Book Review: Me Cheeta, by James Lever

(This was published in February's Hindu Literary Review)

A one line description of Me Cheeta- the 'autobiography' of the chimp in the Tarzan movies- would suggest it is more or less a gimmick. Surely a book that proceeds from such an unreal premise cannot be taken seriously. In fact, it can. There is (as far as we know) no such thing as a monkey capable of language and literature, but then nor is there any such thing as an orc or an elf, or Jane Eyre, or Hercule Poirot, or Sartaj Singh, or Rocket Singh. They are all equally made-up, and one of the pleasant things about a book that is unabashedly fictional is that it reminds us what the essence of fiction is. Artifice. Whether you take for your protagonist a grim, tough-bitten man of the world or a goofy chimpanzee in Hollywood, the question is never: Is it real? The question is only: Does it tell the truth?

On the other hand, there is a reason why most fiction deals in the recognizable, which is the need to keep in touch. The more 'far-out' a character becomes, the less likely it is to serve any useful purpose. It is one thing to imagine a chimpanzee writing, it is another to imagine it writing three hundred pages of interesting memoir- without metamorphosing, at some point, into an ordinary human being. In which case we would be entitled to ask why it wasn't simply one to begin with. So when James Lever decides to get into the head of Cheeta, a chimpanzee abducted from the jungles of Liberia and launched into show-business, he is taking on a task that is legitimate, but difficult. On the whole, he does an excellent job of it. He does it by sticking, more or less, to the core ground of true emotion that Cheeta is perfectly placed to know- a captive animal's feelings for humanity.

This is, however, the less prominent theme of the book. The prominent theme, as advertised on the back jacket and in the bulk of the blurbs, is that of a Hollywood spoof, a parody of a celebrity memoir a bitchy, satirical send-up of the Golden Age of the Dream Factory. And it is true that no one who picks up this book hoping for the salacious atmosphere of gossip is likely to be disappointed. From the introduction, where Cheeta resolves to tell his tale 'without bitterness, name-calling or score settling', 'no matter how oafish the behaviour of certain people, such as Esther Williams, Errol Flynn, 'Red' Skelton, 'Duke' Wayne...', to his continually back-handed praise of his 'colleagues' ('Chaplin is an extraordinarily special human being... but... not even Charlie's stoutest defenders would claim that he was perfect or even likeable or indeed defensible on any level at all'), the entertainment is undeniable.

However, it does not fit. To put high-grade insults in an animal's mouth is funny, but strictly fanciful; the animal in such cases is the prop, not the author. A little less fanciful, but still a stretch, is Lever's portrayal of Cheeta as a delusional and increasingly bitter actor. His cluelessness about how Hollywood really works, coupled with his sense of being at the centre of it, is intended, perhaps, to echo the situation of many of the industry's human stars. But this can only succeed as a brief joke: no really insightful analysis of an artist's struggle in Hollywood can emerge from Cheeta. He is, after all, only a chimp.

All in all, these elements of the book are best treated as stand-alone parodies, snatches of information and comic relief, and if they were all there was to Me Cheeta, it wouldn't have deserved to make the Booker long-list. But there is more. The beating heart of the novel is Cheeta's relationship with humanity, and in particular with Johnny Weissmuller, MGM's Tarzan. “Happy, beautiful, young, untroubled”, Johnny is the centre of Cheeta's world, the human being who epitomizes the best of human beings, the only species that, for all the killing and hurt they cause, truly love and need animals. When Cheeta says this, we hear no satire. His gratitude to humans, and his fascination with their world, is both sincere and believable. Anyone who has cared for a pet will comprehend it. And Lever knows the profundity of this relationship, which is easy to ignore, but worthy of a novel. He sums it up in the lovely end, where Cheeta recalls the memory of a baby, lost in the jungle. “Its trusting gaze was the most vulnerable thing we'd ever seen, but there's power in that... The thing starts to cry... It smiles... I pick it up. It needs me, I think. I'll be its friend..."

