Legends of Halahala - silent pictures from another world

[Did this piece for the magazine Democratic World]

What people are willing to consider literary, or even literate, is highly variable. Often, one hears the casual remark “This mass-market/popular novel is not literature” – a statement that, apart from being inaccurate at a purely definition-based level, also suggests an elitism that runs against the long, complex history of art and popular culture. However, even the most broad-based definitions of literature are sure to contain the word “writing”. It is taken for granted that words, made up of those tiny shapes we call alphabets – so intimidating when we can’t decipher them, and so empowering when we can – are involved. And this may be why, when asked about my favourite Indian novels of the past year, I hesitate for a second before mentioning Legends of Halahala.

But only for a second. This is a work of graphic fiction by the hugely talented artist Appupen (the pen name of George Mathen), his second after the extraordinary Moonward. Like that book, Legends of Halahala is set on a planet that resembles our own in many basic ways. It employs different drawing styles to tell five stories set in separate periods, each presenting a perspective on love, obsession and its effects. There is conventional, youthful (some might say foolish and impetuous) romance, but there is also the cutesy idea of two oddball, parasite-like creatures – from the remote “Oberian” era – being each other’s forever-companions. There is a man pining for the super-heroine he encountered as a child, and another man – a swarthy, motorbike-riding daredevil – who is the rescuer of, and then the abductor of, a supermodel’s absconding left breast (!). And in the bleakest of these tales, titled “16917P’s Masterpiece”, there is the love of artistic creation as a form of self-affirmation.

Most intriguingly, the book is almost completely wordless. This is not a minor achievement. Last year, the Chennai-based publishing house Blaft produced an anthology of visual storytelling titled The Obliterary Journal. The name came from the book’s tongue-in-cheek mission to “obliterate” conventional literature – and yet, most of the stories in that collection, though beautifully drawn, did use text; words and images worked in unison. And this has been true of the majority of international graphic novels too, even the ones that do spectacular things with pictorial form. Alan Moore’s Watchmen – about an alternative America where costumed “superheroes” are becoming irrelevant in the face of the world’s biggest problems – is one of the most intricate works of storytelling I have ever seen, in its use of visuals that echo each other, and an intense narrative within a narrative. But it is also a book that you read – the first time, at least – in the normal way, since the story is propelled by dialogues and by stream-of-consciousness musings from a journal maintained by one of the main characters.

Reading a narrative made up entirely of drawings involves a different cerebral process, but within a few pages of Legends of Halahala I was hooked; so adept and fluid is Appupen’s artwork that these stories don’t need words. The few bursts of conversation there are take the form of exclamations and are depicted in a droll, almost cheesily visual way: when a king’s servant has to announce that the royal dinner is ready, the speech bubble issuing from his mouth contains a picture of a plate and cutlery; when the king and queen realise their daughter is missing and shout out her name, we only see her image in the speech balloon (we never learn what she is called); and after a dragon-like creature is sternly instructed to stop setting things ablaze with his fire-breath, we see a “no smoking” sign emanating from his head as he crawls sheepishly away. In a cheeky touch, most of the written words that adorn the book’s back-cover are fake blurbs such as “Book of the year!” by a publication called The Halahala Observer.

But it is the true silences that are most impressive. The first story – about star-crossed lovers whose fathers rule rival kingdoms – is the most straightforward one, linear and very easy on the eye. It is also bright and vividly coloured, which is central to its purpose: the kingdoms are represented by green and orange respectively, and this distinguishing colour scheme runs through the story, right up to a cheeky last panel where the two lovers are finally united and the picture of a heart on a flag brings the two colours together. Contrast this look with that of the next story, drawn in deliberately gloomy black and white, where a child and his parents – walking the streets of what looks like a Hollywood noir film from the 1940s – are rescued from a monster by Ghost Girl. (When we seen the grown up version of the boy years later – a depressed-looking man still haunted by the memory of his saviour – the panels acquire a neon yellow tinge.)

Just as interesting as the differences, though, are the similarities – the visual motifs that subtly connect the tales. For instance, the opening illustrations for three of the stories involve a chasm that has to be bridged: in “Stupid’s Arrow”, it is the valley that divides the kingdoms, a tenuous rope bridge stretched across it; in “The Saga of Ghost Girl”, the skyscrapers of a metropolis are drawn in a slanted way so that the gap between them becomes another sort of valley, and we see the small figure of the super-heroine swinging from one building to another. And there are many other touches that you might properly register only on a second or third read. (Isn’t the image on the opening page of the first story – the silhouette of the valley and the rocky hills – akin to the bottom half of an India map, complete with a little Sri Lanka tapering away at the bottom? And if so, could the kingdoms stand for the politics associated with the western and eastern extremes of the country? Or is this over-analysis? Decide for yourself.)

