The World is Flat

I’m about a 100 pages into The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. I’m probably a latecomer, because it looks like everybody and their mother has read this book already.

I’m impressed by Friedman’s positivity, his take on things, his effort to talk to leading industrialists or corporate gurus and relay their opinions instead of just shooting off his own mouth. But on the other hand, I’m a little uncomfortable about how he seems careful not to offend anyone, about the glibness of some arguments, the lack of hard evidence.

More as I read.

The Simoquin Prophecies

I got back to work from vacation, and as usual my reading speed has diminished considerably. There’s something about relaxed reading of escapist fantasy books like The Simoquin Prophecies that is posturally incompatible with intense work. Oh, well.

But my respect for Samit Basu has increased considerably. When I started reading the book, I commented that it didn’t pull me in as much as I’d hoped. I think that right at the beginning, Basu may have given off a slight “trying too hard” vibe. It may also be the fact that the book I read just before this one was Sea of Poppies, which might have increased expectations — an eating-a-sweet-just-before-tea kind of problem. But as I read on, I realized that Samit Basu, like Amitav Ghosh, is able to keep his book on an even keel. The fundamental nature of the story doesn’t change. It doesn’t sound enthusiastically written at places and listless at others. The humour stays up, and Basu comes up with hilarious gems at regular intervals. The situations in the book are often familiar, but usually engrossing. He keeps his prose interesting without sounding like a class 10 student trying to impress the examiner in the ICSE board exams.

Good job, Samit!

The Simoquin Prophecies

Just started reading The Simoquin Prophecies, the first book of the GameWorld trilogy by Samit Basu. The dude is just 28 now, and according to Wikipedia was only 22 when The Simoquin Prophecies was released!

The first thing that struck me about this book is its tonal similarity to Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld series. I got the feeling Basu set out to write an Indian version of the Fantasy-spoof.

So far, Basu seems to be doing a good job. The humour is good, the allusions are recognizable and cute, and the writing is natural. The storytelling: I’m not hooked yet, and I definitely don’t understand some of the superlative praise heaped on the book, but maybe I will in a few pages.

I’ll update once I read a little more.

Wah, Ghosh!

I just finished Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. I have to say: Wah, maestro! This was a real zabberdust book. It puckrows a chuckeroo’s interest and really doesn’t let go. The only complaint is I have to wait a long time for the next two books in the series!

Heartily recommended to all Indian readers — non Indians too, but they might find it a bit more difficult to follow or identify with.

Sea of Poppies

I’m really enjoying Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Ghosh is one of those writers who seems to write some very good books and some very pedestrian ones. Like I said before, his prose is prosaic, so to speak, and lacks the kind of flair achieved by Salman Rushdie and attempted by Arundhati Roy. It’s very correct, but I found it a bit too bland in The Glass Palace.

However.

Sea of Poppies is a book that Just Works. You don’t notice the blandness of the prose because you are dazzled by the profusion of archaic and obscure yet deliciously recognizable words that Ghosh keeps weaving into the conversations and sentences in this book. This book is worth reading for the language alone.

One of the greatest things about Ghosh, and I noted this in my review of his book, The Hungry Tide, is his ability to let a story tell itself. He doesn’t try to force his opinions down the reader’s throat, something that some other authors do, sometimes quite directly through infodumps and at other times obtusely through conversations or events in their books. Ghosh tells the story with an even keel, and you can make your own judgements. This is true of Sea of Poppies.

Another thing I really appreciate about this book is it’s not targeted at Euramericans. A great many Indian authors, presumably worried about their bottom lines, write exactly what the fashionable parts of the West want to hear: exaggerated stories of caste conflict, language that’s carefully non-heathen and uses Western idioms instead of Indian ones. Ghosh eschews all that. Nothing against Euramerican-style literature, but it’s nice to see a more Indian flavour in a book. Although you might guess at the meanings of half the archaic words in the book without a knowledge of Hindi, those who do know Hindi can understand it better. This is a real Indian book.

And unlike some other authors, Ghosh doesn’t sugarcoat the problems the British created. In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh brings out the terrible privations that British Rule forced upon India. There are Brits who still persist in the belief that British Rule wasn’t a disaster for India, and reading this book would quickly disabuse them of such notions.

I’m halfway through the book. Let’s hope the rest of the book retains these qualities.

Classics Massacred

Cinema has a way of bringing some great books to life, while destroying some other classics.

Success stories include the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which, while it’s not as good as the original, still made the story accessible in a good way to many people. Two of the failures which bother me — because I loved the originals — are Tarzan and Flash Gordon.

Disney’s Tarzan is the worst type of destruction, because it fundametally changed the nature of the character. Tarzan was not a wimpy nice-guy. Tarzan was essentially a wild animal with intelligence and a sense of honour. And Tarzan did not skateboard on tree branches.

The other massacre is with Sci-Fi Channel’s current series, Flash Gordon, based on the comic strip. The character of Flash Gordon himself is intact, but Zarkov’s character is completely destroyed. The original Zarkov was a scientist, true, but he was very far from the sniveling coward in the TV series. He was, if anything, more decisive than Flash, a daring fighter. It is sad to see what the character has been reduced to. Perhaps there’s something in someone’s psyche that needs a geeks vs. jocks dichotomy in order to make sense of the world? Other than this, Ming’s original character is much more fearsome than the tame Ming in the TV series. The planet Mongo is very poorly realized, although this may be a result of scarce production resources rather than lack of talent.

