The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, introduces an exciting new writer who happens to be Indian. If it’s true—and I happen to think it is—that the quality of a writer’s voice is the key to success, then Adiga has a great future. The compelling and often terrifying but never dull voice in this novel belongs to Balram Halwai, the owner of a car service, who sits in his office in the middle of the night in Bangalore speaking to the premier of China, due to visit India shortly. He’s alone in his tiny office with only his chandelier for company. The room is filled with the flickering light that is thrown around the room by the turning fan just above it. Having heard on the radio that Premier Jiabao wants to learn the truth about Bangalore, to “meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips,” Balram has determined that Jiabao hear his life story because he believes that the “future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse.” And what’s more, his story is the right one because, as he says, “I am tomorrow.”
Forget images of the Taj Mahal, incense, golden chrysanthemums, elephants padding through the jungle, or “lyrical India,” as one critic has described it; Balram’s India is a savage place, a country where he, the son of a rickshaw puller, can rise from “The Darkness” only by the most nefarious of means. Balram’s life reflects all the clichés—rags to riches, poor boy makes good, etc. You can’t listen to him without thinking of Dickens’s Pip, of David Copperfield on the one hand, of Horatio Alger stories, even Stendhal’s The Charter House of Parma or The Red and the Black. Except that, and it’s a big except, Balram gets where he gets in his own way, by conniving and cheating and murdering. And yet, and yet, it’s hard to despise him because his world is so vicious and corrupt. Balram compares it to a Rooster Coop, the box into which roosters are crammed in the market. Above them the butcher chops up chickens and the roosters smell the blood. But they don’t rebel or try to escape the coop, and as Balram says, the “very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”
And so he has become a White Tiger, the “rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation,” in the jungle of his country." The angry outrage, the biting wit, the sheer power of Balram’s voice is so persuasive that readers are carried along, complicit in the acts that he carries out to achieve his office and his chandelier. Is he mad? Maybe. Is this the voice of the future? Possibly. Whatever else, his is a narrative of enormous power that keeps a reader turning the pages until the end just to hear where Balram will go next. Much as I have enjoyed books by other Indian writers such as Amitov Ghosh, Rohan Mistry, Karen Desai, and Manil Suri, this is the first one I’ve read that seemed to look to the future. Prophetically, it seems to suggest the world of the recent attacks in Mumbai rather than the world of a film like “Monsoon Wedding.” Finally, the angry energy of Balram’s voice reminded me a lot of Salmon Rushdie’s classic novel about partition, Midnight’s Children. Is Balram’s world the child of that 1947 midnight? This is not a happy thought.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
A Critic's Critic
For readers who want to go beyond the average review by delving deeper into criticism of the novel I recommend James Wood, a professor of literary criticism at Harvard. To put it simply, Wood is a believer in the power of the novel to express the reality of the human condition in a world without God. Although he goes to some lengths to argue that he is not substituting the novel for religion, he puts great faith in the capacity of literature to express reality. His latest contribution to the cause is a slim volume called How Fiction Works, which is refreshingly on the side of practice as opposed to theory. While not exactly easy reading, it’s well worth your time and effort. Woods is a concise writer with a vast knowledge of the literature from which he selects his examples.
As far as I go, however, Woods’ best book is The Broken Estate (1999), a collection of essays on literature and belief now available in paper. Most of the pieces were published elsewhere before appearing in book form, but reading them together leads to a deeper understanding of Woods’ and of his attentiveness to the works under consideration; in other words, he listens to the voices of the novelist rather than imposing a theory of his own, a surprisingly rare gift in a critic.
Subjects run the gamut from Sir Thomas More to Don DeLillo, and include writers as disparate as Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison. Of course Woods has his pet peeves, such as Toni Morrison’s use of “false magic,” which he says corrupts “our ability to judge fiction, which is a measured unreality.” Yet he is open to D.H. Lawrence’s “occultism” because he, Lawrence, is a “mystical realist” who is a poet and preacher at the same time. Read together, these two essays went a long way towards making me understand what I have never liked about the former and loved about the latter. Thus Woods gives readers a critical vocabulary with which to express likes and dislikes.
There’s no obligation to agree with everything he says—that would be to miss the point. But Woods makes us think about what it is the novel does and how it does it. I, for instance, don’t agree with him about Murdoch or John Updike or W.G. Sebald, whom I will never read with y pleasure whatever Woods or anyone else says about his genius. But neither will I read Virginia Woolf again without remembering Woods’ impassioned claim for her. He argues that what she seeks in her art is an “indefinability” of something that can’t be found, but that we all sense, a meaning that is always elusive, “finlike,” that her art at its best is always moving toward. Woods sent me back to her novels with a deepened understanding of their genius. At the end of the book’s last essay, which is on the nature of the broken estate, Wood asks “Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?” Why indeed, but thank the heaven that doesn’t exist for the literature that has been written in that antechamber.