Three of the stories in Legends of Halahala end with clear heart symbols, but if you squint at the final pages of the other two you might see distorted heart shapes in them too: in the rings of cigarette smoke floating across a city’s dark skyline. Or in the broken pieces of a plaque on which a man banished from a machine-run land has inscribed “16917P was here” as he uses his art to battle oblivion - by building a monument to assert his presence in a world where he is an outcast. On the evidence of his two books so far, Appupen’s own tryst with literary fame is well underway, and happily graphic novels are not as marginalised as they once were.

[A few earlier posts on graphic novels and visual storytelling: the many faces of the Indian comics industry; Jis desh mein manga bikhti hai; the Pao Collective's anthology; Ambedkar in Gond art; the maali who weeded out myth; Kashmir Pending and The Barn Owl; on reviewing a graphic novel]

A most improbable murder - on Keigo Higashino's creepy new mystery

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

Keigo Higashino's thriller Yōgisha X no Kenshin - which became an international publishing sensation as The Devotion of Suspect X when it was translated from Japanese into English two years ago - was a most unusual kind of murder mystery; strictly speaking, not a murder mystery at all, since the killing, committed in self-defence, occurred within the first 30 pages, with the reader made privy to everything that led up to it (only at the end did one realise that a small but vital piece of information had been withheld). The suspense came from the way the narrative moved between the police investigation and the murderer’s attempts at alibi-creation, and the final twist – involving the nature of the cover-up – was ingenious. But the book’s lingering quality – its ability to stay under a reader’s skin long after its secrets had been disclosed – hinged on its portrayal of two people who match wits: one a brilliant physicist-sleuth named Yukawa (also known as Detective Galileo) and the other a criminal with almost unfathomable, monk-like reserves of personal dedication and forbearance.

Now another Higashino novel is out in translation, as Salvation of a Saint, and it has all the qualities that made the first book so gripping. As in The Devotion of Suspect X, the suspense lies not so much in the murderer’s identity (though in this case there is some second-guessing on that front too) but in how the crime was pulled off – and the solution is just as jaw-dropping.

These are the facts of the case: a man named Yoshitaka lies dead in his house, a spilt cup of poisoned coffee by his side. Yoshitaka was not, we learn, particularly sensitive in his treatment of women (Higashino does seem to derive literary pleasure from turning unpleasant men into murder victims!), and there are basically two suspects: his wife Ayane and his lover Hiromi. Once again, the reader is allowed to be a step ahead of the investigating detectives – we know Hiromi is not guilty because most of the early events, leading up to the discovery of the body, have been presented through her shocked perspective. Also, within the first few pages, we have been told that Ayane at least intended to kill her husband and had the means to do so. The rub is, she was hundreds of miles away, visiting her parents, when the coffee was made and consumed. As the detectives try to postulate scenarios where she might have pre-planned the killing before she left, they come up against a wall – and eventually the sardonic Yukawa is brought in to weigh the options.

What he discovers – and I feel I can write this without giving away any spoilers – is something very close to the perfect crime, with a solution that is simultaneously very simple and dangerously outlandish. When it is revealed, your gut response might be to snort “Impossible” (which is basically what the detectives listening to Yukawa do). I even felt a little cheated at first, as if the author had blindsided me by stepping outside the permissible limits of the genre. But further reflection shifted my view of what was possible and what wasn’t; I began to see the peculiar internal logic of the denouement in light of the personalities and the lifestyles involved, and the crime no longer appeared so unfeasible.

Of course, a 370-page book has to be more than its climactic disclosure, and Salvation of a Saint is tense and well-paced. It does contain at least one over-familiar trope of the police procedural or noir – a detective becoming attracted to an apparently vulnerable woman, perhaps compromising his own integrity in the process – though this isn’t stretched to the point of derivativeness. The actual writing has some of the functional woodenness that you find in most commercial fiction of this sort – too many references to a character’s eyes “widening in surprise”, for example, or hands gripping a phone tightly when unexpected news is received – but these are genre tics, easy enough to ignore up to a point. (Besides, as has often been observed, Japanese writing translated into English can seem a little stilted and over-formal, especially when the reader is from a culture that doesn’t understand why a detective might remove his shoes outside a house before going in to question a murder suspect.)

This book is about a crime born of very deep passion, but with no sudden bursts of action, no explicit violence or dramatic confrontations, it is unnerving in ways that more conventional thrillers are not. And despite the fact that the setting is a homogenous modern city and the characters are in some ways indistinguishable from upper-middle-class people living anywhere on the planet, there is something distinctly Japanese about it, something of the deceptive placidity of the filmmaker Ozu or the novelist Ishiguro. One senses a neat and ordered contemporary world with mystical rumblings beneath its surface, like the Sheep Man in Haruki Murakami’s novels, hidden in a forgotten corner of a glass-and-steel skyscraper, or a videotape being employed by supernatural forces in Koji Suzuki’s Ring series. Higashino’s book is set in a world of tidy kitchens with coffee-makers and bottled mineral water, of dating parties and urbane dinner-time banter, but underlying it all is something much more primal. The image I was left with at the end was the indelible one of a spider watching quietly, attentively over her web.

