To say it has been a mad couple of months would be an
understatement, holidays, catching up on the work that piled up whilst I was on
holidays, charity work, running and all whilst attempting to be a dad!!! Thank
goodness I’ve had a great Booker Prize shortlist to transport me away from the
day to day grind, pity I haven’t had time to update my blog. This will be a
short review only.
I read this novel about a month ago so please forgive me if
my recollections aren’t fresh and straight onto the page. This is Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s debut novel
and even though it is primarily a novel about drug addiction, it is also a
social reflection on the city once known as Bombay (the novel begins and ends
with the work “Bombay”).
This novel opens with our mysterious narrator stating, “…and
since I’m the one telling it (the story) and you don’t know who I am, let me
say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now”, and moves throughout
from first person to third person narrative across numerous characters. The
eunuch prostitute and opium den worker Dimple, is the one who seems to appear
most, but she is not the narrator. We also have den owner addict and family man
Rumi, a celebrated artist who can’t control his addictions, an ageing Chinese
refugee who laments on a place and time lost as well as our “narrator” recently
returned from the USA.
The common bond being drugs, this is an hallucinatory story
about loss of identity, motivations for addiction, peppered with dream like
sequences, bold tales of the physical impacts of drugs containing graphic
details of violence and sex. Through addiction, each character has lost more
than their control of their lives, this is how the raw underbelly of a city
existed in the 1970’s.
Only the rich can afford surprise
and/or irony. The rich crave meaning. The first thing they ask when faced with
eternity, and in fact the last thing, is: excuse me, what does this mean? The
poor don’t ask questions, or they don’t ask irrelevant questions. They can’t
afford to. All they can afford is laughter and ghosts. Then there are the addicts,
the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and
the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness
that substances engender. An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a
saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily,
voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency?
There is also the melting pot of religion, race, gender,
poverty vs wealth and more in this dark tale, that reflects the seemingly
better capitalist world of the future (Mumbai) against the not too distant
past, as well as giving voice to the victims of that time. Is the new future
life of being clean what the poor and addicted want?
Unlike any other Indian novel I have read before this debut
strikingly delves into the city of Bombay and the tales of opium, cocaine and
heroin addiction are startlingly real, and I could understand why some readers
have found the subject matter, the style (who’s voice is talking now?) and the
bleak moral a bit too much to handle. Another realist novel on the 2012
shortlist, looks like we’re living in very very dark times indeed.
Cross posted at my blog.
I wasn't a huge fan of the subject matter in this book, but I thought it was well-executed. :)
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