Book Reviews
Review 1: Animal's People, by Indra Sinha
Review by David Hebblethwaite
On 3 December 1984, an accident at a chemical plant released a
cloud of toxic gas over the Indian city of Bhopal. The resulting
deaths and injuries numbered many thousands. Now, I don't know
whether I am telling you something you already know, or whether
you've never heard of Bhopal until just now, or something in between.
Regardless, we all know that such disasters occur; and it remains
a difficult question how we, as distant observers, should react
to them, think about them, or write about them. As a small example,
consider the dispassionate tone of this review's first two sentences.
Then consider that I wrote them that way deliberately to make
a point. And so on.
How we respond to disasters is one of the central themes of Animal's
People. The novel is set in a city named Khaufpur, which is fictional
but has experienced a similar catastrophe of its own. It is narrated
by a nineteen-year-old boy whose spine was destroyed by the gas,
such that he must move around on all fours—he's taken the
name 'Animal' to reflect what he sees as his nature. There are
demands for the chemical firm (known only as 'the Kampani') to
face justice, but it has thus far refused even to send lawyers
to Khaupfur. Now Elli Barber, an 'Amrikan doctress', arrives in
the city to open free clinic—but is she all that she seems?
Could she actually be working for the Kampani?
Animal's first-person account takes the form of a series of tape
recordings. A journalist offered to publish the boy's story, so
the 'thousands of other people . . . looking through his eyes'
could learn about the Khaufpuris' lives. But Animal was reluctant:
'What can I say that they will understand? Have these thousands
of eyes slept even one night in a place like this? Do these eyes
shit on railway tracks?' However, with the 'jarnalis' gone, he
feels compelled to tell his story to us (whom he calls 'Eyes')
through the medium of the 'tape mashin'. Animal's idiosyncratic
voice takes a while to get used to, but it truly brings his character
to life; and a complex character he is, dealing with his feelings
towards the young woman Nisha (which he fears may never be reciprocated),
and the question of just how 'animal' (and/or human) he is—particularly
when Elli offers him hope of walking upright.
Whilst we can't truly imagine ourselves into the lives of the
Khaufpuris, there are some things we can appreciate, such as the
various ways the disaster has shaped places and lives. Of course,
this is true in the physical sense, as with Animal's body and
the city's poisoned ground. But then there are characters like
Zafar, who has dedicated himself to securing justice for Khaufpur;
and his girlfriend Nisha, who really wants to leave the city,
but doesn't feel able, because of Zafar's cause. Surely 'that
night' has transformed their lives as much as those caught in
the gas cloud.
The author also seems to suggest that, in some ways, the Khaufpuris
aren't all that different from outside observers. Animal despises
the insincerity he perceives in foreigners; but when he watches
news footage of planes crashing into some buildings abroad, he
can only see it as a movie. Elli Barber comes across as well-meaning
but not really understanding the Khaufpuris' feelings; yet couldn't
that also describe Zafar when he calls for a boycott of the clinic
on political grounds, even though so many people could benefit
from treatment?
Sinha's decision to set Animal's People against a fictionalised
background is an interesting one, as it makes us perceive the
disaster as being a little way out of reality, as the Khaufpuris
do. I don't mean it's not real to them, but that it's now somehow
beyond real: one character is a nun whom, as a result of the accident,
lost the ability to comprehend and speak languages other than
her childhood French; the cause was brain damage, but the way
Animal describes it, it might as well have been magic. Similarly,
the Kampani is not so much a cartoonish Big Bad Corporation to
the Khaufpuris as it is impossibly remote and unknowable, and
hence can be whatever they imagine—or fear. In all, this
is a powerful portrait of the situation and characters.
However, it's not quite sustained through the whole book. With
just over a hundred pages remaining, lawyers representing the
Kampani arrive in Khaupfur, and the plot moves on. Whilst this
is necessary for the story Sinha wants to tell, the novel loses
some of its atmosphere as the Kampani now has a definite face.
Still, this section has quite some power of its own, as Animal's
world begins to unravel and he retreats into the forest to wrestle
with his self and his conscience. Throughout the book, Animal
has demonstrated abilities (whether real or imagined) such as
being able communicate with a stillborn child preserved in a jar.
