Far From The Tree

"Parenting," writes Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree, "is no sport for perfectionists." It's an irony of the book, 10 years in the making and his first since The Noonday Demon, that by militating against perfectionism, he only leaves the reader in greater awe of the art of the achievable. The book starts out as a study of parents raising "difficult" children, and ends up as an affirmation of what it is to be human.

The project grew out of Solomon's desire to forgive his own parents, who, while they effortlessly accepted his dyslexia as he was growing up – his mother campaigned for his rights in the face of educational prejudice – flunked the same test when it came to his sexuality. (An early sign that he was gay, writes Solomon, with the dryness of tone that makes the book so enjoyable, is that "when I was 10, I became fascinated by the tiny principality of Liechtenstein".) They didn't throw him out of the house, but neither did they disguise their disappointment. Years later, he got to thinking about how parents deal generally with children whose identities fall outside of their own – what he calls the child's "horizontal" as opposed to "vertical" identity – and the result is a fascinating examination of the accommodation of difference.

Religion, race, language and nationality are the customary verticals passed down from parent to child; horizontal refers to traits in a child that are foreign to the parents, either inherent, like a physical disability, or acquired, like criminality. "Vertical identities are usually respected as identities," writes Solomon. "Horizontal ones are often treated as flaws." Chapters follow on families coping with autism, dwarfism, schizophrenia, Down's syndrome, disability, deafness, child prodigy, transgender issues, criminality and children born of rape, and the first lesson of Solomon's research was the non-transferable sympathies of each group. Participants in the book who had shown extraordinary humanity in their own difficult circumstances bridled at the prospect of being lumped in with what they saw as less deserving special interests.

"Deaf people didn't want to be compared to people with schizophrenia; some parents of schizophrenics were creeped out by dwarfs. The prodigies and their families objected to being in a book with the severely disabled. Some children of rape felt that their emotional struggle was trivialised when they were compared to gay activists."

Solomon spoke to some 300 families in the course of researching the book, a rebuke to everything shoddy and dashed off in the culture, and the density of his empirical evidence decimates casual assumption. What unites most of his interviewees is a political sense of injustice in the way they are perceived by the mainstream. "Fixing is the illness model," writes Solomon. "Acceptance is the identity model."

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How does it feel to be the mother of a teenage dwarf who’s desperate to start dating? What if you love the daughter you conceived when you were raped but can’t bear to be touched by her? And, as the father of a happy, yet profoundly deaf son who’s forgotten how it feels to hear, how do you deal with your memories of the times you played music together?

“Parenting is no sport for perfectionists,” Andrew Solomon rather gloriously understates toward the end of “Far From the Tree,” a generous, humane and — in complex and unexpected ways — compassionate book about what it means to be a parent. A lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell and the author of “The Noonday Demon,” a National Book Award-winning memoir about his journey through depression, Solomon spent 10 years interviewing more than 300 families with “exceptional” children. That is, children with “horizontal identities,” a term he uses to encompass all the “recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors.”

He developed what seem to be genuine relationships (entailing multiple visits, unsparing communication and significant follow-up over a number of years) with families of individuals affected by a spectrum of cognitive, physical or psychological differences: “They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender.” His interviews yielded nearly 40,000 transcript pages and his “anti-Tolstoyan” conclusion that “the unhappy families who reject their variant children have much in common, while the happy ones who strive to accept them are happy in a multitude of ways.”

Bookending this immense core of material are intimate accounts of Solomon’s own experiences: first, as the son of parents who lovingly helped him overcome his dyslexia, but struggled (as he did) with the idea that he was gay, his own “horizontal identity”; and then finally, and very movingly, as an awkward and awed new father himself.

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All children are different, but some are more different than others. The majority of expectant parents spend the nine months of gestation buoyed by the conviction that their child, when it is born, will be the most remarkable infant in human history.
Most will find their belief vindicated – more or less. To dispassionate onlookers, the newborn infant may resemble a howling orange in a black fright wig, but to parents euphoric after the dangerous adventure of childbirth, the fact that their offspring displays all the vital signs of normality is enough to make it seem miraculous.

For a significant minority, however, the experience of bringing a child into the world is not one of triumphant relief but the beginning of a recalibration of expectations that may last for the lifetime of the parents, or the child. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” writes Andrew Solomon, “and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity… Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.”
Solomon is an academic and journalist whose previous books include the prize-winning study of depression, The Noonday Demon. The title of his new book is taken from the adage that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but his interest is in the apples that have fallen elsewhere – “some a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world”. His book explores the experiences of families who have had to deal with difference, and have learnt over time to accept, accommodate and sometimes even to celebrate it.

The range of difference he explores is – like his book, which runs to 900-odd pages – immense. He writes about children who are dwarfs or deaf; who have Down’s syndrome or multiple disabilities. He also considers differences that are not apparent at birth – autism, schizophrenia, children who are transgender and those who have committed crimes – and he includes two categories in which the child is physically and mentally “normal”, but possesses a trait that disrupts the family dynamic: children born of rape, and musical prodigies.

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Warning: Andrew Solomon’s new book, about the parents of children with serious medical problems, would make the world’s worst baby shower gift. From dwarfism and Down syndrome to schizophrenia and autism, Solomon delivers a compendium of news you don’t want to expect when you’re expecting. Although some of the conditions startle, the book is no lurid freak show. On the contrary, Solomon forcefully showcases parents who not only aren’t horrified by the differences they encounter in their offspring, but who rise to the occasion by embracing them. In so doing, they reveal a “shimmering humanity” that speaks to our noblest impulses to nurture.

“Far From the Tree” is massively ambitious and, also, just simply massive. It’s exhaustive and occasionally exhausting, but more often inspirational about the “infinitely deep” and mysterious love of parents for their children. Motivated in part by his difficult experience negotiating his homosexuality, Solomon, the author of the National Book Award-winning book on depression “The Noonday Demon,” spent a decade interviewing more than 300 families, compiling 40,000 pages of transcripts about 10 widely varied conditions. “It would have been easier to write a book about five conditions,” he acknowledges in his introduction. “I wanted, however, to explore the spectrum of difference.” So he visited juvenile criminals in Minneapolis and a congenitally deaf village in Bali. He interviewed victims of horrific incest and family abuse. He spent time with women who bore children conceived in rape and even with child prodigies — whose gifts, paradoxically, force them to face issues similar to those of children with severe disabilities.

Solomon stresses a common dilemma: All the parents must navigate the “tension between identity and illness,” or “between cure and acceptance.” So, for instance, should a deaf child be encouraged to learn sign language and join the deaf community, or, contrarily, to learn to read lips and speak so as to better assimilate? Should the parents of a dwarf help their child feel comfortable with his size, or submit him to limb-lengthening operations? Are the parents of a profoundly disabled child within their moral rights to administer growth-inhibiting medication, so they can still lift their “pillow angel” by hand to change her diapers rather than having to hoist her up at adult size with an elaborate medical crane? At what point should parents allow their male child to wear a dress to school or allow him to take puberty-delaying drugs, so as to make his eventual sex-change surgery easier?

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Hey, hey, hey…

With drumbeats
With the warmth of the heart
With the unseen string of love
We wrap the Great Siem of the hills

With Cherapunji, with the wet sky
The way the generous clouds
With the monsoon rain
Embrace our Luit

The Krishna cowherd plays the flute
The Khasi cowherd plays the sharati
Both the flutes made of bamboo
Both divulge the same music

The leaves of the tall pine trees are green
Our baniyan trees are of the same hue
Blei or the moon, in the valley or in the hills
On the autumn night pours the same moonbeams

Digging the red earth
The Khasi farmers work day and night
Even in farms of the valley, a thousand Rongmons
Embraces the same farmers…

[In a world increasing becoming insular, Bhupen Hazarika was our ‘great uniter’. This is the basic translation of a song from his Asomiya film ‘Pratidhawni’ (1964), where he recounts the similarity between the Khasi culture of Meghalaya and the Assamese culture of the valley. What’s in a name, he says, in essence, we are all the same. Siem is the traditional Khasi king.]