[A short post about The Devotion of Suspect X is here]

On A Kiss Before Dying, complexities of book-to-film adaptation, and the world of noir

I’ve been thinking about books, especially in the crime and suspense genres, which are highly resistant to being filmed – or at least resistant to being filmed faithfully. In other words, it may be possible to turn the basic plot into an excellent movie, but the nature and method of its suspense would be unlike that of the book, because of fundamental differences between literature and cinema.

Consider one of the best crime novels I know of: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which was filmed twice in America (in 1956 and 1991) and loosely adapted by Bollywood for Shahrukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar. In each case, the film had to make significant departures from the source material; to understand why, here’s a plot outline of Levin’s novel.

(Note: no major spoilers – most of what I’m about to reveal is contained in the first dozen or so pages, and I’m not giving away the central twist.)

A young man, a gold-digger, has been romancing a girl named Dorothy, the daughter of a rich entrepreneur. For reasons I won’t get into here, he decides to kill her, and the first third of the book (approx. 90 pages) is about the carrying out of his scheme. Throughout this segment, we are privy to the furious ticking of his mind – his anxiety when things don’t go as planned, his careful anticipation of glitches, even his self-congratulatory smugness. The narrative is in the third person, but we are as close to his inner state as it’s possible to get; the writing is so taut and intense that even as the reader condemns him morally, it’s hard not to feel personally invested – even implicated – in his actions.

But here’s the rub: we only get a bare-bones description of this man (he’s blond, blue-eyed, very handsome), and most crucially we never learn his name. He is referred to simply as “he”, and though that might sound forced or gimmicky, it works here because Levin so masterfully ties us to his protagonist’s consciousness. (After the first few pages, “he” becomes as precise a pronoun as “I” would be in a first-person narrative; the word can only possibly refer to one person. Some readers might not even realise that they don’t know “his” name until quite late in the story.)

Levin’s reasons for doing this become apparent in the next part of the book, as Dorothy’s sister Ellen starts making private enquiries about the men her sister may have been involved with at the time of her death. She encounters a few of them, and of course she learns their names. But the reader is flummoxed: we are now seeing things through Ellen’s eyes and it’s possible that the killer is one of the men she meets, but we have no way of knowing who it is. Because of the shift in perspective, the person we knew so intimately in the first section of the book is now a stranger to us.

This, then, is the set-up for the novel’s major twist. Like all of Levin’s books, A Kiss Before Dying is made up of several ingeniously constructed moments of suspense – but the revelation of the killer’s identity is the pièce de résistance. 

Given this summary, I’m sure you can see why A Kiss Before Dying is so difficult to film exactly as it was written. A movie (at least a movie that uses a conventional narrative structure**) would have to show us the murderer’s face right at the beginning – which means that when Ellen begins sleuthing, the viewer wouldn’t be in the dark about his identity. The film would have to generate suspense using other methods, perhaps by changing the story’s focus or chronology, or by keeping us initially uncertain about the man’s intentions. (The book dives straight into his psyche by opening on this classic pulp-fiction note: “His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him...”)

I wrote in this post about another Levin book I love, The Boys From Brazil. His best work creates an almost tangible sense of paranoia, which transcends conventional ideas about “suspense” writing. I can read The Boys From Brazil and A Kiss Before Dying over and over and discover something new each time, long after their major plot secrets have been revealed; these books are lessons in how to construct a story by putting together little details, and I think any budding writer – even one with “literary” rather than “genre” aspirations – can learn from them.

But there’s something else to be said about A Kiss Before Dying: in addition to being an excellent suspense novel, this is also a fine entry in the tradition of American noir literature of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

One of the essential themes of noir is the discontent that can lead people into a life of crime – the gnawing sense that the world is an inherently unjust place and that there’s a better life to be had, if only you can reach out and seize the moment. (Eventually, of course, even minor transgressions lead into mazes and cul de sacs, and the best-laid plans unravel.) The killer in A Kiss Before Dying is first and foremost a social menace and an opportunist, but he is also a small-town lad obsessed with a giant copper-manufacturing corporation that is making much more money than it knows what to do with – and there is a sense in which his story can be read as subtle social commentary.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Shah Rukh Khan character Ajay in Baazigar. Such were the imperatives of mainstream Hindi cinema in the early 1990s that this psychotic “hero” had to be given an elaborate back-story to partly justify his murderous acts. (As a boy, he watched his family being driven to ruin by the businessman whose daughters he now targets. As an adult, he earns a quasi-heroic death scene in his adoring mother’s arms; any Hindi-movie leading man who passes thus can automatically be considered redeemed on some level.) The protagonist of A Kiss Before Dying doesn’t have a dramatic revenge motive of this sort, and there is no attempt to turn him into a sympathetic character – but Levin does permit the reader to think about the personal circumstances and ambitions of an intelligent young boy from a family that’s struggling to make ends meet; a boy who has little interest in the mundane jobs he has to hold down, and who comes to believe that he deserves better. Where might his sense of the unfairness of things lead him? It's a classic noir question.