Book Review: Neti, Neti, by Anjum Hasan (IndiaInk, 2009)

(This was written for Biblio)



Towards the close of Neti, Neti, its young protagonist Sophie Das wonders aloud when her story will end. A little later she has a moment of realization: it won't even be on the last page. She is right about this, and perhaps unwittingly she reveals in the process the truth of her tale. Not merely that it remains unresolved, but that she does not know how to resolve it. So she cries for help- as she has been, more or less clearly, more or less consciously, all through the book.

Here, in a nutshell, is the best and worst of Neti, Neti. It takes on a problem that it cannot tackle, and on this stark measure it is a failure. But the problem isn't easy, and the attempt is honest, so there is not much shame in the defeat.

What is the problem? It isn't anything very new or startling; it is the problem of a young person getting to grips with adulthood. More than anything, Neti, Neti is a coming of age book. Indeed, one of its chief virtues is that amidst a literary culture so paranoid of 'self-indulgence', it features a protagonist who makes no apologies for worrying about herself. Not unlike the author, Sophie is a young woman from Shillong, who moves to Bangalore in search of freedom, and vistas wider than the home. The city gives her independence alright, and Sophie knows how to value it. In her apartment, “she could cook what she liked, smoke to her heart's content, put every object exactly where she wanted it to be and know it would not move unless she moved it.”

But it gives her other things beside; all the hot and bother of a chaotic Indian metro. Traffic jams, accidents, casual rudenesses, ugly malls, dirty streets, vast economic and social disparity existing cheek by jowl. Like any sensitive young person, Sophie feels the oppression of her environment and fears it will overwhelm her. She thinks with a pang of her beautiful home-town and the life she left behind. Hasan knows what hurts. The thousand little pin-pricks, Sophie's everyday humiliations, are all as they should be.

They are not, however, exactly as they should be. From fairly early on, we see the signs that Sophie is not trying hard enough. There is something unduly exaggerated about her horrors, the city seems to parade its evils especially for her. Hasan's insinuation is that other people look away, but the truth appears to be that Sophie looks too raptly. There is a glitch in her perception that repels our sympathy, and it is most apparent in her attitude to wealth. We have all felt the aesthetic failings of a lavish mall, but we have not all been literally paralyzed by the sight. It is reasonable to flinch at Page 3 culture and the glossy lifestyle magazines; it is not reasonable to devour them, just so one may vent. “She ground her teeth reading about wine appreciation evenings in swanky hotels.” This is funny, until you realize it is serious. “Nausea, mixed with awe”, is Sophie's avowed reaction to “wealth, in all its forms.” She does not pause to consider whether this isn't a bit excessive.

For us, however, it is worth pausing here, because it affords a clue to Sophie's character. What might be the probable cause of her heightened intolerance towards 'things'? Perhaps, the book suggests, it is the contrast they strike with her sheltered childhood in Shillong, and its slow-moving, small-town values? This is certainly part of the explanation, but it does not seem the whole or even the greatest part. After all, we are told that Sophie left Shillong precisely because she felt that there, “there was nothing to see.” Moreover, it is not necessary to be brought up in a small-town to feel, in your youth, the crush of the city. Every childhood has its own shelters, and the transition to adulthood is always a shock. And yet, staring at an array of packaged items on a supermarket shelf, walking by lighted shop-fronts, whether in a mall or not, most people, now and then, will feel a rush of something akin to admiration. An abundance of 'things' need not only be proof of human greed. It is also proof of human achievement. So for a truer explanation of Sophie's trouble we must look to her character, not her circumstances. And there is one glaring fact that can strike a twenty five year old like an arrow through the heart as she looks around at all the glut of productivity- and sees nothing made by her.

If one is self-critical enough to grasp this, the way ahead becomes easier to see. It lies in cultivating one's own abilities. Unfortunately for Sophie and for her story she is rarely self-critical, and she is frequently selfish. As a result, her friends and acquaintances, in whose sympathies she might have taken recourse, remain two-dimensional figures. She seems to want them around chiefly in order to feel superior to them- with their prosaic dreams of money and comfort. Her interest in their interior life is half-hearted at best. So even when her friend Ringo kills his girlfriend Rukshana, her thoughts are neither with him, nor with her, but with herself. “All Sophie could think of was the part she had played.” There were a few quarrels between the three, but to the reader it seems no part at all.