Last night, the murder was postponed, as the assassins
Could not find their knives and blades, or anything with
A sharper edge; all they found were pens with dry nibs and
Broken pencils, which had no use to them, as
They were the ones who destroyed, not built

And, today morning, they will merge themselves in the officer goers
In buses and trains and autos, in private air-conditioned cars, and
They will hover around you, like sycophants around a movie star
And all they want is a blade, any instrument, really, with a sharp
Edge, to drill your head, or to twist your heart, for meaningless pain

At dusk, the assassins will hide behind the neon signs, behind each closed
Window, each bolted door, each shop that dazzle under the florescent
Light; hurry, hide everything with sharp edges, hide everything, hide your
Pen with which you sign your cheques, your fingernails, your molar teeth,
Your prickly ambitions, your sharp desperation, your very existence

Making Crime Pay

A truncated version of the story appeared in the 21 July 2015 edition of Sakaal Times, the English daily published from Pune, India. You can check out the story @ http://www.sakaaltimes.com/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsId=4871952086545797164&SectionId=5171561142064258099&SectionName=Pune&NewsTitle=Making+crime+pay

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Suddenly crime writing has become the ‘it’ genre in Indian writing in English. Dibyajyoti Sarma explores the whys and hows

Crime has always been a part of our lives. Open a daily and the first thing you notice are the crime stories. Thus, it is not surprising that writers should tackle crime in their works. What is surprising, however, is that Indian writers, especially in English, did not actually tackle the subject until recently. And suddenly, (perhaps S Hussain Zaidi’s books on Mumbai gangsters, starting with ‘Black Friday’ was a starting point), in the last four-five years, there has been an avalanche of crime writing in India. There are the bestselling authors like Ashwin Sanghi, Ravi Subramanian, Kalpana Swaminathan, Zac O’Yeah, Tarquin Hall, Mukul Deva, and Pune’s very own, Salil Desai. There are publishers like Westland, Fingerprint, Amaryllis dedicated to crime writing. Early this year, there was also an event, Crime Writers Festival, in Delhi, on January 17 and 18.

What gives? Why is this sudden fascination for crime writing in English? “Crime fiction has always had readers,” says Delhi-based international publishing consultant Jaya Bhattacharji Rose. “Indian writers are slowly coming into their own with this genre. So, there is a coming together of events that make it possible for publishers to commission crime stories and have a ready market too.”

Author Jerry Pinto agrees that the publishers have a major role to play. “I think the increase in crime writing has something to do with how many more publishers there are and how much risk they are willing to take. I think the number of publishers is directly related to the large number of writers and books,” he argues.

Author Mahendra Jakhar, whose debut novel is already a bestseller, believes India’s interest in crime fiction has to do with how the young Indian readers are exposed to western crime writing. “The growth is due to the increase in readership and the readers looking for diverse and engaging stories. Suddenly, the youth is exposed to diverse forms of media, and they are more than hungry for Indian stories that connect to them,” he argues.

This is the reason why in his novel, The Butcher of Benares, he brought in the elements of mythology, Hindu symbols, Vedic astrology and astronomy, Naga Sadhus and Aghoris, along with the history of 1857, to make it an authentic Indian mystery.

This does not mean what India crime fiction is a new, nascent genre. It is not. While the classic crime fiction found its niche in the western world in the years between the two world wars, with the publication of those pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks (with writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Hadley Chase, and Erle Stanley Gardner), Indian writers too, especially in the local languages, had dabbled with the genre. In Urdu, Ibn-e-Safi, who created the inimitable detective Imran, continues to be a publishing phenomenon. Again, we all know about Bangla detectives Byomkesh Baskhi and Feluda.

However, aside from a few stray examples like Kalpana Swaminathan and S Hussain Zaidi in the recent years, there was no visible genre writing in English.

What changed? Author Salil Desai believes the recent development is the fallout of the success of Chetan Bhagat. It made young Indian readers seek out stories they can relate to, stories that are not necessary literary, but which speak to them.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose does not completely agree. “I am not sure if you can compare the two kinds of Indian writing in English. These are two very distinct genres and readership. The only points of similarity are probably both rely heavily upon conversations to move the plot forward,” she says.

Bhattacharji Rose also refuses to distinguish between literary writing and pulp writing. There is no comparison, she says, “except for the immense satisfaction they give to the readers. You have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate literary fiction and crime fiction. Also, crime fiction is not pulp fiction, at least not always to my mind.”

Yet, there are great crime writings, which are genre unto themselves. Jakhar argues, as he mentions Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the works of Ian Rankin, and also, works of Shakespeare and Dickens.

Jerry Pinto does not like to think in categories. “I think of books as either good or bad. So there are some literary books which should be called pulp and some genre fiction books which are well-written and then there are the classics that brook no question,” he says.

Media professional Sapna Sarfare, an avid reader of crime fiction, says the reason she is attracted to this genre is simple excitement. “The thrill and twists and turns found are incomparable. Life usually is not filled with the same devilish craziness found here,” she says.

On Indian crime fiction, she feels we are still not digging into the serious crimes. “Abroad, crime fiction delves deeper into human psyche. For example, Ian Rankin’s Detective Rebus, who is a complex character you can connect to. We are still on the ‘whodunit’ formula. I think we have a scope to explore further,” she says.
True. The locale, where the crime takes place, plays an important role in crime fiction. Sherlock Holmes is nothing without London. The same way, Kalpana Swaminathan’s Tamil heroine, Lalli, lives in Mumbai, so does Jerry Pinto’s characters (in Murder in Mahim). Zac O’Yeah makes downtown Bangalore his playing field, while in Tarquin Hall’s stories, crime takes place in Delhi.

This is the reason why Pune-based author Salil Desai cannot imagine his stories without the city in the backdrop. “Pune has a particular kind of atmosphere,” he says, “It is a big city, yet it has a small town vive, where tradition and modernity coexist. It is ideal for my kind of a murder story.”

Pune indeed has its fare share of murder. Desai mentions the Joshi-Abhyankar case. “I found the city perfect for the kind of police procedures I wanted to write. The way my lead character, the inspector, speak, is essentially Puneri,” he adds, “For a good crime fiction, you should know the lanes and bylanes of the city. I know the city very well and it helps me in my work.”

What the future holds? Will India ever produce bestselling writers like, say, Ian Rankin? Jaya Bhattacharji Rose has the last word. “I see no reason why not? Give this space some time to mature in India and you will notice a notable difference in the tenor of writing.”

Quick takes/


Jerry Pinto


Are you a crime writer?
“I don’t think of my writing in genres. Altaf Tyrewalla was editing Mumbai Noir and asked me if I would write a story for it and the first of the Murder in Mahim stories started there. The second was written for my friend Gauri Vij when she was editing Time Out. And then, Ravi Singh, my editor and publisher at Speaking Tiger suggested I work on a book. To be a crime writer, it takes pretty much the same thing it takes to be any kind of writer: the desire to do a lot of hard work for very little financial reward and simply for the joy of having some stranger come up to you and say, ‘That was a good one. Looking forward to your next’.”

Mahendra Jakhar


Being a writer
I started as a crime reporter with The Times of India in New Delhi. I worked there for almost six years but the world of reporting bored me. I wanted to tell stories and use my imagination. I started to write stories and finally shifted to Mumbai. I wrote film scripts for Mahesh Bhatt, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Hansal Mehta and wrote various TV shows. Still, there was an urge to tell bigger stories that did not fit into the prescribed structure of movies and TV shows. So, I turned to writing novels.

Finding a publisher
I had no clue about the world of publishing. I started my search on the net. I found Red Ink Literary Agency, who signed me and agreed to represent me. We sent out the manuscript of The Butcher of Benares to various publishers and a few refused and a few loved it. Finally, we decided to go ahead with Westland. The book got a tremendous response and has sold out the entire first edition. The reviews included both bouquets and brickbats but I’m happy with it.

Being a crime writer?
Crime writing is both an art and a craft. So, first one needs to have an idea, a plot, and characters. Then comes the craft to structure and design it. The biggest challenge is that so much have already been written all around the world that it is not easy to come up with something that is original.

Salil Desai


Starting early
I have been writing short stories for a long time. When I started working on my novel, it naturally became a crime novel, as I was very fond of crime writers like Conan Doyle, Christie and Chase, and also Randel and Rankin. When I started writing in 2008-09, I was ahead of this wave. My first book, The Body in the Back Seat came in 2011. Around this time, the trend of crime writing started. I was one of the first writers.

Indian crime writing
While influenced by the western crime writing, I believe Indian authors have found their own voices. They have developed their own nuances and have created a sense of Indian authenticity. I believe in a few years time, there will be a whole new generation who will read only ‘Indian crime novels.’

