Book Review: Grave Descend (1970) by John Lange

I came across this crime thriller thanks to Peter Rozovsky over at his Detectives Beyond Borders blog, where he astutely points out that its most notable feature, aside from being one of Michael Crichton's early works before he became Michael Crichton Inc., is its economical writing style. Crichton/Lange is, indeed, thrifty with the descriptive prose. Landscapes and locations are described in the most perfunctory terms, and the characters are identified by their skin colour, general build, level of attractiveness, and not much else. The dialogue is equally terse, with no one being allowed to prattle on for more than three or four sentences in a row. The villain is the only exception to this rule, but that's OK because bad guys are obliged to ramble on in their orotund fashion in order to fill us in on their dastardly schemes. The plot is king here, and Crichton keeps things hopping along with great energy as his hero, commercial diver James McGregor, is hired to do a salvage job on a yacht that has sunk under mysterious circumstances just off the coast of Jamaica. There are gun fights, tense moments underwater, scary encounters with sharks and crocodiles, plots within plots, and a variety of femme fatales, each more attractive than the next.

Grave Descend is not trying to be more than a pulp thriller, but it's certainly one of the better ones of its kind from that era, and the worst thing you can say about it is that it's an inferior Travis McGee adventure.  Crichton would actually turn into a far worse writer later in his career, when his novels Congo and Timeline began to resemble Popular Science articles leavened with a bit of violence and intrigue. It's easy to get sniffy about writers like Crichton, but I look at them (and their writing style) as inheritors of the oral storytelling tradition. Once upon a time, as they say, stories only came in spoken form from the local bard or storyteller. Read any collection of folk tales or fairy tales from Grimm's onwards and you'll notice that the stories are filled with a lot of descriptive boilerplate: heroes are "fair and handsome," maidens have "skin white as milk," mountains are so high they "touch the sky," and forests are always "dark and deep." Story after story uses the same descriptors as a kind of shorthand to quickly set the scene for the audience so that the main attraction, the story, isn't slowed down by distracting detail. A storyteller would probably have risked having a drinking vessel chucked at his head if he'd tried to flesh his tale out by saying that the hero's quest was actually due to structural changes in the goatherd industry, or that forests that are dark and deep are actually quite fascinating when you study the symbiotic relation...Ouch! You get the idea. Crichton uses similar devices. Here are some samples from just the first two pages of the novel:

"He had cut through the tiny mountain villages, the native huts perched precariously beside the road; then down through lush valleys of tropical vegetation."

"In the distance, he could see blue water, with waves breaking across the inner reefs, and hotels lining the beachfront."

"He passed manicured gardens, beds of bright flowers, carefully watered palms."

With this kind of punchy, pulpy writing, details are skimped and the big picture is drawn in broad strokes, no time to wax poetic on what colours and types of flowers are in those beds, the size and variety of the hotels, what kinds of lives are lived in those huts, and, of course, we're left to ponder what might a carelessly watered palm look like. But those are worries for another kind of novel. With pulp novels the reader is expected to fill in the blanks with his own imagination once he's been given the right cues. A description like "lush valleys of tropical vegetation" is as cliche as it gets, but there's no one who can't instantly summon up a mental picture of such a landscape. Just for comparison's sake, here's what a literary writer, Yasmine Gooneratne, does with a description of a tropical landscape in The Sweet and Simple Kind:

"When the wreaths of mist lift, leaving the grass wet with dew, mornings on the estate clink and ring with birdsong, sounding very much as if a crowd of children were jingling thin silver coins in their pockets, considering the possibilities."

That's startlingly beautiful writing, but it gets us nowhere in terms of story. An essentially oral storyteller like Crichton is trying to hold the attention of a broad and varied audience by crafting modern-day folk tales that make the reader constantly, and anxiously, ask, "WTF's going to happen next?" This is a hell of a long way from literary writing, and it's often not even good writing, but I think it positions Crichton and his peers in the Guild of Pulp Writers as direct descendants of the men and women who sat by campfires and hearths weaving magical stories built out of stock phrases and familiar characters, and a whole lot of imagination and energy.