Where the dragon bears down on the lambs

Martin Amis once wrote with admiration about another fine practitioner of popular fiction, Thomas Harris – specifically about Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs: “Lecters I and II are thrillers, procedurals of pain and panic, and they involve the reader in various simplifications and unrealities. But Harris maintains human decorum too. His prose is hard and sober and decently sad as he takes us to the place where the dragon bears down on the lambs.”

That last sentence applies to parts of A Kiss Before Dying too. There are moments of unexpected poignancy here: in a casual description of the things packed by a giddily romantic, gullible young woman for a honeymoon she will never go on; or in the betrayal felt by another lady, a loner, who discovers that her emotions have been toyed with. Even some of the throwaway passages are revealing: when a girl, a side-character, ends a mostly subdued letter to a murder victim’s father with a frivolous reference to the current fashion trends in her college, we get a glimpse into the inner world of a student who wants desperately to fit in.

Levin was just 23 years old when he wrote A Kiss Before Dying. This is credible if you look at the confidence and audacity of the book’s structure, and the many risks he takes; only a (very precocious) young writer with nothing to lose would try some of the things he does here. But when you consider the real feeling expressed here for the lonely-hearts and misfits who make up the victims (and occasionally the wrongdoers) of the noir world, it’s staggering to think that this book could come from such a young person. At 23, even as he wrote a bloody good page-turner where our point of identification is largely with the killer, he also found a way to evoke sympathy for the lambs that get preyed on by dragons.

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** One avant-garde approach to filming the first section of A Kiss Before Dying would be to let the killer’s eyes be the camera – so that we see everything from his viewpoint and never get to see his face at all. Something like this was done in the 1940s Hollywood film Lady in the Lake, but needless to say it’s a gimmicky technique, and if it isn’t well-executed it can easily become laughable or just monotonous.

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Important note: if you plan to read A Kiss Before Dying, do avoid reading about it on Wikipedia or even the plot summaries on Amazon.com – some of these rather foolishly give the killer’s name away. And if you do buy it, I'd recommend this lovely-looking Pegasus edition, available on Flipkart.

[Some related posts: Noir's arc - an anthology of American noir writing; Levin’s The Boys From Brazil; Thomas Harris, monster-maker]

Susanna’s Seven Husbands, from short story to novella to script

[Did a version of this piece for Open magazine. Enjoyed writing it - it was like reviewing three stages of the same work]

Asked to write a film in the late 1940s, the novelist Graham Greene could only proffer a couple of lines he had once casually scribbled on an envelope flap: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”

It was the bare outline of a story, having little to do with what producer Alexander Korda wanted – a thriller set in post-war, Allied-occupied Vienna – but Greene developed the premise, first into a novella and then a screenplay. That single-sentence scrawl begat one of the most visually distinctive films ever made – Carol Reed’s classic noir The Third Man, about an American pulp writer discovering that his supposedly dead friend Harry Lime was involved in a penicillin racket.

This back-story is a reminder that a full-length film can develop, incrementally, from a throwaway idea, so that the final product bears only a minor resemblance to the core text. Something comparable happened with Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest movie Saat Khoon Maaf, which was inspired by Ruskin Bond’s five-page short story “Susanna’s Seven Husbands”. Bhardwaj chanced upon the story a few years ago, requested Bond to expand it into a novella, and then developed a screenplay with his friend and associate Matthew Robbins. Now that the film is out, Penguin India has published the original story, the novella and the final screenplay (printed in a mix of Roman and Devanagari lettering) in a single book – an excellent idea, since reading them together provides a good insight into the conversion of a story into a filmable script, and what might be gained and lost along the way.

What makes this collaboration interesting is that Bond and Bhardwaj are unusual bedfellows. The former’s work is droll and genteel in the old-fashioned English way, evoking a bygone way of life, while the latter’s best films are set in the contemporary Indian hinterland, peopled by rough-speaking characters. The two men do share a penchant for dark humour (“I see Vishal Bhardwaj as the Hitchcock of Indian cinema, a master of the macabre,” Bond has said), but their personal styles are very different – Bond’s prose is marked by its seemingly effortless simplicity while Bhardwaj’s films tend to be dense and baroque, with layered use of colour and music. A few years ago he took Bond’s gentle children’s story “The Blue Umbrella”, gave it the texture of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, and shifted the narrative focus, providing Pankaj Kapoor with one of his best roles as a greedy Himachali shopkeeper. (A post about that film here.)

The original “Susanna’s Seven Husbands” is one of those concise, anecdotal tales that Bond does so well, with an unnamed narrator learning – through hearsay – about the life of Lady Susanna, an inveterate husband-collector (and probable husband-murderer) who lived in Old Delhi around a century ago. In the novella, Bond expands and modernizes the story, and gives us a new point of entry – a young narrator named Arun who lives next door to Susanna’s vast Meerut estate, forms a close friendship with her and tracks her conjugal adventures over the years with a mix of fascination, alarm and slight jealousy.