Sonia Raikkonen
My new book, The Murder of Sonia Raikkonen, featuring Inspector Saralkar, is about the murder of a Finnish tourist in Pune. As the story progresses, the mystery becomes a ‘why-dun-it’ instead of the regular ‘whodunit.’

Review in Reading Hour

We are confident: ‘Pages from an Unfinished Autobiography’ is an interesting book. Hence we decided to publish it.

But how do you promote a book when the author is so reticent about publicity? Imagine that, in this day and age, when it is essentially the job of the author, and not the humble publisher to promote a book. After all, the credit goes to the writer, not the publisher.

This Bangalore-based wonderful magazine ‘Reading Hour’ published a judicious review of Dibyajyoti Sarma’s ‘Pages from an Unfinished Autobiography’ in its January-February 2015 issue (vol 5, issue 1), and the author did not inform us about it at all. We finally found the review, and it’s a very good one.

The reviewer, Shruti Rao, understands the book and its foibles too. She says some of the poems “pale in comparison with their more powerful siblings”. This we agree. Some poems could have been edited out. But Mr Sarma insisted that they be included. He wanted to document everything, the sacred, the profane.

Rao also is smart to understand the tonal inconsistency of some of the poems. They have the ring of translation from another language, she says. This is true. Mr Sarma started writing poetry in Asomiya and some of the poems in the volume are actually his own translation of his Asomiya poems.

Finally, Rao writes: “Sarma’s poetic eye looks as much inwards as outwards. The poems, though autobiographical, and nostalgic for past memories, also throw a radio signal out to the world. Is anybody listening? They ask, and you realise that through the impenetrable fortress wall of someone else’s private life, you have been listening in rapt attention.”

This
is
not
the
truth
I
want.

Within a Budding Grove

In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu)—also translated as Remembrance of Things Past—is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust (1871–1922). His most prominent work, it is known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." It gained fame in English in translations by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin as Remembrance of Things Past, but the title In Search of Lost Time, a literal rendering of the French, has gained usage since D. J. Enright adopted it for his revised translation published in 1992.

The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished he kept adding new material and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages as they existed in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.

The work was published in France between 1913 and 1927. Proust paid for the publication of the first volume (by the Grasset publishing house) after it had been turned down by leading editors who had been offered the manuscript in longhand. Many of its ideas, motifs, and scenes are foreshadowed in Proust's unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (1896–99), though the perspective and treatment there are different, and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908–09). The novel had great influence on twentieth-century literature; some writers have sought to emulate it, others to parody it. In the centenary year of Du côté de chez Swann, Edmund White pronounced À la recherche du temps perdu "the most respected novel of the twentieth century."

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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, also translated as Within a Budding Grove) (1919) was scheduled to be published in 1914 but was delayed by the onset of World War I. At the same time, Grasset's firm was closed down when the publisher went into military service. This freed Proust to move to Gallimard, where all of the subsequent volumes were published. Meanwhile, the novel kept growing in length and in conception. When published, the novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919.

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The Tattooed Fakir

It’s a great premise for a novel: Muslim fakirs and Hindu sanyaasis teaming up to fight the British gora sahibs. These Indian Robin Hoods live in the jungles of northern Bengal and help the poor by stealing from the rich. The rebellion involves armed warfare, intelligent tactics and the dream of defeating the British, and is bound to appeal to any patriot.

It’s also a rebellion that isn’t to be.

Biman Nath’s The Tattooed Fakir promises a story about a rebellion and ultimately it becomes about how the lives of the powerful and the powerless are interlinked. Set in late eighteenth-century India, the novel begins when Roshanara, the daughter of a Muslim fakir, is kidnapped by Kali babu, the zamindar of Jahangirpur. The British Ronald MacLean (Makhlin sahib or burra sahib), the owner of a Neel Kuthi (Indigo Estate) intervenes and takes Roshanara as his mistress. Roshanara’s solace are Anne, the sister of the plantation manager Pierre Gaubert, and a servant named Gopal.

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East of the Sun

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is a dystopian novel, a work of speculative fiction, by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Set in the near future, in a totalitarian Christian theocracy which has overthrown the United States government, The Handmaid's Tale explores themes of women in subjugation and the various means by which they gain agency. The novel's title was inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories ("The Merchant's Tale", "The Parson's Tale", etc.)

The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. It has been adapted for the cinema, radio, opera, and stage.

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The Handmaid's Tale tells the story of Offred – not her real name, but the patronymic she has been given by the new regime in an oppressive parallel America of the future – and her role as a Handmaid. The Handmaids are forced to provide children by proxy for infertile women of a higher social status, the wives of Commanders. They undergo regular medical tests, and in many ways become invisible, the sum total of their biological parts.

Offred remembers her life before the inception of Gilead, when she had a husband, a daughter and a life. She had been a witness to the dissolution of the old America into the totalitarian theocracy that it now is, and she tries to reconcile the warning signs with reality: "We lived in the gaps between the stories."

Offred's tender remembrances of times past provide relief from the brutality of her new life, in which her body has become a cause of discomfort for her. Her former life is presented through glimpses of her university friends, her husband, her freedom. They are shadowy memories made all the more indistinct by Atwood's lyrical prose, in which facts appear to merge into one another, and history appears immaterial; Offred is kept alive by her inner life, and reality and history become a kind of symbiotic mirage.

Fiercely political and bleak, yet witty and wise, the novel won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award in 1987, but Atwood has always maintained that the novel is not classifiable science fiction. Nothing practised in the Republic of Gilead is genuinely futuristic. She is right, and this novel seems ever more vital in the present day, where women in many parts of the world live similar lives, dictated by biological determinism and misogyny.

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Surely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock. We are warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue. That was the effect of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' with its scary dating, not 40 years ahead, maybe also of ''Brave New World'' and, to some extent, of ''A Clockwork Orange.''

It is an effect, for me, almost strikingly missing from Margaret Atwood's very readable book ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' offered by the publisher as a ''forecast'' of what we may have in store for us in the quite near future. A standoff will have been achieved vis-a-vis the Russians, and our own country will be ruled by right-wingers and religious fundamentalists, with males restored to the traditional role of warriors and us females to our ''place'' - which, however, will have undergone subdivision into separate sectors, of wives, breeders, servants and so forth, each clothed in the appropriate uniform. A fresh postfeminist approach to future shock, you might say. Yet the book just does not tell me what there is in our present mores that I ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state something like the Republic of Gilead whose outlines are here sketched out.

Another reader, less peculiar than myself, might confess to a touch of apathy regarding credit cards (instruments of social control), but I have always been firmly against them and will go to almost any length to avoid using one. Yet I can admit to a general failure to extrapolate sufficiently from the 1986 scene. Still, even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues. I just can't see the intolerance of the far right, presently directed not only at abortion clinics and homosexuals but also at high school libraries and small-town schoolteachers, as leading to a super-biblical puritanism by which procreation will be insisted on and reading of any kind banned. Nor, on the other hand, do I fear our ''excesses'' of tolerance as pointing in the same direction. Liberality toward pornography in the courts, the media, on the newstands may make an anxious parent feel disgusted with liberalism, but can it really move a nation to install a theocracy strictly based on the Book of Genesis? Where are the signs of it? A backlash is only a backlash, that is, a reaction. Fear of a backlash, in politics, ought not to deter anybody from adhering to principle; that would be only another form of cowardice.

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The Constant Gardenar

The Constant Gardener is a 2001 novel by John le Carré. It tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose activist wife is murdered. Believing there is something behind the murder, he seeks to uncover the truth and finds an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucracy and pharmaceutical money.

The plot was vaguely based on a real-life case in Kano, Nigeria. The book was adapted as a movie by the same name in 2005.

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In medias res is where they say you should always start. John le Carré's latest novel does just that, as news comes to the British High Commission in Nairobi that human-rights activist Tessa Quayle has been murdered - butchered - up in northern Kenya. We are soon in the morgue. Her husband Justin, also First Secretary at the High Commission, is faced with identifying her severed head: "Her eyes closed and eyebrows raised and mouth open in lolling disbelief, black blood caked inside as if she'd had all her teeth pulled at the same time. You? she is blowing stupidly as they kill her, her mouth formed into an oo. You? "

Handsome, diffident Justin (the "constant gardener" of the title) at first appears not quite up to the task of tracking down her killers. As his colleague Sandy Woodrow puts it to the pair of British police who come over to investigate the murder, Justin "loves nothing better than toiling in the flowerbeds on a Saturday afternoon - a gentleman , whatever that means - the right sort of Etonian, courteous to a fault ...".

