Three repulsive stories for the price of one. Perhaps I should have sheltered myself from Paul Theroux's fiction and continued to bask in his mostly splendid travel writings.
Opening with an American couple exploring extra-marital adventures and Ayurveda on a hilltop spa, Theroux follows up with another for the barf-bag. A wiley Jain lures an American pederast to Indian spirituality and makes off into the sunset of the Wild West with loot from the victim. Top it all off with a youngish American girl, all on her own, encountering some really sinister spiritual sisters and a greasy rapist. Bound to make many an American feel much holier than thou where thou is any Indian.
Necessarily, a novel about a place is an account of the place. Mostly, such tales have drawn travelers to locales. Maugham's stories make the 'Orient' intriguing but inviting. Paul Theroux's triplet cannot, I fear, make India alluring to any - save, perhaps, those in search of the lurid.
Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?'
A new passage to India
Though I'm not quite sure what these Indian novels mentioned are, the reader from India is bound to have a Slumdog Millionaire experience:
OMG! If this is India, then where am I?! Who am I?!
Admittedly, our own media would have us believe that Paul Theroux's India, as depicted in The Elephanta Suite, is all the India there is. At least all the India that matters. It's a tempting offer, at times. Especially when every news item, national and international, waxes more yellow, one than the other, where it comes to India.
After decades of polyphonic fiction from and about the subcontinent, it is strange to read such a complacently one-sided view, in which the locals are objects of lust, curiosity or ridicule but their inner lives remain closed.
I'm all for a nice dose of the nasties in a piece of writing. And novellas are rarely for the faint of heart. After all, how much mush can even the mushy at heart mush?
However, in The Elephanta Suite, there is not the tang, twang and tingle of the good writing that characterises anything that struts about as a novella. Rather, this is a green at the gills stumbling bumbling bungling broth of blether, with an overall smell of decay.
However, in The Elephanta Suite, there is not the tang, twang and tingle of the good writing that characterises anything that struts about as a novella. Rather, this is a green at the gills stumbling bumbling bungling broth of blether, with an overall smell of decay.
Theroux is a keen observer of decay. Dwight relishes the "reeking lanes" where he trawls for trade and Audie bears witness to his own deterioration ("the jug ears, the thinning hair. He was no more than his breath"). There is an equally bleak view of India. Characters discover it to be full of inexplicable motives and desires. "India attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unexpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognisable."
As in his previous novel, Blinding Light, Theroux's passages of erotica jar with the intelligence of the rest of his writing. Perhaps it's a metaphor for Western capitalism screwing over the East, but an author fast approaching 70 lasciviously detailing the services of Dwight's teenage Mumbai prostitute makes for queasy reading and it's not just the girl who's left with a bad taste in the mouth. Also, sometimes the sex simply defies the internal logic set out by the narrative.
Apparently, there was or is an attempt at a film. Mercifully, since there is no further news, it is possible that it will not materialise.
I'm not alone in feeling that this was a wild goose chase, seeking all the usual worth that a Theroux can provide only to find a wasteland:
Except that in this collection of stories, the quest for such gems becomes a treasure hunt of sorts through a wasteland of false notes and insufferable smugness, crowned by an open distaste for all things Indian.
Theroux’s latest work of fiction is a triptych of independent tales with shared elements. India, as a backdrop, constitutes one; white Americans of diverse ages and temperaments who experience it first-hand, the other. Conjoining the unrelated narratives thematically is a series of elephant references and anecdotes that culminate in a blood-curdling climax, with a pachyderm becoming the dispenser of poetic justice.
Given that the stories are littered with contemporary allusions to call centres, outsourcing deals and emailed messages and include a sly take on Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid controversy, the slant of the first two, “Monkey Hill” and “The Gateway of India”, is disconcertingly anachronistic.
All in all, the book sounds and feels dated.
Alice boards a train in Bombay. She is en route to Bangalore with a friend who, at the last minute, ditches her for a new found amour, so Alice, alone in her coach with her co-passengers, spends her free time thinking how Indians have mummified an English where words like "utterance" and "miscreants", "thrice", "ample" and "jocundity" survive in daily usage. She meets a young man who adds to her vocabulary of Indian words with "ruminative", and Alice can't help thinking as she looks out of the train window that "it's so Merchant-Ivory".
This exoticisation of India is hardly unexpected, no foreign writer, less a travel writer, has remained free of the cliches, yet what is more annoying is that Alice's train somehow lands up in Gurgaon, the New Delhi suburb, before continuing on to Bangalore. Printer's devil? Subbing mistake? Or has the author of the hugely popular The Great Railway Bazaar lost his Bradshaw?
Paul Theroux's sleaze yatra
I would recommend this book to all India haters, Indian or not. It is a marvellous way to develop an allergy for the country before hand. Perhaps it will be handy for anxious parents whose offspring show signs of wanting to 'find themselves' - India is famous for the quest.
Well, I wash my hands off the book and look forwards to reviewing another Nordic Noir novel, albeit one that is not as wonderful as the Hakan Nesser we discussed in a previous post.
Well, I wash my hands off the book and look forwards to reviewing another Nordic Noir novel, albeit one that is not as wonderful as the Hakan Nesser we discussed in a previous post.
No comments:
Post a Comment