Jeet Thayil’s new book is ‘an often thrilling addition to contemporary Indian literature’. Photograph: Ishan Tankha for the Guardian
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray there is a moment when Dorian sets eyes upon a volume that is described as “the strangest book that he had ever read… the heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain”. Although it is not named, the book Wilde refers to is JK Huysmans’s À Rebours. Its English title, Against Nature, would serve perfectly as an alternative description of Jeet Thayil’s beguiling second novel, which also seems to be imbued with the heavy odour of incense. Its evocation of numerous worlds, ranging from 50s
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray there is a moment when Dorian sets eyes upon a volume that is described as “the strangest book that he had ever read… the heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain”. Although it is not named, the book Wilde refers to is JK Huysmans’s À Rebours. Its English title, Against Nature, would serve perfectly as an alternative description of Jeet Thayil’s beguiling second novel, which also seems to be imbued with the heavy odour of incense. Its evocation of numerous worlds, ranging from 50s
Soho to modern Delhi, makes for a rich, languorous and seductive saga. Like Thayil’s first novel (the Man Booker-shortlisted Narcopolis), it will appeal to many a discerning reader.
Thayil’s protagonist is a dissolute, once brilliant man, Francis Newton Xavier, an octogenarian painter and poet who has lost sight of his Indian roots and become more English than the denizens of Oxford and London with whom he rubbed shoulders, Francis Bacon and Muriel Belcher among them. Comparisons are invited between Xavier and other noted Anglo-Indian authors, such as VS Naipauland Salman Rushdie, at times mischievously so. Nonetheless, this is no literary roman à clef, though Thayil has candidly discussed the book’s autobiographical elements, and the dedication to the Indian poet Dom Moraes suggests that he, too, has been an influence.
Thayil skilfully draws parallels between his protagonist’s fading health and declining artistic achievements
Instead, it is Xavier’s unconventional odyssey that dominates the narrative, as he, wrecked through years of hard living and harder thought, flees a fearful post-9/11 Manhattan with his lover and occasional muse, the excellently named Goody Lol, to return to India, pursued by his biographer, Dismas Bambai. Whether he is heading there for artistic inspiration or in search of absolution is left tantalisingly unclear; in any case, Thayil skilfully draws parallels between his protagonist’s fading health and declining artistic achievements. As Xavier says, “your anger curled, your grief dies, your talent fades on the page… you understand that thought is the enemy, the source of all lesions, tumours and sarcomas; then thought becomes flesh becomes the emblem of your shame”.
Readers with a knowledge of the so-called Bombay poets of the 70s and 80s, who appear in fictionalised form here, are likely to appreciate Thayil’s pastiches and allusions the most. He may have described them as “assholes” in an interview, but he lauds them here as “outliers, rebels, hermits, dangerous faces unwelcome in polite society”. They have an authenticity that is lacking in the whitewashed, westernised attitudes towards literature and life that Thayil satirises, whether or not they merit the description “chocolate saints”.
This is an ambitious and often thrilling addition to contemporary Indian literature. Just as “the strangest book” enthralled Dorian Gray, the rich, heady poetry here leaves readers little choice but to surrender.
Thayil’s protagonist is a dissolute, once brilliant man, Francis Newton Xavier, an octogenarian painter and poet who has lost sight of his Indian roots and become more English than the denizens of Oxford and London with whom he rubbed shoulders, Francis Bacon and Muriel Belcher among them. Comparisons are invited between Xavier and other noted Anglo-Indian authors, such as VS Naipauland Salman Rushdie, at times mischievously so. Nonetheless, this is no literary roman à clef, though Thayil has candidly discussed the book’s autobiographical elements, and the dedication to the Indian poet Dom Moraes suggests that he, too, has been an influence.
Thayil skilfully draws parallels between his protagonist’s fading health and declining artistic achievements
Instead, it is Xavier’s unconventional odyssey that dominates the narrative, as he, wrecked through years of hard living and harder thought, flees a fearful post-9/11 Manhattan with his lover and occasional muse, the excellently named Goody Lol, to return to India, pursued by his biographer, Dismas Bambai. Whether he is heading there for artistic inspiration or in search of absolution is left tantalisingly unclear; in any case, Thayil skilfully draws parallels between his protagonist’s fading health and declining artistic achievements. As Xavier says, “your anger curled, your grief dies, your talent fades on the page… you understand that thought is the enemy, the source of all lesions, tumours and sarcomas; then thought becomes flesh becomes the emblem of your shame”.
Readers with a knowledge of the so-called Bombay poets of the 70s and 80s, who appear in fictionalised form here, are likely to appreciate Thayil’s pastiches and allusions the most. He may have described them as “assholes” in an interview, but he lauds them here as “outliers, rebels, hermits, dangerous faces unwelcome in polite society”. They have an authenticity that is lacking in the whitewashed, westernised attitudes towards literature and life that Thayil satirises, whether or not they merit the description “chocolate saints”.
This is an ambitious and often thrilling addition to contemporary Indian literature. Just as “the strangest book” enthralled Dorian Gray, the rich, heady poetry here leaves readers little choice but to surrender.
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