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 PrintableVersion Shelf lifeLooking at secular booksTHE INHERITANCE OF LOSS Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in October with this, her second startling and engaging novel. I’m not surprised that she won; this is a fantastic novel, full of intelligence, emotional reality and beautiful writing. The novel, set in 1980s India, centres on two parallel sets of relations. First is an aging judge who lives with his orphaned teenage granddaughter, Sai, in a rapidly disintegrating house on the edge of the Himalayas. The second is his cook, whose son Biju is an illegal immigrant in New York working in squalid restaurant kitchens. A love affair for Sai, the evasion of immigration authorities for Biju, and the breakdown of normal life through political upheaval form the plot, but over and above this our attention is on the characters. Through their trials we see themes of identity, guilt and hypocrisy. TrappedFor these individuals, and others we meet in the story, there is a great sense of feeling trapped; they cannot return to the world that has made them, nor can they move forward to the new reality developing around them. Son and granddaughter have both inherited loss from their elders. Sai has inherited an out of place Anglophilia which causes her to react with ‘distaste’ to the poverty of the ‘far edge of the middle class’. Biju has inherited a sense of impotence in servitude which leaves him pitiful and self-pitying in New York. This lassitude is set against the background of an emerging fight for independence for the Nepali majority in the area which turns from ineptitude to fearful violence. It is a bleak picture of life, but one with moral depth, as the radically sinful and corrupt nature of life is portrayed clearly but compassionately. Characters evoke sympathy but are not particularly likeable. EvocativeKiran Desai’s style is both inventive and poised. Objects and places are described in such a way that they evoke the emotions of characters, life in North India comes to life vividly ; in the monsoon ‘insects flew in carnival gear, bread, in a day, turned as green as grass’. There is humour here too in her descriptions of the absurd features of post-colonial life: a powder puff, to turn brown skin paler, a policeman confiscating library copies of Trollope, both now hated symbols of an anti-Empire nation. Collision storiesI am not surprised that this book is a prizewinner because the writing is so good, but there is also another reason. Looking back over the list of previous winners and shortlisted writers, it is striking that just under half come from the post-colonial world, mostly from India, but often from Africa or the Caribbean. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, R.K Narayan, and V.S. Naipaul are highly regarded and extremely popular. And why? Perhaps because the writing is about nations which are still exotic, where violence is a real threat, and which contain extremes of poverty and wealth, it is exciting and fresh. Stories are often about the collision of modernity and tradition in a way that writing set in the contemporary West rarely is, so they feel significant. And how is a Christian to respond? Well, we can praise God for the gospel which transcends cultural and historical barriers, we can shudder at the way it is so often narrowly understood, and we can pray for its progress throughout a world in such desperate need. The vibrancy and complexity of the cultures described here mustn’t daunt us, but instead cause us to cry out to a God of powerful creativity and compassion. Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - January 2007 |
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