Reading this longer, commissioned version of Susanna’s Seven Husbands, one almost gets the sense of a storyteller writing an elaborate personal letter for a filmmaker friend – which is what Bond was doing in a way. He indulges himself, making a few filmi references: one of Susanna’s husbands is described as having a “Jackie Shroff-type moustache and the long legs of an Amitabh Bachchan” (a tongue-in-cheek attempt by the author to influence casting?), a minor character is named Shah Rukh, and there is a mention of Bhardwaj’s film Maqbool. The writing is somewhat hurried in places – as if done on a tight deadline – but all the Bond virtues are in place, notably the clarity and the graceful humour. More atypically, there’s even a bit of sex – nothing explicit, but candid enough. (“He started off by being tender and passionate, but his brain would not send the right message to his loins, and he found himself as ineffective as before.”)

The screenplay that follows retains some plot details – the idiosyncrasies of Susanna’s spouses and the manner of their untimely deaths, in which a “goonga” jockey and a middle-aged maidservant play their parts – but the changes are a pointer to the sort of film Bhardwaj wanted to make. Thus, one of the husbands, the Prince of Purkazi, becomes a well-known poet named Wasiullah Khan (facilitating the introduction of romantic Urdu couplets into the script) and a South American diplomat morphs into a Russian attaché who supplies comic relief by goofily speaking Hindi, using lines like “Mere paas ma hai” and singing “Awaara Hoon” at a piano.

In the original story, the narrator briefly likens Susanna to the husband-devouring Black Widow spider, and Bond jokingly expands on this in the novella (“It was some time since she’d dined off a fat, juicy male. Now she was thinking of moving her web elsewhere…”). However, the Susanna of the screenplay isn’t so much a spider as a chameleon, adapting herself to each new husband’s background and circumstances – she becomes a vodka-drinking “Anna” (and reads Anna Karenina) for the Russian Vronsky, she says namaaz when she’s married to the Muslim poet, and she sings a line of Rabindrasangeet for her Bengali husband. She’s a blank slate for these men – in one case, almost literally (one of the script's more romantic scenes has Wasiullah “writing” his name on her outstretched palm). And in the process she turns into a more sympathetic figure, which is one of the problems with this story’s makeover.

There are essentially two ways of handling the tale of a woman who bumps off a line of husbands: either be lightheartedly amoral about it or provide a properly worked out explanation for her psychosis. Bond takes the first approach in both his versions, helped by the fact that the original story was set in the time of the Raj – as he pointed out during a recent discussion in Delhi, distance lends a certain enchantment to sordid events: “Perhaps we find murder in colonial times easier to accept than murder in contemporary India!” In any case, the tone of his writing is influenced by the black humour of such classic British films as Kind Hearts and Coronets**, which didn’t much bother with conventional morality. The closest he comes to providing an “explanation” for Susanna’s impulses is a passage where she says she can’t help what she’s doing because after being married for a while she feels “the sudden hatred that practically every wife sometimes feels for her husband just because he is her husband”.

As psychoanalysis goes, this isn’t particularly deep or useful (at least not as a justification for multiple murders), and perhaps we should take it as a sign that Susanna has unfathomable depths and that her story is best read as a wickedly funny comment on gender equations. However, Hindi cinema doesn’t have a well-developed tradition of truly irreverent black comedy, and the screenplay tries for an uneasy middle ground; it retains the darkly comic aspects of the narrative but also resorts to sentimental explanations.

Bhardwaj and Robbins make the husbands more outright unpleasant, which has the effect of making Susanna likable in comparison. (One of the novella’s more flippant chapters – about a spouse who must be dispensed with simply because he is obsessed with his cellphone – has been dropped altogether, and replaced with an episode involving a shady policeman who gets his just desserts.) Another key difference is that Arun becomes a member of the servant class, an underprivileged boy on whom Susanna “Saaheb” bestows great kindness. To an extent, this was a practical consideration – Bhardwaj had to make his sutradhaar an active part of the story rather than someone whose life intersects with Susanna’s at irregular intervals – but it also performs the function of thickly emphasizing her compassionate side – something that was done in a few quick lines in the novella. (“She was kind to children and animals…kind even to odd creatures and freaks like the dwarf…her cruelty was reserved for another species of human.”)

On the whole, the script is at its least engaging when it tries to persuade us that Susanna “sacche pyaar ke talaash mein hai” (she’s searching for true love), and the resolution – with our heroine discovering the perfect “seventh husband” as well as personal salvation – is weak too, introducing ethical considerations and the concept of redemption into a story that could have done without them. Happily, though, this is one of those books where even the flaws are revealing and worth the reader’s time – especially if you’re interested in the complexities of story-to-film adaptation, and the nature of collaboration between artists with different sensibilities.

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** During his Delhi conversation with Bhardwaj and Mahmood Farooqi, Ruskin Bond also mentioned Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry as an influence on his darker writing - which was pleasing, for the film is a personal favourite.

