetic creation – a human grown in a factory, genetically programmed to serve sycophantically, physically perfect in every way except for her odd clockwork movements; designed with small pores to accentuate her skin, she overheats quickly in Thailand’s humid climate. Emiko is discarded by her Japanese owner upon his return to Japan. Outside the immunity of the Japanese compounds, Emiko is an invasive species, liable to be destroyed by the Thai authorities. To survive, she is compelled to endure endless humiliation at a dodgy bar. The dubious entertainment districts of Bangkok survive but half the city is lost to the rising sea with the other half kept dry by leaky sea walls. Adding to all of this is the simmering tension between the country’s generals overseen by an all powerful regent caretaker of a revered child queen.

There you go, all the ingredients you need for an incredibly original, engaging, gory, fast-paced, unexpected and deliciously enjoyable story! A scary but credible vision of our future. I am not going to say anything more than that except that on the very last page, I hungered for an encore.

Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph

Mohan Karekar, an aging letter writer, lives with his wife Lakshmi, in Saraswati Park, a middle class suburban neighbourhood of Bombay. The dull routine of their empty nest is disrupted by their nephew, Ashish, who stays with them to repeat his last year of college after his parents are transferred to Indore. Mohan sits outside the GPO at VT and writes letters and fills forms for the unlettered. Throughout his life, he has harboured an ambition of being more than just a letter writer but an overbearing brother and early fatherhood arrested both his education and his aspirations.  

Ashish is quiet, uncertain and troubled by both the pressure of not letting his parents down again and his nascent sexuality. His trysts with Sunder, an attractive and rich but inarticulate SoBo boy leave him anxious and depressed. Later, his relationship with a 40 year old English tutor leaves him confused and equally depressed as he attempts to find something to cling to. Meanwhile, Mohan publishes a story and appears in a newspaper feature.  

Joseph’s prose is simple and straightforward, but her story is completely unremarkable. I don’t think her situation is unique and urban Indian writers in English face similar problems of creating credible characters and yet have engaging stories. Books on writing fiction commonly suggest that you should write what you know. But, what if what you know is banal, middle class and suburban. I think this is the biggest predicament facing urban Indian writers. They can’t possibly write about the ‘real’ India because they have a weak connection to it at best. Besides, who wants to read about the horrific sub-human lives people lead in the slums and villages. Sure, there have been some that have hit bull’s eye with the subject like Mistry with A Fine Balance, but the theme seems dated and despondent. Conversely, you could write about the hoi polloi like that pillock, Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghavi. But, then your work wouldn’t be deemed literary or worth the paper it’s printed on.  

I am sure Anjali Joseph is anything but banal, middle class and suburban. She has a degree from Cambridge and is currently an editor with Elle. I don’t dispute that she may have experienced a lifestyle similar to her characters at some point during her life. But, at the end of the day, they seem to be characters who are kept at an arm’s length; people for whom there seems little empathy in the narrative; distant, empty creations. I suppose this is the quandary of writing about what you don’t really know and don’t identify with. The ultimate result is a tepid work regardless of the talent of its architect.  

No Room for Secrets by Joanna Lumley

Absolutely Fabulous is perhaps my all time favourite among sitcoms and I absolutely adore Joanna Lumley as the incorrigible Patsy Stone. In her autobiography, Lumley opens her life up to the reader in a distinctive way. Instead of plodding along a chronologically ordered account of her life, she invites the reader into her house, taking us on a tour of the different rooms, the objects they contain and the memories they represent. Like any autobiography, you find out heaps that you never knew. I was always aware that Lumley was born in India in the last years of the Raj. What I didn’t know was that her family had a very strong India connection and even her father was born in India and her grandfather served here.  

I was a little disappointed that the book wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be. But, then the author is Joanna Lumley and not Patsy Stone, and I suppose fans must often interchange one for the other. On the other hand, Lumley is poised, charming and even endearing. I love the fact that she’s involved with a lot of charitable work and environmental issues but she’s not a prat about her participation in noteworthy causes. There’s a lot of stuff about her earlier work like The Avengers which I couldn’t really identify it. Regrettably, there’s very little on AbFab.  

What I really liked about No Room for Secrets is the absence of tedious introspection into counter-factuals and morose regret.  Lumley's had her share of ups and downs but she seems to live in the moment and I find that truly admirable.  Last evening, I caught her on The Graham Norton Show and I realised that the book lacks something that is so characteristically Joanna Lumley – her wonderfully posh voice.  

Residency!

I have been away in Hyderabad for a couple of weeks a cause d'un new job.  I thought I would have all the time in the world to read and vegetate.  But surprisingly, even the weekend seemed to have rushed by without so much as a page turn.  I blame the free wi-fi at the hotel and the mildly strange hours they keep at work.   The hotel I stayed at was in one of those neighbourhoods that's mushroomed overnight thanks to the ITES firms nearby.  Its name, suffixed by the word 'residency', isn't weird given that many hotels and guest houses in India call themselves residencies.  What is weird though, is the number of 'residential' buildings nearby which also call themselves residencies like Jayesh Residency or Deepa Residency.  Wiktionary says that a residency is "the home or residence of a person, especially in the colonies."  Is that the rationale for the names of these building, that their occupants are spectacled colonisers of the coding kind?