But perhaps the most apparent instance of Sophie's self-centred-ness, is her relationship with her boyfriend, Swami- “the first boy who understood the essentially shitty nature of her job and held her hand when they crossed roads.” Given that this isn't much to build on, it is unsurprising when later she grows dissatisfied with his easy-going personality. But the idea that, in letting the relationship drift, she might now be simply using Swami does not cross her mind. Instead, Sophie blames her boyfriend for failing to weaken in his “rock hard love”, because of which, she complains to herself, “nothing need ever change.” All in all, she is rather passive. She expects things to please her; she does not think of being pleasing herself.

That she remains an engaging protagonist, is the reason that Neti, Neti remains a good book. Hasan is not alive to her character's faults, but her achievement is that she makes the reader want to be. We are interested in criticizing Sophie because we are interested in her. And that is because she is honest. She is unhappy, but she does not pretend otherwise- as many people do. Moreover, she wants to feel better and she is willing to look for help. To deserve sympathy and attention, no more than this is required. So when Sophie decides to return to Shillong, we still follow her with interest. There is the possibility that the mountain town is her true home, 'that certain places on earth must bring forth happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, that cannot thrive elsewhere.' There is also the possibility of love; a man whose image she carries in her heart.

Now, Sophie's capacity to imagine these possibilities, and to act upon them, is proof of a creative impulse- the kind of capacity that could really turn her life around. But an impulse is only a spark; if it is to burn steadily it must be nourished. And it cannot be nourished unless at first it is shielded. This she does not do. She is greedy to be rewarded, and so her enthusiasm remains feeble and easily dashed. No sooner is she at her parents' home than we find her staring out of the window at a changing town, “at cold, boxy, pink and concrete houses built by people who didn't care about Beauty.' This is vintage Sophie. In the days that follow she is witness to domestic strife and local politics, and the end of an affair. There is no cold rejection; the man cares deeply. There is no familial tragedy either; her parents, despite hiccups, are sticking together. But it wasn't as she had imagined it, and so Sophie decides that “she was alone from now on. She was her own context.” Armed with this insight, she returns to Bangalore, to another job that she does not like.

Her new attitude, though, is “to grow mesmerised by the boredom.” “Nothing frightened her anymore- not walking into a shop in a plush mall, trying on clothes and then buying nothing. Not waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to go back to sleep. Not seeing a man crushed to death on the street.” The old ambition of happiness is gone, and like an invalid, Sophie has taken to being grateful for small mercies- the odd free ride, the occasional kind word. 'I don't want to feel the knife edge of anything ever pressing into me again', she thinks, as the book ends. They are hardly fighting words.

Of course, we are expected to sympathize with Sophie's disaffection, and even perhaps to applaud it. 'Neti, Neti', the title of the book means 'Not this, Not this.' Bangalore is ugly, Shillong is petty, so what is one to do? But the whole premise of this philosophy is flawed. It only wants to receive; it does not think to give. As readers, we never feel that Hasan sees this, and that is why, ultimately, Neti, Neti is a failed story. But we also never feel she is happy with the failure, and that is why it is a good story.

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'The New Anthem: The Subcontinent In Its Own Words', edited by Ahmede Hussain (Tranquebar Press, 2009)

(First published in the Outlook dated Nov. 16th)


What is South Asian fiction? How does it fare in the English language? And why do we need to know? These are important, interesting questions, which a book aiming to anthologize 'the subcontinent in its own words' really ought to have engaged with. A one page introduction merely asserting that “a strand of post-colonial literature” has now become an “independent genre” with a distinctive voice, is too brief and too vague to suffice. So when 'The New Anthem' moves hastily on to its twenty two short fiction pieces, we are fore-warned.

Some of the stories have South Asian settings and some South Asian protagonists. Only a handful reflect South Asian perspectives. Altaf Tyrewala's hand-wringing Mumbai abortionist, Monideepa Sahu's mother-and-son outing; Khademul Islam's Chittagong 'cyclone'; here are examples of subcontinental writers telling their stories in a language that came from a colonial power, and remains foreign to large swathes of their countrymen- and all without affectation or apology.

