Jeet
Thayil is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist, and has published four
collections of poetry till date. Narcopolis, long listed for the Man Booker
prize 2012, is his first attempt at writing a full-fledged novel.
“This
is the Old Bombay as seen from the slums and the gutter, the city illuminated
in all its sweat and temper…. Original and vital” – Daily
Telegraph, reads the front cover.
I
call bullshit.
To
begin with, having read the bloody book makes me wonder how atrocious the bloke
must be at writing poetry and songs, or is it (as Sensei Elver keeps pointing
out during our discussions) that poetry is inherently a bad medium for judging
a writer’s literary command, thus making me wonder again if I should in fact
refrain from even mentioning his poems and songs, forget questioning the
evidence of them being non-atrocious; for a poem is often deemed non-atrocious
these days not by the amount of ‘motive’ it has attached to it, but by the
amount of abstract crap it is able to unload unto the barren, untilled tracts
of tissue that form a docile reader’s brain.
On
a side note, if you feel that the above para is digressive and has little
meaning, you know now exactly how I felt while reading Narcopolis.
Pointless
in its telling and seldom presenting the reader even with the semblance of a
central plotline, the book is a disjointed collection of interesting
character-centric subplots hastily tied together by the single fact that all of
these characters are either opium abusers or opium peddlers or in some cases
both, residing in Bombay. Thayil begins with a prologue that is singular in
style. Presented through the eyes of an unreliable narrator who is
hallucinating about the past as he sits smoking in an opium den, the prose
reminds you of Rushdie’s brilliance in places and assures of a promising
experience to follow, which, to be honest, holds true even after you are a
hundred odd pages in and already introduced to a handful of grounded,
intriguing people as the novel’s protagonists.
A
bleak painter cum poet who is eternally drunk, a rich man who believes getting
high is true freedom, a eunuch who works nights as a prostitute and days at the
opium den, the den owner, his chamchaas, his competitors, his clients and not
to forget, a serial murderer who targets beggars sleeping on the streets after
dark- all are fresh perspectives and also very interesting. Of the bunch,
I craved to read more on the back story of one Mr. Lee, an old man and small
time opium dealer who arrives at the city as a young foreigner on the run and
never leaves once he makes acquaintance with the sea.
Then….
Nothing.
In
his ambition of writing harsh, bleak and hard-hitting prose, the author
somewhere forgets that he is supposed to write a fucking ‘story’ that is harsh,
bleak and hard-hitting. Not just prose made up of bits and pieces.
Writing
a harsh novel doesn’t amount to shit unless you have a purposeful story to
tell, harshly told or not.
Also,
a story, especially a long one, has to have a purpose, even if that purpose be
presented as a subtext, buried beneath layers of character and conflict
complexity. A purpose that forms the central arc of the story, beginning at the
beginning, covering the length of the book, hovering over it till the very end
and sometimes even beyond if the author has left the end open for
interpretation. The purpose, once a reader digs deeper, has to surface if not
in its entirety, then atleast as an enigma that would then need further
deciphering through rereads and discussions between booklovers.
Could
‘pointlessness’ be the purpose of a story? – asks one, experienced in all
intangible, interested in all abstract.
Yes,
it could. And it is. (They have a whole genre for such stories called
existentialism).
Only,
a pointless story and a story about the pointlessness of something should not
be confused with one other. A pointless story, remains just that- pointless.
And
I fucking hate pointless stories. So theres that.
Then
there is the quality of writing- commendably distinctive at the beginning with
long, endlessly free-flowing sentences that whisper secrets inside your ear
seducing you into reading on; impressing in the first two chapters (Thayil
calls the real chapters as Book one Book two, etc and the subsets to those as
chapters which he begins and ends randomly at any goddamn point for no reason
at all); then, once chapter two is done, it becomes terrible. A glimpse
here, a glimpse there of the greatness promised at the beginning, maybe.
Otherwise nothing.
And
honestly, what the author lacked in other scenes, I thought he could have
easily compensated for with decent writing in the sensual bits atleast. But no,
he doesn’t seem to have any particular talent for that either. Some of the
explicit descriptions are outright hideous and written so tastelessly (Oh, how
I miss Rushdie at these moments) that they invoke no emotion at all, if you
know what I mean.
All
in all- Just sloppy penmanship.
Narcopolis
is not an ode to ‘Bombay of the ‘70s’, as the synopsis at the back
would have you believe. Capturing a city’s history in all its compelling
squalor and capturing shit, piss, garbage, the ugly and/or the poor in each and
every scene are two different things. Further, while I may not be a staunch
advocate of the 70s as pictured by big-budget Bollywood, I do have a beef with
anyone who pictures the city as merely a metaphor for stark economic divide
housing hopeless inhabitants who keep learning harsh lessons on philosophy and
existentialism almost every alternate day (surprisingly at the drop of a hat).
A
novel on Bombay demands much more.
But
these are trifle observations. Easy to overlook. Easier to forgive. But bad
writing? Hell no. That makes or breaks the deal.
Definitely
not worth recommending.
In
its stead, do read ‘Moth Smoke’ by Pakistani Writer Mohsin Hamid. Or better,
read both and compare.
The
latter, a doomed love story narrated from the point of view of Darashikoh
Shezad, a unemployed youth cum drug-addict-in-the-making, might help
demonstrate to you how an author need not abandon beauty and passion in his
words to ensure that his novel is effectively ‘harsh’.
Below
excerpt from Moth Smoke for your consideration:
3 comments:
Your expectations from sensual scenes have been unrealistically heightened by a certain ficlet called "Pride and Shame". Avoid the temptation to compare all erotica thereto.
Well, one tries not to compare, but one fails miserably sometimes, especially when the author himself seems to hold no great passion for what he is showing through his writings.
Fecking hell. Read the entire thing (despite having scarce time to). A rant well done - pointed, scathing, and critical. Also, the two snapshots at the end were just beautiful. I will here-forth call myself well-rounded.
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