It turns out that diffidence can be a powerful attribute when you are surrounded by scoundrels. At first Justin simply hides out in the house of one such, the very same Sandy. A slug of a man who used to ogle the beautiful Tessa, Sandy even sent her a love note in a moment of weakness. Now his own wife Gloria has taken a fancy to the grieving adult schoolboy (for so Justin initially seems) hiding in their guest suite: "What are you doing down there? she wondered. Are you lying on your bed flailing yourself in the darkness? Or are you staring through your bars into the garden, talking to her ghost?"

The interior monologue of that passage is very typical of the way le Carré will let us have a bit of each character without losing his main focus. It is, however, mostly Justin's ghost-talking that we listen to, as his quest takes him to Elba (home of Tessa's Italian family), northern Germany, central Canada and south Sudan. And these aren't the only territories where classic le Carré tropes of betrayal and counter-betrayal can be turned and turned again. Another is cyberspace. There is much up-to-date business with computers here, including a neat twist with a virus.

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mericans have spent the first post-cold-war decade peering through the mists of our new isolationism and wondering whom to worry about out there. Few have been more ready with suggestions than John le Carré. Charting the breakup of the Soviet Union (''Our Game''), reporting on arms merchants (''The Night Manager'') and money-laundering drug kingpins (''Single & Single''), the master of the spy thriller has matched pace with the headlines, keeping us apprised of our next new enemy. And so ''The Constant Gardener,'' le Carré's 18th novel, looks like a departure. It takes us to an Africa that has fallen off the West's map, and to a rueful coterie of Brits idling away in ''dangerous, decaying, plundered'' Kenya, where grave-digging thieves steal wedding rings off the corpses of the wealthy, and a ''safe haven'' isn't a shelter for spies but rather your bedroom, closed off from below by a steel security door.

The gardener of the title is Justin Quayle, an officer at the British High Commission and one of those supremely English characters who embrace being a cog in the machinery of government with a fanatical resignation. Justin has reached middle age with no ambition beyond tending his flower garden, and little use of his intellect beyond fashioning sophistical diplomatic arguments for inaction in the face of injustice. His much younger wife, Tessa, on the other hand, is a society girl turned Oxbridge-trained lawyer and zealous missionary to the poor -- Mother Teresa of the Nairobi Slums,'' one newspaper calls her, the ''Angel Who Gave a Damn.'' Tessa has a soul-mate friend, a Belgian-African doctor named Arnold Bluhm; and when she turns up dead, and Bluhm vanishes, Justin at first bows to the notion of an affair gone terribly awry. But what about the tire marks of a vehicle trailing the one Tessa died in, or a pair of rough-looking men seen at a nearby lodge the previous night?

Justin begins to look into Tessa's work, particularly her inquiries into a new antituberculosis drug, Dypraxa, rushed to market despite serious side effects -- with Africans serving as medical guinea pigs. Back in London, his boss at the Foreign Office dismisses the idea of a conspiracy behind Tessa's death. ''I'm an Oswald man,'' he says, making a case for ''accepting the obvious.'' But when someone breaks into Justin's house and documents go missing, it becomes clear that being an Oswald man won't do. Soon we're into false passports, threats and skulduggery on three continents, evil pharmaceutical giants and a global holocaust waiting in the wings. So this is the old le Carré after all.

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As the world seems to move ever further beyond the comparatively clear-cut choices of the Cold War into a moral morass in which greed and cynicism seem the prime movers, le Carr 's work has become increasingly radical, and this is by far his most passionately angry novel yet. Its premise is similar to that of Michael Palmer's Miracle CureDcynical pharmaceutical firm allied with devious doctors attempts to foist on the world a flawed but potentially hugely profitable drugDbut the difference is in the setting and the treatment. Le Carr has placed the prime action in Africa, where the drug is being surreptitiously tested on poor villagers. Tessa Quayle, married to a member of the British High Commission staff in corruption-riddled contemporary Kenya, gets wind of it and tries in vain to blow the whistle on the manufacturer and its smarmy African distributor. She is killed for her pains. At this point Justin Quayle, her older, gentlemanly husband, sets out to find out who killed her, and to stop the dangerous drug himselfDat a terrible cost. Le Carr 's manifold skills at scene-setting and creating a range of fearsomely convincing English characters, from the bluffly absurd to the irredeemably corrupt, are at their smooth peak here. Both The Tailor of Panama and Single & Single were feeling their way toward this wholehearted assault on the way the world works, by a man who knows much better than most novelists writing today how it works. Now subject and style are one, and the result is heart-wrenching. (Jan. 9) Forecast: Admirers of the author who may have found some of the moral ambiguities and overelaborate set pieces of his last two books less than top-drawer le Carr will welcome a return to his best form. There is a wonderfully charismatic and idealistic heroine, which will bolster female readership, and the appearance of the book shortly after the release of a movie of Tailor (starring Jamie Lee Curtis) is bound to create an extra rush of media attention. Be prepared for the biggest le Carr sales in years.

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A Strange and Sublime Address

idway through the first of the three slim novels in this collection, an Indian boy named Sandeep sets out with his uncle for an evening walk through the back lanes of Calcutta during a power failure. Sandeep is only 10, but he already thinks of himself as a writer, and he finds his curiosity stirred by each house he passes: the one with a dozing watchman, ''which gave the impression that the family had valuables locked away inside''; the one with the old man on its veranda; ''or this small, shabby house with the girl Sandeep glimpsed through a window, sitting in a bare, ill-furnished room, memorizing a text by candlelight, repeating suffixes and prefixes from a Bengali grammar over and over to herself -- why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them?''

Amit Chaudhuri is an immensely gifted writer who is less interested in one particular story than in all the bits and pieces of stories that make up ordinary life: ''The 'real' story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion,'' will never be told, he warns us cheerfully, because it does not exist. This conviction may be both his blessing and his curse. His novels -- or novellas, really -- are crammed with breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations, comic set pieces and melancholy grace notes; they are also stubbornly, teasingly plotless. At times, they seem artless as well -- as if the author were simply dipping his net at random into the stream of daily life in Calcutta or Oxford or Bombay and then holding up his glittering catch for inspection. At other times, when the patterning of these narratives gently reasserts itself, it seems to do so not in the usual manner of fiction but almost in the guise of another art form altogether: a dance, a piece of music or a half-remembered scrap of poetry.

So, as promised, these novels don't progress, exactly, but instead explore some exalted or uneasy temporary state, which occasionally throws off intimations of its opposite. In the first, ''A Strange and Sublime Address'' (1991), Sandeep, an only child, is intoxicated by the boisterous intimacy of his uncle's household in Calcutta, which stands in contrast to his more privileged and lonely existence in Bombay. At 17 Vivekananda Road, there is always something afoot -- a visit from a wheedling relative, a Sunday drive in the unreliable Ambassador, a trip to the market -- and everything is a matter of intense, almost undifferentiated interest.

Chaudhuri is perpetually delighted with ''the enduring allure of the everyday,'' and Sandeep provides the ideal conduit for his creator's lush imaginings. In the afternoons, the maidservant wrings the newly washed saris ''into long, exhausted pythons of cloth,'' and the ancient ceiling fan moves ''unreliably from side to side, like a great bird trying to fly.'' Even Calcutta's chronic power outages are transformed, improbably, into a daily miracle:

''Each day there would be a power cut, and each day there would be the unexpected, irrational thrill when the lights returned. . . . With what appeared to be an instinct for timing, the rows of fluorescent lamps glittered to life simultaneously. The effect was the opposite of blowing out candles on a birthday cake: it was as if someone had blown on a set of unlit candles, and the magic exhalation had brought a flame to every wick at once.''

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On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach is a 2007 novella by the Booker Prize-winning British writer Ian McEwan. The novel was selected for the 2007 Booker Prize shortlist.

The Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Jonathan Yardley placed On Chesil Beach on his top ten for 2007, praising McEwan's writing and saying that "even when he's in a minor mode, as he is here, he is nothing short of amazing".