The Hero’s Walk: Anita Rau Badami

There is a pattern among Indian authors writing novels in English. The novel usually concerns the developments surrounding an ordinary event, something that happens a million times every day everywhere in the world. The character development is intense and multi-layered. The book will have several interesting characters, all somehow connected to the immediate events. The timeline, driven by the character development, is chaotic, jumping smoothly back and forth between the immediate events and the past. There are stories within stories within stories: a broad flow, the stories and substories of each of the characters, leading to a narrative frequency spectrum, or a raconteur’s fractal. The entire spectrum of emotions is on offer. The plot and the ending appear less important than the sensory immersion. Above all is a saturating, distinct Indianness. If the author is successful, all of these combine into a smooth tapestry, where the reader can absorb all the elements without confusion. Amitav Ghosh, Manil Suri and Anita Rau Badami are authors of this style I’ve read who have managed to pull this off.

Anita Rau’s The Hero’s Walk is a book in this mould. It starts off with a catastrophic event and its consequences, meandering through the lives of a collection of folk in a sleepy town somewhere near Chennai. The central character is Sripathi, a disgruntled, disillusioned, aging man who feels his lack of success keenly. The story is about how he, his family and the people surrounding him deal with tragedies, common and individual, and how they get on with life after.

Anita Rau takes a more Indian approach to the dialogue than many other Indian authors. Her book abounds in such Indian-isms as “quick-quick” and the emphatic “only”. Anita Rau manages to capture the milieu, both emotional and physical, in the little town. In particular, her treatment of caste hierarchies in India is more balanced than Arundhati Roy’s in The God of Small Things, accurately capturing the “generation component” of caste-related sentiments. Unlike in Roy’s work, the emotions and reactions of Anita Rau’s characters are believable and seem accurate. The downsides, if they can be called that, to the novel are the subdued and often unhappy storyline and the open ending, a staple of Indian authors.

Amitav Ghosh

This complex and interesting novel talks at several levels. At the personal level, it tells a story of individuals caught in a rollicking jungle adventure; trapped by their own principles; or surmounting the insurmountable to bring succour to a poor community; and the intertwined lives of a small group of humans brought together by history. At the community level, it captures the fragile frontier lifestyle of a community on an island and tells the story of historical atrocities wreaked on another large frontier settlement settlement by an uncaring government. And at a broad level, it attempts to render nothing less than the very soul of the Sunderbans.

The story follows Kanai, a Bengali businessman settled in Delhi, and Piya, an American cetologist of Bengali descent. Kanai and Piya arrive in the Sunderbans for different reasons, but are soon caught up in a web of interpersonal relations spanning three decades. Both discover things about the Sunderbans they did not imagine.

The reactions of the characters at specific times are a little hard to believe. But the tapestry that Ghosh weaves more than makes up for this slight flaw; the reader is given a glimpse into what the Sunderbans are like, what makes them and the people who choose to live there tick, their history and their fauna. The mood of the novel is alternately immediate and pensive, now dealing with the immediacy of danger, now dealing with the larger questions that plague the region (and humanity in general).

Significantly, Ghosh seems to see the characters and places in his story as they are, and not as a vehicle to propagate a particular ideology or to paint himself, the author, in a particular light. This is a refreshing contrast from authors who write “fashionably” or select their topics for their ability to shock or impress (often Western) audiences. It results in an interesting balance of conflicting viewpoints, each of them portrayed but not judged. All in all, a great read.

Altered Carbon: Richard Morgan

Richard Morgan is perhaps one of the most talented “wordsmiths” among the writers I’ve read so far. His prose, as one reviewer puts it, positively crackles with brilliant metaphor and evocative word-coinage. His world is rich and developed, though Morgan is so inventive that at times I wondered whether he didn’t simply make it up as he went along. Every line bristles with intelligence and invention.

This is Morgan’s first book, and his self-assured writing is suprising and refreshing (compare Michael Jordan’s first attempt in the Wheel of Time series). Morgan endows each character with a unique personality, carefully developed and detailed. The book is essentially Alistair MacLean-style “tough guy” action (referred to in several Amazon reviews as “hardboiled detective fiction”) mixed with cyberpunk.

More or less, the book’s style is to deliver periodic “kicks” to the reader. Takeshi Kovacs, the protagonist, is a lean, mean, mentally conditioned killing machine… but a good one. In identifying with Kovacs, the reader is invited to feel like a restrained god who always gives the bad guys a chance to mend ways before beating them into bloody pulp. The reader spends several pages building up hatred for specific bad guys, then revels in the mindless violence the protagonist does to them next. Spends some time feeling sorry for people, then warm and fuzzy as Kovacs does something truly philanthropic. All in all, the book is violent and callous enough to be every male’s testosterone fix.

Altered Carbon’s world needs to be taken as a given, and once that is accepted, the novel is fairly believable and logical. The world itself seems inconsistent. Superficially, it seems like a realistic world, but practically the only real advance in 500 years, in the novel’s world, is the ability to digitize human beings and improvements in AI. (This is not a new concept at all; Greg Egan, Charles Stross and others have been doing it for a while.) Other than that, life is almost the same as it is now except for cosmetic changes like cars traveling in the air instead of on the ground.

Nevertheless, this is a great book. Just the complexity of metaphor and brilliance of word-coinage makes the book worth it. And unlike many in the current crop of Sci-Fi writers, Morgan has good ideas, good prose and knows how to tell a story. That last bit seems missing in Sci-Fi of late.