Following the leader
William Dalrymple
THE LAST BURDEN by Upamanyu Chatterjee Faber, £14.99, pp.303 It is probably inevitable that every great literary success produces in its wake a backwash of inferior imitations. The worse the imitation, the more likely it will be packaged by the publisher as the natural successor to the original triumph.
The popularity of Gabriel Garcia Mar- quez in the Seventies spawned a whole Latin American literature — much of it of indifferent quality — in which the spirits of teenage prostitutes could routinely be found waltzing with dead archbishops through the barrios of San Salvador — as naturally, it seemed, as adulterous couples pace Hampstead High Street in the novels of modern England. In the wake of Vikram Seth and the recent blossoming of a remarkable generation of new Indian writ- ers — Gita Mehta, Amitav Ghosh, Robin- ton Mistry — it was only a matter of time before publishers began serving up the much less palatable Indian Second Divi- sion, each indifferent volume duly hyped as the next Suitable Boy. With the trumpeting that has heralded the publication of The Last Burden by the Bengali writer Upa- manyu Chatterjee, it looks as if that pro- cess has now begun.
In early March, about the time V. Seth was being deified by English critics, Faber and Faber (who had published The Golden Gate but later lost Seth to Orion) put it about that they had up their sleeves a Suit- able Novel which, come August, would give Seth a run for his money. Within a few weeks Private Eye had tipped Upamanyu Chatterjee for the Booker shortlist while the publishing trade magazine, the Book- seller, had noted that `Chatterjee manages to achieve the same vivid sense of Indian life and the complexity of family relation- ships as Seth in less than a quarter of the pages. Literary prize-givers,' it concluded, `take note.'
Perhaps one should have guessed. Never- theless, it was still something of a surprise on opening The Last Burden to find that Chatterjee can barely string a comprehensi- ble sentence together. Indeed, reading this novel turned out about as much fun as
wading through a pool of thick, sticky molasses.
The Last Burden is the story of domestic strife in a modern middle-class Indian fam- ily. The plot is certainly not over-complex. The mother of the hero has a heart attack after being treated for piles. Her family gathers around the hospital bed and squab- bles over who pays the bills. The mother dies. The hero mourns. Finis.
A major problem with this book is that nothing much happens, and what does hap- pen lacks interest. Another drawback is that most of the novel is taken up with irri- tating flashbacks to earlier (and equally gloomy) bouts of domestic strife and mor- tality: as if one prolonged death was not enough, Chatterjee treats us to 20 pages of reminiscence about the slow demise of his hero's aya (nanny).
But much more irritating than the action of the novel — past or present — is Chat- terjee's prose style, a style which the Faber dustjacket inventively describes as 'lan- guage of unsurpassed richness and power'. At first this rich language strikes one as unusual rather than beautiful. When we meet the hero Jamun (who, incidentally, like many of the characters in this book is named after a sweetmeat) he is described as being 'hot and somehow full of blood'. His friend's son, a few pages later, is 'three and a half, endomorphic and captious'.
Chatterjee, we soon learn, never uses one simple word when 15 complicated ones will do. People in The Last Burden don't feel lusty, they 'pine to procreate'. The hero, on his way to the hospital, feels 'trep- idation at the malodour of purulence'. Meanwhile, down the road, his family are eating a 'routine lunch, gelid, all anyhow'.
This lunch, like others in the novel, is remarkable for its unusual conversation which mixes Chatterjee's trademark the- saurus-speak with odd, misplaced bits of streetwise slang: `sonofabitch', 'smart-ass', `slut', 'pussy'. The result is some of the least believable dialogue in modern litera- ture. Here is a passage of light banter:
At their last booze bout, on his birthday, Burfi, sozzled legless, has stretched out his hand towards a disinclined Joyce and bla- zoned, don't hanker after a single breath of my past, not a sole second.' Nobody heeds his words, or so it seems, until some prattle later, Shyamanand without warning says, `Why should you be hungry for your past, you who like a darling pet has been tutored to forget?'
The awful thing is that Private Eye was probably right. This novel — boring, tire- some, over-hyped and almost impossible to read — has, like Okri's The Famished Road, all the essential ingredients of a Booker winner. The bookies William Hill do not accept bets before the shortlist is announced, but Graham Sharp, who sets the odds, told me that he regards Chatter- jee definitely 'as one of the horses to watch'. Readers with a fiver to spare should duly take note.
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