A sad detective in tandoori marinade: Zac O'Yeah's Scandinavistan

[Did this review for Biblio. The table of contents for the latest issue is here - many fine pieces, which can be read on PDF after free registration]

Detectives in noir fiction are frequently described as “hardboiled”, which suggests a tough, cynical man carrying the baggage of a tragic past but soldiering on regardless – masochistically working on unpleasant cases that deepen his view of things, tailing scoundrels and femme fatales through shadowy places that serve as metaphors for the darkness in his own soul.

This adds up to a brooding figure of the sort played in films by charismatically world-weary actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. But now consider Public Intelligence Officer Herman Barsk, the lead in Zac O’Yeah’s novel Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan. Eighteen pages into the book, when confronted by evidence of cannibalism in a restaurant kitchen where he himself has just eaten, Barsk does “the only thing an old cop could do in a situation like this: he shat his pants”. It’s an early clue that he might not be the typical noir hero. As the narrative progresses, we will get many more.


But then O’Yeah’s novel is hardly straight-faced crime fiction, or straight-faced anything. A genre-hopping work of speculative fiction (as the title suggests), it’s set in the near future, in a world where most of continental Europe has not just been rendered tropical or desert by global warming, but also colonised by India, with some very ulta-pulta results.

When the European Union was being liquidated, and its member countries sold off their industries and privatised their highways and railroads, international conglomerates with head offices in Asia bought up pretty much everything. Sweden was given away as a special discount offer when Germany and Switzerland were sold – perhaps due to the fact that most people could not really tell Sweden and Switzerland apart. These things happen in a global economy.

Thus, the restaurant Barsk has his epiphany in is called the Tandoori Moose; it’s one of the few non-vegetarian joints still operating in Gautampuri (formerly Gothenberg), because vegetarianism is the dominant lifestyle choice in this world, and Buddhism the key religion. Concepts like reincarnation and karma are taken entirely at face value, and why not – after all, “the weather had transformed alongside the political and economic changes, bestowing a sense that it was fated to happen – that all was pre-destined”.

In this desi-fied Sweden, India and Indianness impinge on the local culture in the most unexpected ways. Roads have been renamed (and have “randomly blinking traffic lights”), the Ashoka Pillar dominates town squares, and Committing Nuisance in a Public Place is against the law. Rowdy kids have access to “Thums-Up bottle bombs containing an explosive cashew-fenny kerosene mix”, cries of “Hain?” merge with the local “Höh”, and a policeman chasing a female hooligan might yell “Hey, goondi!”

Extremely entertaining though all these details are in themselves, there is also a plot – it centres on the dead bodies found by Barsk in the tandoor and involves a group of murderously sociopathic girls, a mysterious ashram, a cheap restaurant that serves food to the poor, and a British submarine preparing to “liberate” Gautampuri. Barsk himself is in love with a married Indian woman named Kumkum, and the personal stakes rise for him when he discovers that her husband is connected with the murder case.

Actually, I didn’t think the storyline was the most compelling thing about this book: it sags a little midway as subplots proliferate, suspects and stool pigeons flit in and out of sight, and chapters end in the patented style of pulp thrillers – “Presently, he became aware of a shadow sneaking up behind him” – with a few (deliberately?) corny analogies thrown in: “It was the sound of the silence one might hear while balancing a trampoline over purgatory”. The plot gets confusing near the end; I had to revisit the final few chapters to confirm how everything fit together.

But Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is a winner because of its premise and especially because Barsk is such a memorable character. We stay with him for each of the book’s 400 pages, as he trips morosely from one misadventure to another. At one point we are told that when he volunteered to donate his organs, his body was rejected as “not usable”. (He has poor eyesight too; trying to identify a lurker at a crucial point in his investigation, he wishes balefully that he had got himself a pair of spectacles.) Constantly aware that the only reason he exists is that his prostitute mother “had been so drunk she had forgotten to take an abortion pill the day after the condom burst”, he spends much of the book swallowing Loperamide tablets to keep his bowels in order, and mooning about his recently deceased dog.

Bobby used to come and sniff his sweaty socks, but the mongrel (75 percent Husky) had died after accumulating too much negative karma from pissing on every lamp-post on town. Bobbylessness was hard. All that remained were the memories of pattering paws and claws scratching the creaky floorboards. Time healed no wounds, at least not in Barsk’s soul.

Even when, against all expectations, he finally gets to undrape Kumkum’s sari, the potentially erotic moment is described thus: “It came off a layer at a time. Kumkum turned like a tandoori chicken on an automatically rotating skewer, Barsk thought, and the analogy made him hungry.”

In short, there is nothing remotely dashing or heroic about Barsk. He isn’t even the sort of character who is sometimes referred to as a “little hero” – the Frodo Baggins-like underdog who triumphs against the odds. The few times he does come good, it feels more like an accident of karma than anything he might reasonably be credited for.

Of course, his actions and responses are defined by the chaos that continually unfolds around him, and the narrative is full of passages of inspired absurdity (a dead horse being perfumed by a coolie on the location shoot of a Hindi film - don't ask), funny asides (“In the Masti Mela amusement park, a pyromaniac had set the ghost house on fire and several ghosts had to be hospitalised”) and too many clever ideas to keep track of. (A less imaginative writer might have developed a whole sub-plot around the theme of the Nobel Prize being renamed the Reliance-Nobel Prize, but in this book it gets exactly one casual mention.)