This is a major cultural achievement, but it is only meaningful in a specific cultural context. It would be wonderful to prove that the achievement is widespread- but you would have to focus. Where 'The New Anthem' lets itself down is in its uncritical collation of sensibilities- South Asian, diasporic, even simply Western. What suffers in the process is not the individual quality, but the collective thrust. That English fiction abounds in South Asian names, we already knew. And South Asian voices? We still don't know.

The Road to Recovery

On the 27th of August, 1999, on a still, clear morning in County Sligo in West Ireland, Lord Mountbatten was out at sea, boating with his family, when a bomb planted by the IRA exploded and he was dead. Three others died in the blast, including Nicholas, Mountbatten's grandson and Timothy Knatchbull's twin brother. “Our hearts beat in loose synchronicity over seven hundred million times, until he was killed, aged fourteen.” It was the deepest relationship of Timothy's young life: 'to be so completely on the wavelength of another human being... was a gift. I was to realise this only once I had lost it.' 'From A Clear Blue Sky' is the story of how, over the course of the next twenty four years, Knatchbull overcame that loss.

Now of course, grief itself is commonplace. As Knatchbull points out, “we all have a car crash in our lives.' So it is perfectly fair to ask, at the outset: Does his own story rise above the ruck? Is it really deserving of a book? The answer is Yes, and not because of the political turmoil at the back of it, or who Mountbatten was; these details are interesting, but ultimately only incidental. It is obvious that Knatchbull isn't trying to cash in on a famous tragedy. Nor is he merely airing his sorrows. He is not 'using' his writing to get over his brother's death. He has already got over it; he is writing to tell us how. In doing so, he offers an account, always sincere, often moving, of a mourning so courageous and a healing so complete, as few people manage.


A Human Process


Of the many important insights Knatchbull has to offer, one that is crucial is the difference between grief and mourning. In the aftermath of Nicholas' death, he returned quickly to physical strength and an outward ebullience. But “becoming strong again did not mean physical strength alone, it also meant emotional strength. Had I spent more time actively mourning, then I would have healed more quickly and suffered less. Instead, I just let grief float over me on an occasional and passive basis.” There is a suggestion, also, that the stiff upper lip, and the sense of humour- revered British institutions both- can hinder one's facing the facts. So at thirty one, despite a seemingly happy professional and personal life, Knatchbull diagnoses himself afresh. He has mood swings, bouts of misery, the 'sound of the bomb' still plays in his ear. He decides then to take “an almost impossibly difficult but necessary step... to return to Ireland and finally address what had been holding me back for so long.' To engage, as he puts it, 'in a human process.'

From here on we follow him through an exhaustive series of encounters with the world of his childhood and the day of the bombing. He speaks with the staff at Classiebawn Castle, the family's old August retreat, “a place where normal life was suspended and dreams were played out”; with locals in Village Sligo; with his rescuers; doctors and hospital staff; with the security forces assigned to Mountbatten. Through these meetings and interviews, Knatchbull is able to reconstruct the environment at the village and grasp for the first time the complex politics behind his grandfather's assassination. He is able, also, to confront the image of his murdered brother.


Farewell and Forgiveness


During this account, what is particularly striking is the contemporaneousness of Knatchbull's personal healing and his forgiveness of Thomas McMahon, the bomber. It seems clear that his mission to 'say goodbye' to Nick would not have succeeded, had he not made his peace with the murderer. To achieve this takes hard and careful work. While he wants to learn about it, Knatchbull is careful to avoid probing too deep into the conspiracy that led to the bombing; he is not interested in rooting out every last culprit or pointing fingers at local sympathizers (of whom there were plenty). What he aims at is only a sufficient understanding of events to accept, “that if I had been born into a republican stronghold, lived my life as dictated by conditions in Northern Ireland, and been educated through the events of the 1960s and 1970s, my life might well have turned out the way Thomas McMahon's did.” The point here is not that it would have- it doesn't seem likely- nor that McMahon's crime was at all justifiable. The point is that the crime was human. And a book that culminates with a truth like that has told a story worth telling.