As far as I go, however, Woods’ best book is The Broken Estate (1999), a collection of essays on literature and belief now available in paper. Most of the pieces were published elsewhere before appearing in book form, but reading them together leads to a deeper understanding of Woods’ and of his attentiveness to the works under consideration; in other words, he listens to the voices of the novelist rather than imposing a theory of his own, a surprisingly rare gift in a critic.
Subjects run the gamut from Sir Thomas More to Don DeLillo, and include writers as disparate as Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison. Of course Woods has his pet peeves, such as Toni Morrison’s use of “false magic,” which he says corrupts “our ability to judge fiction, which is a measured unreality.” Yet he is open to D.H. Lawrence’s “occultism” because he, Lawrence, is a “mystical realist” who is a poet and preacher at the same time. Read together, these two essays went a long way towards making me understand what I have never liked about the former and loved about the latter. Thus Woods gives readers a critical vocabulary with which to express likes and dislikes.
There’s no obligation to agree with everything he says—that would be to miss the point. But Woods makes us think about what it is the novel does and how it does it. I, for instance, don’t agree with him about Murdoch or John Updike or W.G. Sebald, whom I will never read with y pleasure whatever Woods or anyone else says about his genius. But neither will I read Virginia Woolf again without remembering Woods’ impassioned claim for her. He argues that what she seeks in her art is an “indefinability” of something that can’t be found, but that we all sense, a meaning that is always elusive, “finlike,” that her art at its best is always moving toward. Woods sent me back to her novels with a deepened understanding of their genius. At the end of the book’s last essay, which is on the nature of the broken estate, Wood asks “Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?” Why indeed, but thank the heaven that doesn’t exist for the literature that has been written in that antechamber.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Nowhere to Go
Nothing to Be Frightened Of, self-described as a “memoir of mortality,” displays the wit and linguistic facility readers expect of Julian Barnes, whose most recent book was Arthur and George, a novel based on a relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and an unknown Anglo-Indian named George. Barnes’s latest begins with a bang suggestive of both its seriousness and its humor: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” What follows is Barnes’s self-examination of his irrational fear of death and the pointlessness of such an emotion, if one can reduce a profoundly troubling psychological state to h an inadequate word.
Readers learn a lot about Barnes’s family, grandparents, parents and philosopher brother who, by the way, sounds like a true British eccentric, and who regards his younger brother’s whinging about the inevitable with affectionate (I think) scorn. But Barnes also draws upon what other writers, especially French, have had to say about the grim reaper. One often cited is Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French author whose sometimes mordant wit and brevity may explain Barnes’ attraction to him. Stendhal appears too, primarily in the context of Stendhal’s Syndrome, a supposedly near-death experience brought on by exposure to great art that overcame the writer the first time he visited Florence. Barnes debunks Stendhal’s description of what happened, pointing out that the details are all wrong, that it cannot have possibly transpired as Beyle/Stendhal claims; he does not, however, deny the worth of the experience. The story, he says, “is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true.” Thus too we need to believe when we are told that death is not to be feared, in which instance it’s harder to accept the convenient lie.
The fraught question of the ephemeral nature of the novelist’s output and the unreliability of memory pops up throughout the book. Memory, Barnes says, begins to seem “less and less distinguishable” from the imagination as age sets in. The novelist—he cites Ford Madox Ford, who was known for his storytelling—“could be a mighty liar, and a mighty truth-teller, at the same time, and in the same sentence.” But does any of it endure? For a few generations perhaps, but seldom longer. Towards the end of the book Barnes describes a visit to Renard’s grave in the village of Chitry-les-Mines, which shows no signs of frequent visitations. “Is there anything sadder than an unvisited grave?” he asks, knowing full well that in time every grave is unvisited.
I liked this book. Barnes is at times too clever for his own good, but he is always intelligent, always provocative, and sometimes moving as he defends his fear of death and his lack of belief in an afterlife as perfectly rational if not inevitable for a thinking person. I share many of his views and the night I finished the book just before falling asleep I had a most unpleasant dream, the details of which soon faded, but from which I awoke speaking the words, “I have nowhere to go.” Having initially remembered them as “I want to get out of here,” upon reflection I realized I was wrong. It seems obvious now that my terror was a response to Barnes’s assertion that we die only to go nowhere.