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There is no epigraph to this short, elegantly realised novel, but if there were it would surely be the celebrated opening couple of stanzas from Philip Larkin's Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Ian McEwan's story exists exactly in that hinterland in British courtship between repression and licence, the Lawrence litigation and 'Love Me Do'. It is July of 1962 and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, he an ardent graduate historian, she the tremulous lead violinist in a string quartet with aspirations to Wigmore Hall, both 22, have just got married in Oxford. Their love story and their tragedy grows out of McEwan's opening sentence, which contains within its careful confines almost everything you need to know about what follows: 'They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.'

The honeymoon is to take place beside Chesil Beach, in a Georgian hotel. They eat their nuptial supper - melon with glace cherries, slabs of beef with overcooked veg, in their room overlooking the bay - while a pair of waiters, local lads, stands by intrusively. The beach, that unique spit of shingle which runs between the Fleet Lagoon and the Channel, immediately seems emblematic of several things: of this moment of certainty in lives that might never again seem certain; of the path that they have just embarked on together, a path which, like all married couples in love they believe they will be making new; but also of a romance that has taken place between the devil of Middle English rectitude and the deep blue sea of the coming sexual revolution.

Florence yearns for the former; she would rather never have anyone touch her, she believes, even this man she loves. She has been undone by the language of the wedding manual she has been reading (all 'mucous membranes' and 'glans' and 'penetration'). Edward, meanwhile, dreams fervently, silently, of the uninterrupted pleasure that will be theirs now the 'wrangle over the ring' has been sorted. Inevitably, these two worlds have collided several times already, and not favourably.

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The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, announcing, ‘I have never been able to understand how that thing works,’ and then slowly realising all the magical tricks this little rubbery object could do when suitably inspired? (‘She grasped the animal under study without hesitation, turned it this way and that, observed it with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific, and said when she was finished: “How ugly it is, even uglier than a woman’s thing.”’) It is not hard to imagine the surprise of Florence, the girlfriend of Edward Mayhew, a nice girl in her early twenties from a nice background in Ian McEwan’s new novel, On Chesil Beach, when ‘one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows . . . she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis.’ What she experienced was ‘a living thing, quite separate from her Edward – and she recoiled.’ Edward, also in his early twenties, was so excited that ‘he could bear it no more’ and asked her to marry him. This short novel takes place on the first night of their honeymoon, with many flashbacks, and at the end a great flash forward, and at the core an enormous misunderstanding.

The relationship between the characters in On Chesil Beach is very close to the relationships between the people in The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), the script for which was written by McEwan. In both cases, a young man from a class background about which he is very uneasy, who has an ailing mother, an interest in history, and wishes to write a book, falls for a girl from an upper-middle-class, bohemian family, only to find that she will not sleep with him. The girl’s mother is, in both cases, an academic with many opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child in Time (1987), of Britain itself, its recent history and its public life, as an anchor in the narrative. Carefully researched moments in real time help to rescue the novels for seriousness, at times for earnestness, to move them away from the timeless and delicious cruelties of McEwan’s first four books, which were wonderful explorations of what he called in his introduction to the published script of The Ploughman’s Lunch ‘the dangers, to an individual as well as to a nation, of living without a sense of history’.

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Chesil Beach in Dorset is a favourite destination for geologists, and readers of Saturday, Ian McEwan's last novel, might expect his new one, On Chesil Beach, to have a lot of geological interest too.
It's easy to imagine Henry Perowne, the earlier book's
scientifically-minded protagonist, contemplating isostatic sea-level rises while trudging through the graded pebbles. It would probably make him think of Darwin.

And perhaps Daisy, his poetic daughter, could show up in order to quote Matthew Arnold's line about 'the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea'.

Instead, the new novel - novella, really - turns out to be a tightly focused human drama. It's set, like the admired first section of Atonement, in the past and on the cusp of early adulthood.

As in Atonement, too, the characters' choices turn out to be more fateful than they're equipped to recognise when they make them, and there are strong yet tasteful hints that the resonant creepiness of McEwan's early fiction is at work beneath the surface melancholy and nostalgia for summers long ago.

Florence and Edward, the central characters, are newlyweds who have come to a hotel overlooking Chesil Beach to consummate their marriage. It's 1962, and for them, as for Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse has not yet begun - it is, in fact, a deeply worrying mystery.

Edward's worries are conventional - he fears 'what he had heard someone describe as "arriving too soon" ' - while Florence is repelled by the thought of sexual contact. She's terrified but, this being 1962, neither one of them feels able to speak of such concerns.

Writing in the third person, McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous. In neatly placed flashbacks, he also fills us in on the differences between Edward and Florence - class differences, mostly - while sketching out their courtship and their respective backgrounds.

It's a pleasure to watch McEwan fleshing out his characters, expertly shifting chronology and point of view around as he prepares for the coming bedroom scene and its aftermath.

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They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. The geographical distinction that marks Chesil Beach in England is the grading of the shingle — the pebbles, that is — that forms its 18 miles: the pebbles are arranged, by wind and rain, in a spectrum of sizes and textures, so that the beach forms a spatial map of time. Each stone confesses a part of its relation to the whole. Local fishermen brag of the ability to make a blind identification of the original placement, on Chesil Beach, of a given stone.

Among the encompassing definitions we could give “the novel” (“a mirror walking down a road,” “a narrative of a certain size with something wrong with it”) is this: a novel is a vast heap of sentences,

like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension: in my eagerness to learn “what happens,” might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Some experience this as a delicious agony, others distrust it. Our appetite for Ian McEwan’s form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness. McEwan’s books have the air of thrillers even when, as in “On Chesil Beach,” he seems to have systematically replaced mortal stakes — death and its attendant horrors — with risks of embarrassment, chagrin and regret.

... young, educated ... virgins ... wedding night ... sexual difficulties. The first stone on McEwan’s new beach indulges his radical efficiency with a hook. If McEwan’s first chapters generally ought to be sent, like Albert Pujols’s bats, to the Hall of Fame, then we may agree that in this instance his first sentence is a first chapter of its own, as well as doing extra duty as its host book’s perfect piece of ad copy. (Here’s my spoiler warning: “On Chesil Beach” is far too lean and pure for me to muse on more than a few of its sentences without giving some secrets away. If you’re inspired by the hook above, read the book — it’ll be nearly as quick as reading my review, and more fun.) Then comes a second thought: But it is never easy. With startling ease these five words deepen and complicate the book. Who speaks, and from what historical vantage? The sentence entrenches the facts that precede it — and the facts to follow — in the oceanic retrospect of a ruminative mind, even as they claim to universalize the lovers’ predicament, to forgive them their place in the history of sexual discomfort.

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Maps for Lost Lovers

Maps for Lost Lovers is a novel by the British Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam. Ostensibly about the murder of a pair of lovers, the book is in fact a minute dissection of working-class Pakistani immigrant communities that have settled in the north of England over the last 40 years.

Aslam spent 11 years writing this book; according to an interview, the first chapter alone took him 6 years to complete. The novel received widespread acclaim on publication, with critics repeatedly referring to the quality of its prose, its remarkable characters, and its exposé of the tortured immigrant experience.

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In the opening paragraph of Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam writes: "The snow storm has rinsed the air of incense... but it is there even when absent, drawing attention to its own disappearance." There, though we don't know it at the time, is the very heart of the novel. The lovers, Chanda and Jugnu, have disappeared from the English town of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and though they have been gone five months when the book opens, they haunt it, and the lives of those who occupy it, until the final pages.

The English town of Dasht-e-Tanhaii? It sounds more like something out of a fairytale than a place off the M4. But no, it is a town with a large community of Pakistani migrants who have renamed their new home Dasht-e-Tanhaii: The Wilderness of Loneliness or The Desert of Solitude. Aslam has populated this place with a remarkable cast: Jugnu's brother, Shamas, a gentle, liberal man with no time for the orthodox form of Islam to which so many in his community cling; Shamas's sons and daughter, part of the generation that must attempt to forge a link between the Pakistani and British parts of their lives without being consumed by anger or pulled apart by conflicting demands; Suraya, who was "mistakenly" divorced by her husband in Pakistan while he was in a drunken rage, and now (by the precepts of the Islamic sect she follows) must find someone else to marry and divorce her before she can return to her former husband and their son.