A Critical Failure: Standards of Judgment in Indian English Fiction

(This is an essay I wrote on the state of contemporary literary criticism of Indian English fiction. A slightly altered version was published in today's Hindu Literary Review.)


At first glance, literary criticism seems a purely reactive enterprise; an appraisal of creative output that both logically and chronologically arrives after the fact. But it is much more than that. Just as the gardener's pruning shapes the growth of the plant, criticism gives direction to creativity. A critical culture envelops writers, whispering suggestions of subject and style- and the majority of writers depend on the suggestions. Otherwise they might not know what to say. The same critical culture guides readers too, and helps them comprehend the books they are given. Otherwise they might not know what to think. So if Indian English fiction today seems a disjointed cacophony of voices, with no discernible shared themes or values to lend some shape to its burgeoning mass, the ultimate fault is of our critical imaginations. They have not clarified the standards, by which writers may know their material, and readers may know their books. What standards we have got, are superficial and misleading, and the products of insecurity.

Awards

Judged by the number of international literary awards it has won, and the pace at which it has won them, Indian English fiction must be among the world's finest. The list of winners is impressive- Rushdie, Roy, Lahiri, Desai, Adiga. And it seems only natural that we should accept these victories as aids to our judgment. Surely it is safe to say that a book by an Indian author, so successful on the world stage, is an exemplar of Indian writing in English? But truthfully, not at all, because fiction writing is not a sport. An Indian cricket team winning the World Cup is almost certainly a greater achievement than the same team winning domestically, since at the international level the rules are the same and the competition is likely much tougher. But in fiction, there are no rules, and the 'competition' is incommensurable. All there is, at the back of every book, is a certain sensibility, the writer's mind, expressed for better or worse. And the act of reading is a meeting of minds. So when a book by an Indian writer wins a foreign prize, it makes more sense to be suspicious than thrilled. It may well be that the book is not really Indian writing, not really an Indian mind on paper, but a more or less foreign one. Perhaps that is why it won. At any rate, the inquiry must be made, and to shirk the inquiry, to focus on the fact of the prize, and to declare on its basis a triumph for Indian writing in English, is to leave the critical job undone. It is to continue to accept other people's opinions, without looking for one's own.

Reportage

Kiran Nagarkar once observed: “Research is not fiction. Very often it is passed off as fiction, especially in this country.” These are insightful words. Non-fiction continually outperforms fiction in our English language market, perhaps because its utility is clear on the face of it, while the case for fiction is less easily grasped. It needs to be made, clearly and effectively, but it hasn't been, and so a strange and pervasive theory has come to hold sway, that the best fiction is really just non-fiction with a storyline. According to this theory, the internal crises of characters, the play of their thoughts, the analysis of their emotions, do not suffice: 'hard facts' are needed, politics, history and sociology must be dropped as paperweights to prevent the frail fictional edifice from fluttering away. Many literary heavyweights adhere to this theory, and with seeming impunity. But the greater the emphasis on reportage the greater the disconnect between the writer and his characters, and the less the human insight. Then why the great emphasis? Perhaps, as Amitava Kumar has written, “the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude... betrays the anxiety about authenticity.” A writer “concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject...[might] invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage... to build banks against the rising tide of that worry.”


Fashion

Nowadays, it is usual to read and hear that middle class India is growing ever more self-confident and ever more globally powerful. All too often, however, the hallmarks of this way of thinking are an uncritical celebration of money, personal aggrandizement and faux liberalism. Businessmen and industrialists are the heroes of the movement, but artists are welcome to join- provided they toe the line. And therefore a new breed of Indian English fiction has come to be published and lauded, not because it is good, but because it is the fashion. A book that is 'light' and 'breezy', doesn't have much to say but says it glibly, pats its chosen establishment on the back, and takes aim at nothing but good taste, will fit the bill. The operating tyranny here is that one mustn't be a spoilsport- you cannot seriously criticize a 'fun' book. A great deal of 'chick-lit', for example, is thus allowed to fly under the radar. But this is literary criticism at its most superficial; it is almost literally judging a book by its cover, as though the only important story on offer is the writer's 'success story.' Naturally, it provides no means of judgement, only adds to the prevailing peer pressure.