O’Yeah himself is of Finnish ethnicity but he has married into India and lived in Bangalore for the last few years, and his writing suggests a basic affection for the country combined with the bemused perspective of someone who comes from a vastly different cultural landscape (and who must still sometimes feel like he’s been thrust into a Terry Pratchett novel). He has a ear for the cadences and peculiarities of middle-class Indian speech, such as the young corporal calling a potential trouble-maker “Uncle” even while preparing to arrest him. At other times, there is light caricaturing of Indian “types”: a popular movie actor is named Phillumappa Ishtarjee, a yoga teacher is Swamijee Consultantwallah, and Kumkum’s husband is – what else – Patiparmeshwar Gharwallah.

Occasionally one gets the sense that the vision presented here isn’t fully thought out; that the author, having defined the broad contours of his world, is basically having fun as he goes along, throwing in eye-popping bits as they occur to him. Some details read like O’Yeah thought them up in a trance while he sat typing, so that you have to go back a few pages to confirm that you read what you thought you read – was there really a reference to butter-chicken-flavoured condoms? What’s with the remote-controlled camera that looks like a mutton samosa? Some of this stuff gets outright silly at times. Take this reference to a recently colonised Mars:

The Red Planet had since become an overpopulated suburb of New Delhi, renamed NOIDA Phase 819, and due to its colour it was a favourite retirement destination for old Maoists who demonstrated every other day and called for bandhs to have the planet renamed “Maors”.

Given that the fictional world described in Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is not one of notable technological advancement (Internet connections are still slow, for example, and the “holophones” used by people have to be knocked about before they yield a dial tone), the passage above doesn’t seem organic to this setting. But that might be the wrong approach to reading this book. As I went along, I found it useful to think of Scandinavistan not so much as an internally consistent fantasy universe created from the bottom up with meticulously defined rules and limits of its own, but as a hysterical, hyper-exaggerated rendering of the idea that India – with all its chaos and contradictions – might become a world-dominating power someday (an idea that in any case doesn’t belong exclusively to the realm of fantasy these days – just read newspaper editorials).

Rereading the Mars passage in this light, I thought of the times I’ve joked with friends about how Delhi’s suburbs might engorge and devour the entire country some day, given the relentless expansion of the National Capital Region in all directions. Then one wonders: given a scenario where India takes over the world, is it so hard to believe that things would become as anarchic and outlandish as described here? Would anything be off-limits? Probably not – by the end of the book, it seems almost normal that a naked, marinade-coated Barsk should be running down Bangla Marg with a sword in his hand. I hope O’Yeah revisits Scandinavistan and its endearingly ungallant hero soon.

[More information on O'Yeah and his earlier work - including a Gandhi biography that is still available only in Swedish - can be found at his official website]

Noir’s arc - notes on an excellent anthology

I don’t spend much time in bookstores these days (it’s the old conundrum: most of my reading is for review purposes), but one of my favourite recent buys was the anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. Thirty-five stories in all, beginning with Tod Robbins’ 1923 “Spurs” (this quaint tale about a dwarf’s obsession with a beautiful bareback rider formed the basis for Tod Browning’s creepy film Freaks) and including such writers as Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke.

“The thrill of noir,” writes Ellroy in his Introduction, “is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption.”

And then: “The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.”

Making doom fun – that’s a good way of putting it. Noir, French for “black”, was thoroughly incorporated into American popular culture in the 1940s – through a series of pulp novels and “film noirs” – until it came to stand for the dark and unknowable places in the human heart, and the character types are familiar even to readers who don’t know the genre well: the femme fatale who spins a fatal web around her victim; the morally weak patsy who helps her get rid of her husband for the insurance money; the hard-boiled detective with demons of his own. Needless to say, there are few happy endings in this world.

It isn’t easy to do a comprehensive review of an anthology that contains 35 stories, most of which are very good, so here are some short notes:

– I used to think of noir as relevant mainly to literature and films produced between the 1930s and 1950s, and indeed this book includes some solid, representative work from that period: I particularly liked Steve Fisher’s “You’ll Always Remember Me” (1938), David Goodis’s “Professional Man” (1953) and James M Cain’s bucolic, darkly funny “Pastorale” (1928) about a murder followed by problematic attempts to dispose of a bodiless head. But to my own surprise, some of the most impressive stories are from the past few decades. Twenty-one of the 35 pieces included here were written from the 1970s onward, and some of them intriguingly challenge the reader’s expectations of the genre and its tropes.

For example, Thomas H Cook’s intense “What She Offered” begins with a very familiar scenario – a weary, self-consciously cynical male narrator being approached by a mysterious woman in a bar (“What she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman”). But from here, the story heads in a completely unexpected direction – it turns out that what this woman really has to offer the narrator is the emasculating knowledge that “her darkness is real; mine is just a pose”. I thought there was also a sly little observation about self-important writers and their knowing readers, and the story's beginning reminded me a little of Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".