But the most extraordinary of the characters is Shamas's wife, Kaukub. A woman brought up to believe in an unforgiving, narrow-minded version of Islam, she could, in the hands of a lesser novelist, have become a monster. But in Aslam's hands she is transformed into a woman entirely human, entirely heartbreaking. She is the devoted mother behind the headlines about the parent who sends her British-born-and-raised child back to Pakistan into an arranged marriage; she is the young bride who used to step out of the bath and wake up her husband by twisting her hair into a yard-long rope and letting beads of water fall over him, but then grew into a woman who equates sex with shame and sin; she is the voice of condemnation raised against all transgressions from orthodoxy and also the voice telling us: "Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love."

In this book, filled with stories of cruelty, injustice, bigotry and ignorance, love never steps out of the picture - it gleams at the edges of even the deepest wounds. Perhaps this is why the novel never gets weighed down by all the sorrows it carries: there is such shimmering joy within it, too. Here are characters hemmed in on one side by racism and on the other side by religious obscurantism, and yet they each carry remarkable possibilities within them.

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Nadeem Aslam's first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, was published in 1993. Over the past 11 years, I have often wondered what Aslam was up to. Now, here is the answer. Maps for Lost Lovers, according to the dates the author gives us at the end, took 11-and-a-half years to finish. If it was half as much fun writing as it is reading, it was time well spent.

Aslam opens the novel with a beguiling set piece about the first snowfall of the season in an English town. These pages, rich in detail, languid in cadence and iridescent with remarkable images, set the tone for the rest of the novel. Here, the earth is a 'magnet', 'pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself'; an icicle 'drops like a radiant dagger'. Aslam takes us by the hand and, scattering his trail of bewitching images, leads us into his story. Within the first 15 pages, we have been seduced; he has firmly placed us at the centre of the world of his novel.

What a world it is. We are in a town populated by poor, abused immigrants, losers on the margins of society whose grim lives are untouched by hopes of redemption. In this setting lives Shamas, a former poet and current social worker, who declines to leave his wretched neighbourhood, who refuses to 'put aside [his] principles when there was talk of an OBE'... because he 'neither seek[s] honour among men nor kingship over them'. With Shamas is his wife, Kaukab, who, in a touchingly accurate self-portrait, says: 'I know I can't seem to move without bruising anyone, but I don't mean to cause pain.' Their children, two of them divorced, all live apart. Shamas's brother, Jugnu, and his girlfriend, Chanda, live next door.

Or did. Because as the novel opens, we are told that they are missing. We learn soon enough that they were murdered - an honour killing by Chanda's brothers because they cannot accept the couple living in sin.

The manner in which the year after they have gone missing unfolds, how those months come to have a bearing on all those close to the couple, how it splinters relationships and changes lives provides the narrative spine of the novel.

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FROM Adam on, exile has been man's (and God's) cruelest punishment. "An exile's life is no life," lamented Leonidas, the ancient Greek poet. Dante, banished from Florence, described the pain in more concrete terms. "You will leave everything you love most," he warns in "The Divine Comedy." "You will know how salty / another's bread tastes."

The characters in Nadeem Aslam's powerful novel, "Maps for Lost Lovers," are well acquainted with such desolation. Migrants from Pakistan (like Aslam himself), they live in a cold and inhospitable English town they call Dasht-e-Tanhaii -- the Desert of Loneliness. It's a grim place, marred by racism and violence, where the grayness of the sky seems to have filtered into the inhabitants' souls. "We should never have come to this deplorable country," someone complains early on, calling it a "nest of devilry from where God has been exiled."

Yet as lonely as these people are, they can't complain, like Dante, of having left everything behind. This is an era of mass exile, and today's migrants arrive not as individuals but as communities, armed with all the cultural and social paraphernalia of home. Indeed, although it's in the English Midlands, the town in Aslam's novel can resemble a transplanted Pakistani village, its language and customs and religion more or less intact. It is a place where ancestral feuds and gossip are carried over from the homeland, where the diktats of clerics supersede English common law and arranged marriages are the norm. The society at large is kept resolutely at bay: one character, Kaukab, has only three interactions with "a white person" in a year; when she leaves home, she puts on her "outdoor clothes" to minimize contact with "a dirty country, an unsacred country full of people with disgusting habits and practices."

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Aslam was 26 when he embarked on his second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (Faber & Faber, £16.99), thinking it might take two years to complete. "The only time I'm ever fully alive is when I'm writing. When I'd finished this book, I felt like a cage from which the songbird is being removed. For a month I just didn't know what to do."

Although culturally a Muslim, Aslam describes himself as a "non-believer". His Communist father - a poet and film producer in Pakistan - worked as a bin-man and in factories in Huddersfield. There was no money, so Aslam has never been back to Pakistan since his family arrived when he was 14. But he was raised with "a feeling for the life of the mind". Home was full of books, with pictures cut from magazines framed on the walls. His father always told his son to "live a passionate life" and not to worry about money. When Aslam received a Royal Literary Fund grant, he turned part of it down. "I said, 'I don't need that much'."

Aslam began writing his debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds, knowing little about agents or publishers. He sent his manuscript, unsolicited, to Andre Deutsch and within 10 days it was accepted. The book won two awards and Aslam lived on prize-money and various grants, writing Maps for Lost Lovers between Huddersfield, Edinburgh, Leicester and Reading - wherever friends could lend him a flat.

Draping the windows with black cloth, he wouldn't go out for six weeks at a time. Sometimes he would fall asleep on the floor rather than go to the bed. If he did go out he would feel disoriented. "I'd wonder, 'Why is it snowing?' because it would be summer in the town I was writing about." But seclusion was essential. "I always think of the silence and the darkness of a root that enables the flower to grow."

The fruit of this silence and darkness is a richly poetic and poignant novel. Maps for Lost Lovers spans a year in a Muslim community in a nameless English town. The 65-year-old Shamas, director of the Community Relations Council, and his devout wife Kaukab, are waiting to learn what has happened to Shamas's brother Jugnu and his young lover Chanda, who has vanished five months before. Although their bodies have never turned up, several pages into the narrative Chanda's brothers are arrested.

This is a working-class community suffocating in its intimacy and secrets. "I'm from a working-class family and I've always lived in these places," says Aslam. Shoppers gossip at Chanda's parents' grocery store over the loquats and hibiscus-flower hair oil. Here it's a neighbourhood curse to say "May your son marry a white woman", and Pakistanis with halting Eng- lish might only talk to three white people in a year - and that's three too many.

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Suldrun's Garden

The Lyonesse Trilogy is a group of three fantasy novels by Jack Vance, set in the European Dark Ages, in the mythical Elder Isles west of France and southwest of Britain, a generation or two before the birth of King Arthur. An Atlantis theme haunts the story, as do numerous references to Arthurian mythology.

Some place names and concepts, such as references to sandestins as magical creatures that do the actual work of carrying out a magician's spells, are shared between Lyonesse and Vance's Dying Earth series, suggesting that the two worlds may be linked.

Vance makes no pretence of historical accuracy. The society depicted is in general of the later Middle Ages, with trading cogs plying the seas, knights engaged in jousting and following the fully developed Code of Chivalry, and royal courts dancing the pavane and cotillon – all of which would be gross anachronisms when assumed to take place in the 5th Century. In this Vance in fact followed the conventions of the original Arthurian tales, which depicted the society of their own time rather than that of the historical King Arthur.
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The Masters of Solitude

The Masters of Solitude, is a 1978 science fiction novel written by Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin. It initially appeared as a four-part serial in October 1977-May 1978 issues of the magazine Galileo, and was first published in book form in hardcover by Doubleday) in July 1978. A Science Fiction Book Club edition followed from the same publisher in November of the same year. The first paperback edition was from Avon Books in July 1979. The first British edition was from Magnum, also in 1979. Later paperback editions were issued by Bantam Books in 1985 (U.S.) and Orbit/Futura in 1986 (U.K.).[1]

The book is the first novel in what was apparently intended to be a trilogy of the same name. The second novel in the series is Wintermind, 1982. A third book by the same two authors, A Cold Blue Light, 1983, is sometimes listed as the third novel of the trilogy, but is unrelated. Unattributed comments indicate that the authors wrote a conclusion which their publisher declined to publish. A 12/24/12 post by Marvin Kaye on his official website, states, to the contrary, that "the final volume, "SINGER AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES," has at last been written! It's now in the hands of Parke's agent."

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The Tenderness of Wolves

The Tenderness of Wolves is a novel by Stef Penney, which was first published in 2006. It won the 2006 Costa Prize for 'Book of the Year'.