Interior Honesty: The True Standard


The extent of foreign acclaim, non-fictional content, and trendiness- what do these spurious standards of criticism have in common? They are each proof of a cultural insecurity. We resort to other people's verdicts, hide behind detail, and pile onto bandwagons, because we are shy of accepting that we have minds of our own. The literature of other Indian languages suffers from no such crises of identity; but as to Indian writing in English, Naipaul has rightly diagnosed, “India has no means of judging.... India's poverty and colonial past, the riddle of the two civilizations, continue to stand in the way of identity and strength and intellectual growth.”

And yet we cannot accept the air of finality about that assertion, because after all, it is the writer's very job- and pride and joy- to solve such riddles. The fact is, that the lives of English-speaking Indians, their specific social situations, their emotional crises and predicaments, are as real as anybody's, and as fertile a ground for literature, as anybody's. The test of the worth of Indian English fiction must, therefore, be the same as the test of any fiction. It is the test of interior honesty, which is achieved only by accepting your material and making something of it- and with candour, not a nervous laugh or a running apology. What is more, we do have writers who have attempted this task, and some of them have even tasted great domestic success. Unfortunately, their success has perhaps been mis-analyzed. I would suggest, for example, that the popularity of Chetan Bhagat's books is not because they are written so 'simply' or imagined so crudely; it is because, in spite of their many glaring artistic and other shortcomings, they honestly have something to say. There are others, also, who have things to say, and the only fair way of judging them is on the merits of what they have said and how well they have said it. That way lies literary criticism, and a little further on, maybe, a new national literature.

Book Review: The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, Jonathan Cape (2009)

(A modified version of this was published in today's Hindu Literary Review)




The Quickening Maze, shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize, is a graceful, vivid, beautifully written book, about fascinating characters in an otherworldly setting, whose achievement is nevertheless limited by a serious absence of narrative unity.


Drawing upon the lives of real people, in real situations, the book is ostensibly the story of the 19th Century English poet John Clare, and his incarceration in Dr Matthew Allen's High Beach Asylum, in Epping Forest in Essex. The 'nature' poet, whose mad hallucinations centre around his first, dead love, Mary, and his own identity- sometimes he is the poet Lord Byron, sometimes the boxer Jack Randall- is denied the company of his muse, the forest, and his wives, the real Patty and the imagined Mary. We follow his descent into madness. But although The Quickening Maze is so described, and although it starts and ends with John Clare, it is not particularly about him. A host of characters make up the tableau at High Beach Asylum. There is Dr. Allen, a seemingly wise and self-possessed medical man who launches into an ill-fated enterprise to sell wood-carving machines and prove to his skeptical family that he is an entrepreneurial genius. There is a young, as yet un-lauded Alfred Tennyson, living in the vicinity while his brother takes treatment, nursing grouses against literary critics, and investing in Allen's doomed project in a bid to get rich quick. There is Hannah, Allen's daughter, smitten by Tennyson, and trying touchingly to reel her man in. There are others too, the gypsies in the forest, the patients in the asylum, an aristocrat's love-lorn son, a business magnate, Dr. Allen's brutish colleague.

Now, to varying degrees, these various storylines are each engaging. The book abounds in apposite descriptions of people's emotions. The unwavering stubbornness of a lunatic receiving treatment; 'she could hear that he [the doctor] was exasperated, as with an awkward child, whereas it was his understanding that was childish'; Allen's fatal attraction to 'risk'; 'there was a pent force in having things at stake that seemed to charge one's limbs with energy and made eventual triumph more intense than could be imagined'; Hannah's curious relief at knowing finally that she can't have Tennyson;, because now 'the failure was outside of her body. It was already there, in the green and sunlit day', are high quality pieces of thought, with writing to match. The setting too, is precisely evoked; Epping Forest, dark and lovely and teeming with interior life, stays with the reader as an abiding presence. Where the novel loses steam, though, is in the big picture. Its various parts never really coalesce, either thematically or structurally. Aside from their co-existence in place and time, John Clare has little to do with Tennyson, or Hannah, or Allen's wood-carving scheme. And though it is possible for the enthusiastic reader to hunt out commonalities of meaning, running through the different stories- Imagination's battle with Reality, for example, or simply the 'quickening maze' that each character navigates- one feels that the novel should have done more of this work.

