Night Train to Jamalpur

Andrew Martin
Night Train to Jamalpur

Faber, 2013

India, 1923. The protagonist of the previous eight books in the series Englishman Captain Jim Stringer with his wife and teenage daughter is on secondment to the East Indian Railway. The main purpose of trip is investigating possible cases of corruption among top management of the East Indian Railway.

At the beginning of the novel Stringer takes the Night Mail train from Calcutta to Jamalpur in first class carriage with five companions, among them Major Fisher, who was set as a partner to Stringer to investigate corruption cases. Stringer does not trust Fisher, considering his dark personality, he is able to do anything behind Stringer’s back. Fisher behaves surly and despises all Indians.
In the car, our narrator meets with Jim Young, an Anglo-Indian, who is also working on the railway. At night during one of the stops someone kills Young, escaping in the desert. Everyone in the car have heard the shots, but no one has caught the killers. The lock on the door of Stringer’s compartment was broken and Stringer concludes that perhaps someone wanted to kill him, not Young. Someone calls the police, and Detective Inspector Khudayar Khan of the C.I.D. is assigned to the case.

Stringer takes an interest into this matter investigating available suspectes in his spare time. The third case, which Stringer also takes unofficially, becomes "snake killings" in the first class carriages on the Railway. Someone throws poisonous snakes, including king cobras, in first-class compartments. Snakes have killed more than four people and continue to kill. People become afraid to go first class, although trains are carefully checked. Stringer wonder who can do this, because only the master can control the snake and put it in the car without hurting himself.

In the main corruption case Stringer has two primary suspects, William Askwith, top brass in the traffic department, and Douglas Poole, his deputy. Both are Englishman, as other brass on the Railway.

Perhaps those who read the previous books in the series will have even more fun, but even as a stand-alone book Night Train to Jamalpur is quite a smart mystery. Martin throws the bait immediately, starting the book with murder, and then slowly spins all three (even four, if we take into account the matter with Stringer’s daughter) plotlines. The novel continues without haste, that in general it is quite clear. The detective has the three investigations at the time, one officially and two semi-officially, and he can not solve them all immediately. However, it turns out that the main plotline, corruption case, remains in the shadows.

The novel is written in the first person, the narrator Stringer generously shares with the reader the obtained information, and the detective and the reader are on an equal footing, having the same evidence and conjecture. Martin fills the book with suspects in all three investigations. Especially tickles the nerves that someone wants to set Stringer up for murder. All three cases are resolved quite logical and using deduction, although you have to admit that in the books of this kind everything is possible.

In addition to the suspense of plot, Martin delivers on the atmospheric front. Indian background is colorful and bright, details are believable, excursion in history is such that you feel the era, but do not feel that as if you read glossy booklet about India. Martin knows rails and sleepers, as his own ten fingers.

What's confusing is the main work activity of Stringer. He spends little time on his main job, driving around idly to and fro. You can see corruption behind this.

It is a good genre novel.

The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri
The Lowland

Knopf, 2013

Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, were born and raised in one of the districts of Calcutta near the lowland (the same one from the novel’s title). With the age difference in one year, the brothers were inseparable and very similar to each other. Both brothers were savvy and smart, but their characters eventually became different. Protest, disobedience, and challenge started growing in Udayan, but Subhash remained calm, considerate, obedient to his parents. In the early '60s, in the period of world revolutions and uprisings, Udayan joined the Naxalite movement, a terrorist organization operating illegally in India and advocating for equality and justice for all. While one brother rebels, the second one goes to the United States, Rhode Island in particular, where he studies the marine chemistry at the university. Studying is going steady, as is introduction to American life, even an affair with a married American woman and the first sex happen. After the break-up with an American woman Subhash suddenly receives a telegram about his brother's death.

Subhash rushes off to India, attends funeral and finds his brother's widow, eating food from the floor in the kitchen. It turns out that Udayan married secretly an intellectual without consent of parents, and now brother’ parents barely tolerate the presence in the house Gauri, a pregnant widow. Subhash can not find out anything about the death of his brother, and only Gauri tells how Udayan has been shot in the lowlands by the police in front of the family. His body was never given to the family.

Seeing that Gauri can not stay at parents’ home, Subhash asks her to marry him and be the father of the unborn child. Gauri obediently agrees, and the couple fly to the U.S. (of course, this marriage was also made without the approval of the parents).