The book is set in Canada in the 1860s. It starts with the discovery of the murder of a trapper, and then follows various events that occur as the murderer is sought. As Stef Penney suffered from agoraphobia at the time of writing this novel, she did all the research in the libraries of London and never visited Canada. In an Elle Q&A interview, Penney revealed that the inspiration for the novel originated as a screenplay she had written 12 years prior to the novel, which also featured the novel's main character, Mrs. Ross.

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Some eyebrows were raised when it was announced that Stef Penney had won the Costa (previously Whitbread) first novel award: although it is set in Canada, she had done all the research for her novel in the British Library and, being agoraphobic, had not set foot in Canada at all.

Yet this doesn't seem to be a problem. The novel is set in 1867, about a century before her birth, and how she's going to get back to that time without a time machine escapes me. Besides, it is not necessary to visit the location of one's novels; Saul Bellow didn't go to Africa before writing Henderson the Rain King; nor, for that matter, did Julie Burchill visit Prague to write No Exit. Actually, you can easily tell, for slightly differing reasons, that neither author visited the scenes they wrote about. But Penney's evocation of the frozen lands of northern Canada couldn't ring truer if she'd spent months wandering through the land with nothing but a pack of huskies and a native tracker for company. (If there is a possibility that the judges' decision was in some way skewed, one might more usefully look at the way that coffee figures repeatedly in the novel.) I have a small amount of first-hand knowledge of the cold bits of the North American continent, and there isn't a syllable of her evocation that seems forced or voulu

This is doubtless mostly due to her skill as a writer; but I wonder if her agoraphobia didn't play a useful part as well. It might be bad manners, both literary and personal, to bring this up as a means of evaluating the novel, but I can't help thinking that it is the affliction itself that makes her so very attentive to the desolate landscape. I'd imagine that all that wide open space is exactly what an agoraphobic fears most; in which case it is an act of bravery, and indeed of artistic honesty and good faith, which has made her confront and make use of her deepest fears.

The story begins with the discovery of the murdered body of Laurent Jammet, a trapper living near the remote settlement of Caulfield; his throat has been cut and he has been scalped. His body is discovered by a Mrs Ross, a woman of proud bearing and antagonism-inducing intelligence; but her adopted son, a moody and withdrawn adolescent, has also gone missing. With the help of an Indian tracker, who himself is a murder suspect, she heads off into the wilderness to find him - and possibly also to trace the source of the mysterious second set of tracks which her son has probably been following. And if Caulfield is at first portrayed as a one-horse dump, it comes to seem like a thriving metropolis when compared to the pathless wastes that stretch out in front of her.

There are few things like an endless vista to make a novel seem really gratifyingly contained. The novel itself comes to seem like a fragile bubble of consciousness beyond whose limits is a threatening void. (And that's what novels, in one essential manner, are.) And living in the rudimentary civilisation of mid 19th-century Canada must have been like living in a novel: there is nothing to concentrate on except the flawed characters of your fellow human beings, and the spoor left by their movements. And that, in a way, is all The Tenderness of Wolves is about.

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The winner of this year's Costa (formerly Whitbread) prize for first novel, and winner of the overall prize, is a suspenseful, atmospheric novel set in Canada. It is 1867, and the small settlement of Caulfield is witness to a murder. Laurent Jammet, a trapper, trader and loner, is found dead in his bed by his neighbour and the book's main character, Mrs Ross.

Over the next few days, we learn about several of the people who live in the settlement, and those who travel to and from it. We also learn that this is not the first untimely death or accident that the inhabitants have experienced: some years ago, two young girls went out picking berries and never returned. Their mother eventually died of grief, and after years of searching for them, their father died also. The local physician, Doc Wade, was found drowned in Dove River a couple of years previously. Now Francis, Mrs Ross's son, has also vanished, yet his father seems distant and unconcerned.

This cloud of suspicion covers the small town like a blanket. Inside it, we see the lives and characters of the Ross and the Knox families, other neighbours, and the Company men who come to investigate Jammet's death - McKinley, Moody and associates - and their interactions with the locals. (The Company is revealed as the Hudson Bay Company). A trapper friend of Jammet's called Parker, half Indian and half white, is arrested for the crime, but he does not seem a likely suspect. Mrs Ross is desperate to find her son, another friend of the dead man, before he too is suspected.

By this point, although I was enjoying the book, I thought that there were too many characters in it to be able to fix any firmly in my mind or to care very much about any of them. Once the journey started, however, the book began to exert a strong spell on me. The developing relationship between Parker and Mrs Ross, together with her sad tale, is very moving. Parker tells her of an abandoned wolf cub he once found and bought up as a dog, until "It remembered it was a wolf, not a pet. It stared into the distance. Then one day it was gone. The Chippewa have a word for it - it means "the sickness of long thinking". You cannot tame a wild animal, because it will always remember where it is from, and yearn to go back."

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An unkown British writer shook the book world last night, winning the first £30,000 Costa Book of the Year Award (for 35 years it was the Whitbread Award) for her debut novel about Canada - despite a severe medical condition that made it impossible for her to go there.

Stef Penney’s portrait of a small Canadian settlement in deep midwinter was so authentic that when her winning novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, was published in north America, Canadians were convinced that she had spent weeks researching the book there.
In fact, the author who lives in east London, did all her research at the British Library.

Acute agoraphobia meant that she could not travel by aeroplane or train for 15 years.

The Tenderness of Wolves is a murder mystery that takes place in 1967 on Dove River, a lonely snowbound town on the Hudson Bay.
Victory by Penney, 37, was a big upset for the form book.
The bookies had predicted a fierce fight between William Boyd’s spy thriller, Restless, and Keeping Mum, an unusual autobiography about the working class childhood of 71-year-old Brian Thompson.
Penney’s win is all the more remarkable because she revealed to the Daily Telegraph last month that her book was rejected by “quite a lot” of publishers before being bought by the small new publisher, Quercus.

But the 10-strong judging panel, including chairman Armando Iannucci, broadcasters Kate Adie and Clive Anderson, and Carol Thatcher, daughter of Baroness Thatcher, took little more than an hour to pick The Tenderness of Wolves.
The 10-strong panel decided by a two-thirds majority after taking just one vote.

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The Prince and the Pauper

The Prince and the Pauper is a novel by American author Mark Twain. It was first published in 1881 in Canada, before its 1882 publication in the United States. The novel represents Twain's first attempt at historical fiction. Set in 1547, it tells the story of two young boys who are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father in Offal Court off Pudding Lane in London, and Prince Edward, son of King Henry VIII.

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The Blind Man's Garden

In Nadeem Aslam's memorable 2008 novel The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan, beauty and pain were intimately entwined, impossible to keep apart. The various incompatibles in his new book The Blind Man's Garden don't surrender their separateness so magically. There are awkward gaps and residues despite the author's great gifts of imagination.

The novel starts in late 2001 and takes place largely in Pakistan, though some sections are again set in Afghanistan, newly invaded. Elderly Rohan, eventually the blind man of the title, his vision gradually dimming, founded an Islamic school called Ardent Spirit with his wife Sofia. After her death he was forced out as the school became intolerant, a virtual nursery of jihad, but continues to live in the house that he built on the same site.

The main characters of The Wasted Vigil were non-natives, a Briton, an American and a Russian (partial roll call of the nationalities that have meddled in Afghanistan). There are no such mediating figures in the new novel, and they are missed. No doubt imperialistic reading habits die hard, the easy expectation of having otherness served up on a plate, but it's not just that. For Nadeem Aslam to communicate the richness and depth of his characters' culture, he must keep touching in the background they take for granted, in passages that float free of their points of view. He informs us for instance that orphaned children are likely to be sought out and asked to say prayers, since they belong to a category of being whose requests Allah never ignores, and that the Angel of Death is said to have no ears, to prevent him from hearing anyone's pleas. When there's a reference to mountains near Peshawar being "higher than the Alps placed onto the Pyrenees", the European frame of reference is jarring.

Before the main characters are properly introduced a minor figure administers a distracting overdose of symbolism. A "bird pardoner" sets up snares in the trees of Rohan's garden, trapping the birds in nooses of steel wire. He plans to sell them in the town, since freed birds say prayers on behalf of those who buy their freedom. He doesn't come back, though, at the promised time, and the trees are full of suffering birds.