Partly, perhaps, this lack of unity stems from the inherent difficulties of transmuting non-fictional material into a single work of fiction. John Clare's story is both true and interesting. So is Matthew Allen's. Foulds is thus naturally keen to include both in his book, but the question remains, do they reveal any greater truth, when examined side by side? The other culprit, maybe, is the narrative style that Foulds adopts- one that is becoming increasingly fashionable in contemporary literature. The book unfolds scene by scene, flitting from place to place as a camera would. This allows for vivid images and a sense of compacted meaning, but it is, quintessentially, the style of a movie. It is a transplant, therefore, from a different mode of imagining. Not only does it somewhat distance the author from his characters, to have a metaphorical camera installed in between, but it might also waylay him into pursuing parallel, unconnected storylines, where the more traditional literary narrative, that cuts the whole book from one cloth, would have imposed a desirable unity. So it is in the thick of individual scenes that Foulds' brilliance shines through; not in the transitions, nor in the whole. That still leaves enough brilliance, however, to make this book well worth your while.

An Interview with Neel Mukherjee, Author of Past Continuous

I did an email interview with Neel Mukherjee, who won the 2008 Vodafone Crossword Book Award for fiction for his first novel, Past Continuous. Excerpts from this were published in September's Hindu Literary Review.



1. Past Continuous is your first novel and it's obviously deeply felt. Did you worry at any stage about how your candour would be received? For example, did you worry that the scathing treatment Calcutta gets in this book, might offend some of your readers? And now that the book's been out a while, how would you assess the reaction of readers in this respect?

I do not have any memory of worrying about the reception its candour would get but the thought did cross my mind, on several occasions, that Calcuttans and Bengalis might murmur against the book. I was relieved when my anxieties turned out to be unfounded. I do not know why I have been spared the fate (so far, I hasten to add; it might be unleashed with my next book, who knows?) that lies in wait for writers who are critical about Bengalis and Calcutta. I'd like to think it's because I do not write as an 'outsider': I know the place and the period in my blood and my bones. I have lived as a Bengali and a Calcuttan for 22 years of my life, so no one could accuse me of not 'being' a Bengali/Calcuttan, of writing about things I do not know/understand. It may also have something to do with the fact that the book's attitude towards Oxford and London are as scathing and disaffected so it balances out the disenchantment with Calcutta.

2. There have been plenty of books dealing with emigration from India to the West. But the protagonist is rarely as little nostalgic about what he is leaving and as single-mindedly bent on escaping, as Ritwik in Past Continuous. Were you aware, while you wrote this book, that you were treading a different emotional terrain from other 'migrant' novels? Is that something you deliberately set out to do?

Yes, it was a very deliberate move on my part. I was trying to look at exile as choice, as volitional and sought-out. The common or garden variety of nostalgia, which is nothing more than a spurious, confected sentimentality, has ruined the 'migrant' novel. If you must have nostalgia, or longing glances backwards at what you've left behind, there must be new ways of doing it. Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian-American writer, for example, looks back on his life in Sarajevo all the time, but he reinvents nostalgia for his purposes to the extent that we need to find another word for the feeling that charges his fiction. Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the USSR. They wring your soul. Alas, no such thing marks Indian 'migrant' literature yet.


3. You chose a gay protagonist for the novel, and yet the fact of his homosexuality didn't seem to me central to any of his predicaments. He might have been heterosexual and had just the same crises- only the details would differ. Do you agree with this reading? Or do you think the novel has something specific to say about Ritwik's sexuality?

It's really wonderful and affirming to hear this. I cannot tell you how much I agree with this reading. Ritwik's homosexuality is a sideshow. The novel is not a 'gay novel' in the sense The Swimming-Pool Library or The Spell are. I'm dismayed to hear it described as a 'coming-out' novel or, worse, a 'coming-of-age' novel. It could then, with equal justification, be called a novel about fruit-picking, or a novel about a posh London hotel. I was once told by a reader, who was disappointed, I think, that the book was not 'about' homosexuality, that I 'didn't do anything with Ritwik's homosexuality, just placed it in the novel without dealing with it'. What's there to deal with? His sexuality is what it is, a given, and I was not interested in mounting an enquiry into it at all. It's a novel 'about' other things.