Book Review: Partitions (2011) by Amit Majmudar

Over the short lifetime of this blog I've frequently touted Rafik Schami (my reviews here, here and here) as a writer whose fiction provides some background to the whys and wherefores of the Arab Spring. Majmudar does something in a similar vein in Partitions, a novel about the cruel, chaotic and bloody division of Imperial India into three separate countries in 1947. Majmudar's novel isn't political in tone or outlook, but the horrors he so artfully describes go a long way to explaining the past and current tensions between India and Pakistan.

Partitions is plotted like a thriller and written like an epic poem. The novel follows four individuals caught up in the two-way exodus that preceded the creation of Pakistan. Muslims are heading west to resettle in land that will become Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs are fleeing east to India. All the refugees are preyed upon by murderous sectarian mobs, as are those who choose to stay on the wrong side of the border. Hundreds of thousands of people would eventually be killed in the upheavals surrounding Partition. The four people at the centre of the novel are Masud, a Muslim doctor; Simran, a Sikh teenage girl; and two Hindu boys, Keshav and Shankar.

All four characters face death on more than one occasion, and their progress to safety is fraught with tension and harrowing episodes of violence. It's in this regard that Partitions reads like a thriller: characters are left in cliffhanger situations and frequently leap from the frying pan into the fire. The novel has an epic poem quality thanks to the author's audacious decision to make his narrator a ghost. Yes, a ghost. The spirit is that of Dr. Jaitly, the father of Keshav and Shankar. He died months before Partition and he now watches over events, flitting from place to place like a Greek god in The Iliad to observe events and, on occasion, to make ineffectual attempts to intervene in the life and death struggles he witnesses.

Majmudar's decision to make the narrator a ghost is a bold one. Some readers are going to find that this is a distracting or ridiculous narrative device, but I think his intention is to give the novel a voice of humanity and empathy that's divorced from a sectarian viewpoint. Jaitly the ghost sees horrors in a way that Jaitly the mortal would never be able to. Having a ghost as a narrator also lends itself to Majmudar's finely crafted prose. Majmudar is a poet as well, and it shows in sentences like this one describing Masud standing beside a column of refugees:

The family is staring at him. A gentleman heron perfectly still against a background of shuffling migration.

Jaitly has an impressionistic view of what goes around him, conveying violence and distress and hatred with finely-formed, terse descriptions that seem all the more powerful for being brief. Another writer might have gone for lengthy, gritty descriptions of the various horrors of  Partition, but the economical, poetic approach seems to work better in this case. And on a purely aesthetic level there's no disputing that Majmudar is fine writer.

The only problem I had with Partitions is that the ending brings together the four characters in a symbolically convenient manner that's a bit too cozy and predictable. That aside, Partitions is yet another world-class novel from the Indian sub-continent. In the last few years just about every novel I've read from that region has been better than the last. Here are my reviews of novels by Manu Joseph and Yasmine Gooneratne, and although I haven't reviewed it yet, I have to mention Sujit Saraf's The Peacock Throne, which may have to rate as the Great Indian Novel.

Book Review: Difficult Daughters (1998) by Manju Kapur

Just this week an international poll taken by the Thomson Reuters Foundation found that India is the least woman-friendly country amongst the G20 countries. Women in India are still subject to domestic slavery, child marriage, and violence and murder as result of dowry disputes. Difficult Daughters shows that the more things don't change, the more they stay intolerable. Difficult Daughters is set in the years leading up to India's Independence and Partition. The central character is Virmati, the eldest daughter of a prosperous family of jewellers. As she comes of age in the early 1940s the political changes sweeping India have also produced a shift in attitudes towards women. A small, but significant, minority of women are choosing to continue their education past the most basic level, right up to university. Virmati is one of those girls.

Difficult Daughters is a hindsight novel. The purpose of hindsight novels is to take us back in time to show us that things were once a whole lot worse, or, in rarer cases, a whole lot better. In this case, author Kupar is looking back and letting us know that Indian women, even the ones from the middle-classes, had it very bad. The hindsight aspect of the novel isn't its strongest feature. It's hardly news to us, or Indian readers, that women faced a laundry list of restrictions, prejudices and barriers once upon a time. The more time Kapur spends detailing the sexism of 1940s India, the more the story drags.