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri in fact is low: there are only a few high points here, but plenty of low points. The beginning of the book promises much, though melodrama already is noticeable. The two brothers, who had gone separate ways and are split by the ocean, is not really original premise. The book is written in the third person, and the point of view changes from chapter to chapter. But the brother-revolutionary dies quickly, Lahiri does not have time to tell about his motives, and Udayan will remain a mystery to the reader until the very end. But the chapters written about another brother from his point of view in the novel are plenty. And that feel kind of unfair: one brother was given enough space to speak out, but the other died in silence.

But the surviving brother has very little to tell. That is one of the failures of the novel. Subhash’s life is empty, uneventful, a continuous lane of contrived sadness. About his marriage with Gauri it is clear from the very beginning that it won’t work out. The couple does not even quarrel (both of spouses are remarkably inert), and continue to live side by side. Their way of life does not hurt them and does not change them. Lahiri is forced almost a third of the novel to devote to this joyless coexistence. But you can not build a whole novel on sadness and decline of marital relationship. The author does not know how to write properly about everyday life, and the result is something like this: chapter begins, as spouses are sad, the next chapter also tells the story how the wife are sad, as if it were the only business that they can take themselves to - being sad.

Characters do not change throughout the book. It takes forty years, but Subhash and Gauri are still the same sad people, seemed to have not learned from life any single thing. Both had their degrees, but in reality they are at 20-year-olds level, however, severely depressed. Even Bela, their daughter, already adult, becomes something like her father: she lives like a ghost in the eventless world, and we do not really wonder what will happen to her.

But the final returns the tension of beginning of the book. Confrontation between the characters get even much tougher than expected. The Lowland reminds us that mercy is not only the good, but also to the detriment. Even the scene of the confrontation is written more furiously in style than most of the book.

Lahiri, apparently, wanted to broaden her audience and make her novel more accessible. Otherwise how do you explain the fact that the novel is written stylistically too straight. Lahiri "chews" everything here, so that the reader only is left to swallow, no secrets between the lines here. Those readers who love to think on the book will be disappointed.

As to the historical material which the book is based on, in particular, the Naxalite movement, there Lahiri failed. Into her lyrical prose Lahiri unceremoniously shoved pieces of historical material, not even bothering to edit them. Copy-paste does yet decorate no novel.

The author has the potential, but somehow it smeared – on the lowland.

Serious Men

Manu Joseph
Serious Men

John Murray, 2011

At the center of this funny story are two men working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai, India. But the place of work of perhaps is the only thing that unites them.

Ayyan Mani is a representative of the lowest caste. Janitor's son, Mani began working at the Institute as a courier, rising to the position of secretary to one of the most important researchers of the Institute Arvind Acharya. Mani, after ten years of marriage, became tired of his silly wife and half-starved existence. His wife no longer seems attractive; the future does not seem bright. Not being the holder of outstanding intelligence, Mani nevertheless has the ability to intrigue. Every day, Mani places on the stand at the Institute fictitious quotes, allegedly belonging to an outstanding scientist or thinker, but in fact he makes these statements up. The only way to rise from the bottom Mani sees in his clever son. But just cleverness alone is not enough, you need something more. Deaf in one ear, Adi is presented by his father as a mathematical genius.

Eccentric people inhabit this somewhat eccentric story. «Serious Men» can be easily mistaken for satire, but it is rather humorous novel. Satirical allusions to the structure of Indian society, Indian science and Indian religion then are withdrawn dashed, and the humor here, perhaps, is even English.

All the troubles come from women - about this with a smirk on his face Manu Joseph is trying to tell us. Indeed, the plot is moved with this premise. This is the same engine of the ridiculous here. The two main characters are tormented by vanishing love in them. They're both tired of their wives, available lovely creatures with whom they had once felt good, and now somehow uncomfortable. Both the secretary and the scientist, excel, as they can, just to pull themselves out of the swamp, to refresh their covered with cobwebs existence. Mani sets up to the scam involving his son to shake his wife, to prove to her that even the lower castes can achieve something. Acharya is looking for bodily pleasures, and finds them in a lovely young colleague. But the scientist forgets that science and feelings are different matter, and they require a different approach. At the beginning of the novel there are a few funny scenes where Acharya looks in the mirror at his body, starts to use deodorant, though he already seems to have given up on his looks long ago.

The story would be lost in the background of similar ones, if the action occurred in Britain, for example, not in India. Exotic colors entourage battered story in a new way. The people there have a different mentality, different views on life, different values. The mere fact that India has the Institute for the search of extraterrestrial life, is laughable.

Joseph is verbose, but he does have a sense of the word. He can equally good describe the poor neighborhood and the meeting of the Disciplinary Commission. This is a leisure reading, but because, after all, it is not a thriller.

Serious Men does not discover new lands, but tells a story that could suck you in and make you laugh.