4. When I finished reading Past Continuous that old line of verse came to me : East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Is there a sense in which you share that sentiment?

Yes, I do, in short. I'm much more attracted to the miscegenation of cultures than to harmony. The vision of, say, Naipaul, of such complicated enmeshments and their intractable nature, excoriating though it is, speaks an undeniable truth that is lacking from the flimsier works written by lesser writers to 'celebrate' multiculturalism or happy fusion of East and West. I'm much more interested in the long-term historical legacies of such (mostly baneful) encounters between worlds than sixteenth-century Turkish and Venetian art that borrowed from each other and married East and West in such harmonious beauty because the worlds came together through trade and commerce and all that rubbish. 

5. I understand that before Picador India got it, the book was considered by many agents and publishers in the U.K. Were there any recurring comments or suggestions that you received from them?

Agents don't usually send suggestions in this country if they turn you down. The agent who took me on made one very sensitive suggestion and I accepted it instantly because it went 'ping' in my head. I have one very bad experience with a UK publisher, who gave it out to be understood that she wanted to publish my book and made me do a lot of changes, all outside a contract, only to reject it in the end. What was worse was that it was obvious from the outset that she simply hadn't 'got' the book: she wanted me to turn the novel into a fluffy, romantic, weepy Exotica Fest. She wanted the 'smells and colours of India', which she felt were missing, a love-story in Ritwik's narrative, a love-story in the Miss Gilby narrative, something that would 'wrench the heart' ... I'm really, really lucky I wasn't published by her. I think of that experience as something akin to surviving a rail crash.


6. You did a course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. How useful was that experience in shaping you as a writer? Would you recommend a creative writing course to amateur writers?

It was one of the worst years of my life. The UEA Creative Writing MA was in irreversible decline by the time I joined the course: too many students (because it's an easy money-spinner for the university); very mediocre teachers in my year; their craven kowtowing to the illusion that writers can be made out of people who are not readers; the inanity inherent in the 'workshopping model' ... I could go on and on. The anti-intellectualism that so defines the English was nowhere more starkly on show than in that dreadful MA course. Which makes you think: if a writing class is pegged to the lowest common denominator, where are we headed? What it does give you, and I think this is quite useful, is a kind of toughness, a resilience to both the dominant norm in writing produced by the Creative Writing Industry and to useless, content-free, unintelligent criticism. It can build a good filtering system in you, so that you can instantly detect rubbish in comments you get on your work and, equally, the perceptive stuff. It also teaches you to push against the zeitgeisty kind of writing that has taken over publishing and that is invaluable. So, in short, all you learn from a Creative Writing course is to go against it, a kind of walking the via negativa. On a more personal level, I should quit complaining about my time at UEA because it was there that I met the most exciting writer working in the UK today: Ali Smith. Alas, she didn't teach my group.

As for recommending creative writing courses to amateur writers, yes, I suppose I would, very reluctantly, simply because it's getting impossible to have your manuscript seen by agents if you do not have the rubber-stamp of a good writing school.

7. Who are your favourite authors- and what do you like about them?


The list is endless. I'll pick just a few. Gustave Flaubert, because he took realism to its stretching point. Samuel Beckett, because he picked up the pieces after that and created new possibilities for fiction by taking prose back to zero. Mikhail Bulgakov, for that one novel, The Master and Margarita, which shows you what a wild, untramelled imagination is capable of. Penelope Fitzgerald, for her left-field imagination, her left-field prose, her astonishing way with details. R.K. Narayan, because the whole world is there in his gentle, witty, immensely affectionate novels; irony had not become a default position for moral impoverishment yet. Richard Yates, for the glitchless surface of his psychological realism, under which runs a bleak vision of humanity. James Salter, for some of the most extraordinary prose in the Anglo-American world.