Fortunately, Kapur does a much better job of describing the relationship between Virmati and Harish, a college professor. When Virmati goes to college in Lahore she comes under the spell of the married professor. He pursues her despite the fact that he's married and they eventually become lovers. This affair, and Virmati's quest for educational success, drives her away from her traditional family until, eventually, she's ostracized by them. Harish finally marries Virmati and makes her a co-wife, something that was allowed, but frowned upon, in Hindu society. Life in a two-wife household is hell for Virmati. It's this aspect of the novel that Kapur excels at; her descriptions of the tension in the household, and the weasel-ish hypocrisy of Harish are excellent. As a psycholgical novel, as a character study, Difficult Daughters is very good.

Another novel with very similar themes, but with more ambition and more elegant prose, is The Sweet and Simple Kind (my review here) by Yasmine Gooneratne. It's set in Sri Lanka in the 1950s and is well worth seeking out. And for an excellent novel about Partition read my review of Partitions by Amit Majmudar.

Book Review: The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006) by Yasmine Gooneratne

Yasmine Gooneratne is Sri Lankan born and bred, and her native country is the setting for this ambitious novel that details the changes that gripped Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) from independence in 1948 to the race riots in 1958 that foreshadowed the civil war that began in 1983.

Gooneratne centres her story around two female cousins, Latha and the rather portentously named Tsunami. The latter is from the rich side of the Wijesinha family, while Latha's family is decidedly middle-class. The two girls become fast friends as young girls at Lucas Falls, a large house and tea plantation owned by Tsunami's father, Rowland. Latha visits Lucas Falls on her vacations and is a witness to what amounts to the moral decline and fall of Tsunami's family over the course of the next dozen or so years.

When we first meet Rowland he's married to Helen, a skilled amateur artist originally from India, and their lifestyle is in most respects that of an upper-class English family. Their taste in literature is Anglocentric, Helen's art is Western, their peers are often Oxbridge educated, cricket is an obsession, and their children attend elite local schools modeled on institutions like Eton and Harrow. In sum, they're almost more English than the English.

Gooneratne depicts Latha and Tsunami's early years at Lucas Falls as a kind of Eden in which the two girls discover a shared love of books and learning. Helen is the muse of this paradise, encouraging the girl's curiosity, discussing art and literature with them, and generally encouraging a liberal way of thinking. The dark cloud in paradise is Rowland, who acts the part of the English gentleman, but soon becomes influenced by the rising tide of Sinhala nationalism that will eventually tear the country apart. Rowland is from an ancient Sinhala family and becomes caught up in politics after Independence in 1948. In what almost seems a symbolic act, he disparages Helen's art, and not long after that Helen leaves Rowland for Mr Goldman, a German rep of tea wholesalers.

The rest of the novel follows Latha and Tsunami as they navigate the difficulties of love and courtship in Ceylon's deeply conservative society, and struggle with life at university. Meanwhile, in the background, Ceylon's post-colonial political life becomes more vicious, culminating in deadly race riots aimed at the Tamil minority. Rowland moves further along the path of Sinhala nationalism and his family becomes as fractured as the country itself, with his two eldest children, Ranil and Tara, becoming as morally vicious as the political conflict.

Gooneratne is a professor of 19th century English literature, with a special interest in Jane Austen, and it shows in her writing, for good and not quite so good. On the plus side, she knows how to spin out a family saga and juggle multiple storylines and characters. This makes the novel very readable, almost addictively so, and her characterization is usually very sharp. The political elements are skillfully interwoven, and even non-Sri Lankans, such as myself, should have no problem understanding the political and cultural makeup of the county.

The only problem I had with the novel (and it's a minor complaint) is its gentility, its cosiness. Gooneratne can be brutally realistic at times, but on a few too many occasions characters and events are bathed in a warm glow of sentimentality and nostalgia. And this also applies to the plot. The middle section of the novel is mostly taken up with Latha and Tsunami's life at university, and too much of it reads like an affectionate, but static, memoir of university life.

The Sweet and Simple Kind is well worth reading, if only for the elegance of Gooteratne's prose. For example, here's a short passage describing the Lucas Falls estate:

When the wreaths of mist lift, leaving the grass wet with dew, mornings on the estate clink and ring with birdsong, sounding very much as if a crowd of children were jingling thin silver coins in their pockets, considering the possibilities.

That sentence could stand on its own as a poem, and writing of that calibre is rare enough that it should be praised at every opportunity.