Readers learn a lot about Barnes’s family, grandparents, parents and philosopher brother who, by the way, sounds like a true British eccentric, and who regards his younger brother’s whinging about the inevitable with affectionate (I think) scorn. But Barnes also draws upon what other writers, especially French, have had to say about the grim reaper. One often cited is Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French author whose sometimes mordant wit and brevity may explain Barnes’ attraction to him. Stendhal appears too, primarily in the context of Stendhal’s Syndrome, a supposedly near-death experience brought on by exposure to great art that overcame the writer the first time he visited Florence. Barnes debunks Stendhal’s description of what happened, pointing out that the details are all wrong, that it cannot have possibly transpired as Beyle/Stendhal claims; he does not, however, deny the worth of the experience. The story, he says, “is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true.” Thus too we need to believe when we are told that death is not to be feared, in which instance it’s harder to accept the convenient lie.
The fraught question of the ephemeral nature of the novelist’s output and the unreliability of memory pops up throughout the book. Memory, Barnes says, begins to seem “less and less distinguishable” from the imagination as age sets in. The novelist—he cites Ford Madox Ford, who was known for his storytelling—“could be a mighty liar, and a mighty truth-teller, at the same time, and in the same sentence.” But does any of it endure? For a few generations perhaps, but seldom longer. Towards the end of the book Barnes describes a visit to Renard’s grave in the village of Chitry-les-Mines, which shows no signs of frequent visitations. “Is there anything sadder than an unvisited grave?” he asks, knowing full well that in time every grave is unvisited.
I liked this book. Barnes is at times too clever for his own good, but he is always intelligent, always provocative, and sometimes moving as he defends his fear of death and his lack of belief in an afterlife as perfectly rational if not inevitable for a thinking person. I share many of his views and the night I finished the book just before falling asleep I had a most unpleasant dream, the details of which soon faded, but from which I awoke speaking the words, “I have nowhere to go.” Having initially remembered them as “I want to get out of here,” upon reflection I realized I was wrong. It seems obvious now that my terror was a response to Barnes’s assertion that we die only to go nowhere.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Liars, Rogues and Thieves
Company of Liars by Karen Maitland—a specialist in psycholinguistics, whatever that may be—is a chilling account of a group of strangers forced to flee together from the ravages of the Black Plague that struck England in 1348. Advertised as a reinterpretation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it has little in common with that great chronicle other than being structured as a journey during which some of the travelers tell their tales. In this instance, however, the tales are primarily a fictional device for filling in their backgrounds. That said, the novel is a fascinating narrative of what the arrival of the plague on England’s shores signified. A large portion of the population died and abject fear took over the country. Maitland creates a believable portrait of life in a country still largely rural in nature that does not make one long for the past, which she portrays as brutal, diseased and filthy. The novel puts paid to the myth of the medieval world as a place of minstrels, castles and Christmas feasts. Although it uses some of the same devices, Company of Liars is head and shoulders above the usual “medieval world come to life” novel.
The travellers’ tale is told by Camelot, a seller of relics who ends up leading the disparate group of pilgrims, most of whom either dislike or distrust each other, as they wend their way across England, the plague always on their heels or even ahead of them, always forcing them to rethink their route. His fellow travelers include a young couple expecting a baby, two Italian musicians, a young man with a swan’s wing for an arm, and a distinctly unsettling very blond little girl with a nasty habit of knowing what is about to occur, usually something terrible, usually death. Every one of these refugees from the mainstream has a secret to keep, all of which are divulged in time. Many of them come to a bad end so all in all it’s a grim tale, but very readable. Camelot’s secret is told only at the end, and is the least convincing in that it seems like too handy an end to the novel’s journey, a journey which, like Chaucer’s before it mimics man’s progress through life. A pilgrimage is a very handy metaphor around which to build a novel and Maitland makes good use of it.
The travellers’ tale is told by Camelot, a seller of relics who ends up leading the disparate group of pilgrims, most of whom either dislike or distrust each other, as they wend their way across England, the plague always on their heels or even ahead of them, always forcing them to rethink their route. His fellow travelers include a young couple expecting a baby, two Italian musicians, a young man with a swan’s wing for an arm, and a distinctly unsettling very blond little girl with a nasty habit of knowing what is about to occur, usually something terrible, usually death. Every one of these refugees from the mainstream has a secret to keep, all of which are divulged in time. Many of them come to a bad end so all in all it’s a grim tale, but very readable. Camelot’s secret is told only at the end, and is the least convincing in that it seems like too handy an end to the novel’s journey, a journey which, like Chaucer’s before it mimics man’s progress through life. A pilgrimage is a very handy metaphor around which to build a novel and Maitland makes good use of it.
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