22 MARCH 1997, Page 41

An acknowledged expert

Francis King

LOVE AND LONGING IN BOMBAY by Vikram Chandra Faber, £12.99, pp. 257 This collection of five stories is excep- tional for two reasons, one trivial and one important. Firstly, no previous work of fiction can have been prefaced by so many acknowledgements, some 50 in all, ranging from the author's parents, through various police officers to a retired Brigadier. Secondly — could it be as a result of all this 'friendship, information, aid, and inspi- ration'? — Vikram Chandra, whose second work of fiction this is, shows himself to be that rare thing, a writer who is simultane- ously a master story-teller and a master stylist. In the best of the stories, 'Kama', a dandified police inspector, his marriage disintegrating, has the task of investigating `Sony, majesty — pyramid schemes are illegal.' the murder of a seemingly respectable and happily married man. There is an obvious suspect, an alcoholic drifter, who is found wearing the dead man's Rolex watch and who, arrested, then dies in custody. But like the Bombay slums through which the inspector trawls, the labyrinthine investigation weaves through innumerable malodorous back alleys and cul-de-sacs before coming up with a far more bizarre solution. Such an intricate story might have been devised by H. R. F. Keating, creator of the splendid Inspector Ghote. But in the virtuosity of its writing, now glimmering with mystery and now flashing with men- ace, it is the equal of anything produced by Martin Amis or William Boyd.

Another remarkable story, `Shaktf, is an account of the rivalry between two women in Bombay high society. One of these women, ageing and unattractive, represents old money; the other, a younger and appealing former air hostess married to a millionaire, represents new. As they battle, in always polite but murderous fashion, for the leadership of their tight, snobbishly exclusive circle, one might be reading, updated, some story of colonial life by Somerset Maugham, so sharp is the irony and so vivid the characterisation. But such stylistic dazzle was beyond Maugham, always so unadventurous in his writing.

Curiously, in a manner reminiscent of the narrative technique of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, each story has two narrators, one in effect the author and the other an elderly retired civil servant, who likes to regale his drinking companions, the author among them, with tales of people whom he once knew. The old man himself is the central character of the last story of all a hauntingly poetic account, set in the immediate aftermath of the last war, of how a woman bereft of a pilot husband lost to the Japanese and a man bereft of a twin brother murdered in the post-indepen- dence struggle, eventually find solace with each other. This device of dual narrator seems clumsy in comparison with the adroitness of each story itself.

The only major defect of the book is a lengthy and ludicrous passage, of the kind now so often deemed obligatory in present- day fiction — what a flood of tedium con- tinues to ripple out from the dank puddle of Lady Chatterley's Lover! — in which Chandra describes a sexual encounter between the police inspector and his estranged wife. A typical sentence:

Again her fingers moved over his stomach, scuffing, and his face contorted, saying take pity on it, my thing my muscle my cock, take pity on its loneliness, and she grasped him in her hand.

Here is clearly a strong contender for the prize awarded by the Literary Review for the most absurd sexual scene in a work of

fiction.

In every other respect, this hook is worthy of consideration for prizes more prestigious.