It's in the final part of the book that this aspect really takes
flight. There's also a resolution of sorts to the Khaupfuris'
struggles with the Kampani; although it does carry a whiff of
'the baddies getting their just deserts' (I've no idea whether
anything like that happened in real life), there is nothing approaching
a panacea. Life goes on in the book, as in reality.
So how do we respond to this novel about a disaster without being
insincere? I think there's a clue at the very end. For all Sinha's
evident anger about Bhopal, there is (commendably, I would say)
no real didacticism in Animal's People. Perhaps the closest to
a 'message' lies in Animal's closing sentences: 'Eyes, I'm done.
Khuda hafez. Go well. Remember me. All things pass, but the poor
remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will
be more of us.' Maybe the most sincere response is just to know,
and to try to understand as best we can. Novels can help us do
this by letting us inside the minds and worldviews of others;
with Animal's People, Indra Sinha has done exactly that, and done
it very well indeed.
Review 2: Memories of My Melancholy Whores, by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez
Review by Yasmin Huda
'The year I turned Ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of
a wild night of love with an adolescent virgin.' This, the opening
sentence of Marquez's first novel in over a decade, introduces
us to the 'sordid' world of our anonymous protagonist.
Known as 'The scholar', Marquez's latest 'hero' (a small town
columnist for a local paper) is, put simply, an archaic, cranky
old man who has spent his life frequenting the town's brothels
and as he proudly admits, has 'never gone to bed with a woman
[he] didn't pay'. Last time he counted (at the age of 50), he
had slept with 514 prostitutes after which, he lost track. He
describes himself as a 'mediocre journalist'—'ugly, shy
and anachronistic' and comes from 'the end of a line without merit
or brilliance'; hardly the words of someone trying to endear himself
to the reader. And this is exactly what makes him so interesting.
You shouldn't like him but you do. And why not? Despite his lecherous
ways, he is a likeable narrator. You may not like what he has
to say but you can respect him for being honest about it. He doesn't
seem to care what the world thinks of him; perhaps in old age,
he has gone beyond pride and shame. A fact made all the more obvious
when his trusted madam procures for him on his 90th birthday,
a 14 year old virgin, at which he remarks 'I don't mind changing
nappies'. But when the anticipated 'night of wild love' arrives,
the scholar finds his object of desire too drugged (courtesy of
Rosa the brothel madam, to 'ease' the girl's fear) to do anything
more than sleep through the entire night. So instead, he spends
the evening studying the young girl's slumbering form; 'That night
I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body
of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles
of modesty'.
What follows is a tale of an old man's obsession with a young
girl. He declares himself 'in love' for the first time in his
life at the age of 90 and spends his pension on gifts for her,
and on trinkets to decorate the hired room in the brothel, the
'theatre of our nights' as he describes it, all the while, never
consummating his physical desires. This new-found relationship
brings about a change in the scholar, which seems to reverberate
throughout the town as he transforms his column to a series of
love letters. But Marquez seems determined to keep us in two minds
about his narrator. His 14-year-old Lolita is nothing short of
two-dimensional. But he likes her that way. She speaks very little
and spends most of the time asleep. In fact, on one occasion she
speaks during her observed slumber; 'Her voice had a plebeian
touch . . . that was when the last shadow of a doubt disappeared
from my soul: I preferred her asleep.' He refuses to learn her
real name and instead, refers to her as 'Delgadina' a character
from a song he sings to her when she's asleep.
His entire romance with the girl is based on his own idealistic
hallucinations; scenarios he imagines for the both of them; the
girl becomes an annoyance when her true personality tries to surface.
He very tellingly admits 'seeing and touching her in the flesh,
she seemed less real to me than in my memory'.
So just when you think you're beginning to warm to the old man
through his 'love' induced renaissance, you realise that actually,
he's still as antiquated and misguided as he was to begin with.
The one woman he has ever loved is in reality, an imagined picture
of perfection, created by him, to be enjoyed by him.