– Some of the recent stories are more sexually explicit and daring than stories written in the 1930s could be. Take Andrew Klavan’s “Her Lord and Master”, a disturbing take on the power equation in gender relationships, with a female protagonist who preys on men by stoking their appetite for violent sex games. The classic theme of the femme fatale using her wiles on a gullible sucker is given a very different spin here, and I doubt that the old masters like Mickey Spillane, Mackinlay Kantor and Cornell Woolrich (all of whom also feature in this collection) could have published something like this, even though much of their work was often controversial and politically incorrect in its own time.

– A special word for the longest story in this collection: Harlan Ellison’s powerful and literate “Mefisto in Onyx” is about a black man with a very special – and, to him, a very troubling – ability to “jaunt” into the minds of other people and scan their mental “landscapes”. To Rudy’s dismay, an old friend – a woman with whom he had a sexual liaison once – asks him to scan the mind of a convicted serial killer, whom she believes to be innocent. (The premise is slightly similar to that in Tarsem Singh’s excellent film The Cell.) I won’t give much away, except to say that the story climaxes with a fascinating game of one-upmanship and one twist following on the heels of another. It’s also one of the very few pieces in this collection that has anything resembling a “happy ending”, though given what has led up to it one can never be too sure. Incidentally, Lawrence Block’s gripping “Like a Bone in the Throat” is also about a series of mental games between two men: a rapist/killer and the brother of one of his victims.

– And some personal favourites that I haven’t mentioned above: David Morrell’s “The Dripping”, Brendan Dubois’s melancholy “A Ticket Out”, Chris Adrian’s “Stab”, and especially William Gay’s very dark and poetic “The Paperhanger”, about the strange disappearance of a little girl while her mother was just a few feet away. Also, Ellroy's own "Since I don't Have You", set in the 1940s and prominently featuring real-life figures Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen.

The Best American Noir of the Century is a reminder that though the themes and narrative arcs of noir might appear to be limited in scope, their treatment isn’t. Reading these stories you never get a sense of repetition: in nearly every case, the characters’ actions and choices lead to the inevitable cul de sac, but it turns out that there are different ways to get there - as well as many forking, unexplored paths that might just have led them to a sunnier place.

P.S. The Windmill Books edition I have is missing four of the stories that were in the original publication, including one by Joyce Carol Oates. Pity.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and Kafka is funny!

Not that I’m any sort of expert on this topic, but I think Kafka-esque is an overused word, often applied to just about any noirish work of anxiety, and ignoring one of the most distinct elements of Franz K’s claustrophobic worlds: his very particular, absurdist black humour. Most of us don’t think of Kafka in especially funny terms. I think instinctively of a sallow-faced, sunken-cheeked man with a haunted expression, condemned to spend eternity in a drab office where nothing ever gets done. I think of Jeremy Irons (who played Kafka in Steven Soderbergh’s eponymous 1990 film; but I might have thought of Jeremy Irons even if that film had never been made). I think of the worried, tight-jawed Anthony Perkins (who had just come off playing Norman Bates when he starred in Orson Welles’ crepuscular The Trial in 1962).

But Kafka is also seriously funny. And Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is a novel more than worthy of being called Kafka-esque, capturing absurdism as well as it does tragedy. The protagonist, the poet Ka, is one of the genuinely unforgettable characters (another overused description) in recent fiction, a melancholy modern-day K wandering the streets of Kars in Turkey, caught in a crossfire between secular and fundamentalist Islamists.

Ka isn’t funny himself, but the events he’s embroiled in, and the people he encounters, are. The description of a meeting where extremists debate the contents of a televised message they want to send to the Western world is as brilliantly, morbidly comic as anything in The Trial. There is great beauty but also (intentional, I’m certain) great humour in the way poems keep coming to Ka during his time in Kars (he hasn’t written one for the four years previous), and how he often doesn’t even have the time or opportunity to note them down. And what about the timid, aging detective who is hired to follow Ka around the city. And the confused youngsters who start crying when they suspect that they might be atheists inside.

Snow is a book of great power. It’s beautiful in its imagery (especially in its use of snow, and the theatre) and profound in its observation of wasted lives and the ways in which people use religion as a crutch, continuing to cling to it past the point of belief simply because they have nothing else to cling to. But it’s somehow cuttingly funny about all these things too. It isn’t often you come across a book that manages to send up the absurdity of its characters’ actions while at the same time being gently empathetic towards them. This might seem to be a book about the shades of Islam (which is one reason it’s doing so well around the world) but it implicates all of us.

P.S. A few years ago, I saw a short film with the extraordinary title Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Richard E Grant as the harried writer seeking inspiration on a snowy Christmas night as, bedevilled by distractions, he tries to finish the first line of his new story: "Grigor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic... WHAT??" A banana? A kangaroo? It was a funny film. Franz K would have smiled. Even Jeremy Irons might have.