Another minor character is a mendicant who goes around wrapped in hundreds of chains. The idea is that each link represents a prayer, and disappears as Allah grants it. The book also contains a ruby that appears without explanation, just in time to ransom a prisoner from a warlord, though the warlord, taking offence at a lack of respect during the ransoming process, pulverises the jewel and uses it as an instrument of torture instead.

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IN NADEEM ASLAM’s haunting new novel, The Blind Man’s Garden, a village schoolteacher in Afghanistan writes to the United Nations pleading to be rescued from the hell she is in: “It is my 197th letter over the past five years, please help us.” The letter is written four years into the Taliban’s regime of stonings and public beheadings; a regime with a special affection for female schoolteachers depraved enough to educate young girls.

Where did this teacher get the money for foreign postage for 197 letters, one wonders. To whom in the UN did she address her entreaties? Did anyone in that noble and oily organization ever read her letters? The reader is not told any of this. Mikal, the novel’s intense young protagonist, finds the letter after 9/11, torn in half in a rose garden in a Taliban mountain fort, hours before it is stormed by American soldiers. To yoke beauty and brutality by locating a paradisiacal rose garden and stream inside a compound of zealots is a hallmark of Aslam’s lyrical style. He is a writer who can bend barbed wire into calligraphy. In his second and most deeply written novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, Pakistani immigrants in an English village place pots of scented geraniums in the center of the downstairs room in the hope that if white racists were to break in at night, the perfume of “rosehips and ripening limes” from the smashed pots would warn the sleepers of intruders. Rose gardens in Taliban citadels might sound like a touch of orientalist rogue, but to mull over the image is to discern an imperceptible hint: isn’t another rose garden the site from which a succession of presidents have declared war and missile strikes, and lied to the world? There is no direct equivalence here — Aslam is neither a pamphleteer nor a fool — but he certainly startles the reader into looking at the world with new eyes. This is a guerilla wordsmith who takes cover behind loveliness to lob language at your certainties.

Mikal and his best friend travel up from Pakistan to provide medical aid to the wounded people of Afghanistan but are duped and sold to the Taliban. An ordinary man caught in the Great Game, Mikal is described as “a mud-child and drifter,” for that is what his life has been ever since his beloved father, a communist poet, was disappeared by a Pakistani dictator. The figure of the persecuted poet recurs through Aslam’s fiction, no doubt in homage to his own father, a poet forced to seek asylum in England from the pro-American General Zia. Mikal’s journey will propel the narrative; illuminate the horrors of the Taliban’s intolerance and America’s blundering war on terror. He will blunder terribly too, even as he tries to protect with maimed hands (his index fingers have been chopped off by an Afghan warlord to impede him from using a gun) the destinies of those around him: his best friend who is with him in that rose garden fortress; his best friend’s wife whom he loves with a blazing passion; his irreverent and wonderful brother, Basie, named for the Count of jazz; and the silent American soldier who has the word “Infidel” tattooed on his back like a tabloid taunt, not in English, but in huge Arabic letters, so that the enemy can read and know that America is unafraid.

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First Infinities

Vijay Nambisan, poet-in-exile for more than 20 years now, is back with a new book of poems, and the world ought to be grateful for this. Last week, he released this book, First Infinities, at The Toddy Shop in New Delhi's Hauz Khas Village. That evening was the third in a series of events called Poetry at Toddy, curated by Jeet Thayil. Thayil and Nambisan co-wrote a collection of poems called Gemini in 1992, the only book of verse Nambisan had published before now.

Thayil has been instrumental in persuading the poet to dig into his pile of unpublished poems, the end result being First Infinities. While introducing Nambisan, Thayil called him "the best-kept secret in English poetry". He added: "If you haven't heard this name before, it's because unlike some of us, Vijay never learnt to attend the right literature festivals, make the right noises and kiss the right asses." At this point, the novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, who was in attendance, wisecracked: "Why don't you give him some tips?" prompting a round of good-natured laughter from the audience. But when Nambisan started to recite, there was pin-drop silence, punctuated with loud and enthusiastic applause at the end of each poem. (This writer has been to enough literary soirees to understand the difference between genuine and fake applause.)

After he had finished performing about half a dozen poem from First Infinities, Nambisan spoke to the critic Supriya Nair about the book and the long gap since Gemini. On Nair's request, the poet recited a poem called Elizabeth Oomanchery. As one realises after reading First Infinities, this short, sharp poem bristling with indignance encapsulates one of the poet's pet peeves: the cult of the celebrity writer and how it ends up killing the joy of the writing itself. Here's the poem in its entirety:

"Elizabeth Oomanchery / The celebrated poetess / Went to the corner shop / To buy a loaf of bread. / The shopman said, "Excuse me, / "Aren't you Elizabeth Oomanchery, / "The celebrated poetess?" / So Elizabeth Oomanchery went home. / Elizabeth Oomanchery / Sat at her desk one evening / To write herself a poem. / The poem asked, "Excuse me, / "Aren't you Elizabeth Oomanchery, / "The celebrated poetess?" / Elizabeth Oomanchery / Said "Yes," / So the poem went home."

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What happens to poems deferred? When they lie unshared, unseen. Do they dry up, raisins in the sun? Fester like sores? Do they sag? Like heavy loads. Do they explode? Rarely do they land in your hands, like Vijay Nambisan's First Infinities, beautifully bound and produced. He isn't new on the scene. In 1988, at 24, he won a country-wide competition organised by The Poetry Society of India and The British Council. The winning poem, "Madras Central", displays special mastery of sparseness.

It begins with a quotidian black train pulling in at the platform - "Hissing into silence like hot steel in water" - and comes, not to a crescendo, but what Marianne Moore calls "merely to a close" with the description of a solitary traveller carrying "unwantedness" from place to place. A quiet finish both vulnerable and lasting. In 1992, Nambisan's poems appeared in Gemini, a two-poet project, which Dom Moraes called, in the foreword, "an indication that Indian poetry, after many years of striving, ha(d) at last arrived at maturity." Since then, there was poetic silence. Nambisan embarked upon a distinguished career as journalist and critic - documenting his experiences of small-town Bihar in Bihar is in the Eyes of the Beholder and arguing for the importance of written communicative honesty and integrity in the Orwellian Language as an Ethic. Most recently, he has translated the devotional bhakti verse of Poonthanam and Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri. Twenty-two years after Gemini, Nambisan delivers his first full-length poetry collection. First Infinities is worth every minute of the wait.

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Vijay Nambisan’s First Infinities (2015) selects sixty poems from the last three decades of his largely uncollected verse. Because the net is cast this wide, a fiercely varied cast of poems becomes possible, each experimenting with a different mood, register and form. Together they form a picture of Nambisan as someone who is both broodingly cerebral and goofy, someone pointedly serious and incredibly self-mocking.

His best poems bring these aspects together, where he is able to heed the weighty, despairing voice within him, even as he keeps it from becoming mawkish by a wit that is both devastating and funny.

For instance, in the short poem ‘The hole in the earth,’ the poet-persona on spotting a mysterious ‘hole through to the earth’s bowels,’ starts a slightly woolly-headed, self-serious monologue wondering about ‘what beatitude, what hate, / what hope of sanctity’ might lie in there, only to discover the next day that this hole is a far more unpoetic and disenchanted thing – a ‘manhole,’ which the workmen come and cover the next day. The brooding self of the poet, its labours of the mind, its indulgent explorations of the ‘void,’ are all sharply undercut by the labour, always caste-bound, of the workmen who make a shattering debut at the end of the poem. The poetic ‘void’ implodes into the more material ‘manhole’.

Do not for a moment mistake that the labour of the mind, the work of the intellect is devalued in Nambisan – no poetry does that, and most of his own is very allusive and densely meditative – but this intellectual labour is neither over-enchanted nor cauterized by pedestalization. His mind is always roving, searching, thinking, but never in a vacuum, and is always acutely anxious about self-indulgence. The intellect is worn lightly on one’s shoulders, hoping it would never turn into a performance, a burden.

Nambisan is a poet’s poet, but not in its banal, back-handed sense that only a small coterie really ‘gets’ him. Here instead, it implies that he makes the scene of production of poetry as available to his reader as the product. The worlds where poetry is written, published, disseminated find their way into the meat of his poems, often to be ridiculed. On more than a few pages, you get a sense of his chosen poet-forebears, his acute awareness of writing in English, or the trials of the modern day poetry scene which overwhelm him and not in a good way.

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Read some of the poems here/