To say I was a little disappointed with the female characters
in this novel would be a bit of an understatement. Marquez's characters
(the females in particular), usually so rich and colourful, are
reduced to marginal creatures, mere conquests notched into the
belt of the protagonist (with the exception of shrewd brothel
madam, Rosa Cabarcas). But perhaps this is more of a comment on
the scholar than it is Marquez. He has lived life alone never
knowing more of a woman than sex, and on turning 90 seems to seek
redemption in his alleged love for the girl. Unfortunately, he
can't even get this right. His emotions towards her are immature;
more suited to the narcissistic romanticism of a teenager. He
is besotted with a woman that exists only in his own mind.
If this is a book about finding redemption, or about never being
too old to experience life anew, it doesn't really seem to have
anything new to say. There is no lesson to learn or message to
decipher, because the 'hero' of the piece is allowed to arrive
at the end of the book just as deluded, if not more so, than when
it begins. Perhaps Marquez, now 80, is having the last laugh here.
Perhaps the message is that men his age have earned the right
to believe whatever they want, no matter how deluded they might
be. Overall, Marquez's tapestry of words seduces the senses as
only he knows how, making the journey enjoyable enough, but those
expecting a mesmerising masterpiece should steer clear.
Review 3: Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn
Review by Neil Ayres
Ella Minnow Pea is a concept novel, worth, I believe, the author's
probably considerable time spent penning it. But the reader not
interested or able to enjoy it for what it is (a rather weak story
laden with drippings of wordplay) may feel their time might be
better spent on something perhaps more real; ie, some hefty and
unforgiving modernism or hard SF.
The story, such as it is, is an epistolary dialogue, mostly between
the eponymous character and her cousin Tassie, but littered throughout
with notes and notifications from various other family members
and neighbours, all residing on the small island of Nollop (formally
Utoppiana), which is located twenty-one miles to the southeast
of Charlestown, North Carolina.
The islanders pride themselves on a sense of community and the
apparent equality in which all live their lives, until, that is,
the cenotaph bearing the pangram attributed to the island's favoured
son, Nevin Nollop, loses one of its letters. The novel begins
with a letter from Ella to Tassie, in which Ms Minnow Pea informs
her cousin of this news. It doesn't take long for the island's
mysterious Council to decree a ban on the use of the fallen letter
Z.
Ella sees this development as an exciting challenge, inaugurating
a new era for the island, for who needs the letter Z really? The
more savvy Tassie sees through the new law and rejects it for
the totalitarianism it is.
Of course it doesn't take long for more letter-bearing tiles to
begin dropping from the monument, and soon people are abandoning
the island in their droves for the promised land that is the USA.
(Funnily enough no mention made of Green Cards or work permits
at this stage.) The Council starts requisitioning the abandoned
property and it's not long before the mis-use of certain letters
of the alphabet results in a number of floggings, imprisonments
and yes, even executions, all the more disturbing when juxtaposed
with the jollity of the storytelling.
All the while Dunn has ever-increasing lippogrammatical fun as
his characters struggle to carry on communicating through the
medium of words, remaining surprisingly coherent until the loss
of the twelfth letter, the letter 'U', whereafter everything devolves
into a brand of makeshift argot a la Russell Hoban's 'Riddley
Walker.' Once we reach this point though, there is obviously the
necessity for a complete suspension of disbelief, as words in
print and words uttered are two entirely separate entities, and
it is simply not feasible that, when using a morphic vocabulary,
lines between punctuation and spelling will not begin to diverge.
Also, from page one I became suspicious of the lack of deaf islanders
in a purportedly Utopian nation - are we to suppose that those
with physical impairments offer too awkward a prospect to amalgamate
in a society founded on principals of equality.
Other than the rather weak political digs that the story seems
to be grappling onto for dear life in the hope of gaining some
narrative credibility (How difficult is it to take a sideswipe
at authoritarian extremism?) the novel revolves around the remaining
law-abiding islanders pursuit of a pangram (a sentence containing
all the letters of a given alphabet) made up of less letters than
Nollop's original.
And that, pretty much, is it. There's plenty to marvel at, not
least Dunn's decision to lose the letter 'D' so early on. And
if you love word-games, you'll no doubt thrill at the prospect
of reading this book. But if you want some of the other things
many expect from a good read: strong characterisation and setting,
emotional depth, vibrant, clear and unexpected plotting, you'd
do well to look elsewhere.
As a literary curiosity, 'Ella Minnow Pea' was a revelation for
me, and in spite of my criticisms, I highly recommend it.
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