Not a Bollywood fairy story
Jonathan Ideates
THE SILVER CASTLE by Clive James Cape, f15.99. pp 263 Passengers at my local underground station — or 'customers' as official consumer-speak calls them — can while away the intervals between fretting at the train indicator's latest mendacious proclamations by reading the extensive text of an advertisement for Thames Water. Several columns of chirpy, fact-filled copy are accompanied by a photograph of a young man in a white coat to whom the camera has unfairly given the appearance of a participant in one of those North- country face-puffing contests known as `grinning shows'. He is what used to be called a boffin (meaning any scientific expert), named Andy Roach and is, we are assured, 'dying to tell us' about the myster- ies of pipework seepage and filtration.
Clive James is one of fiction's Andy Roaches, volubly didactic on the singulari- ties of life in Bombay, where his latest novel unfolds. More accurately, the setting is `Bollywood', that rarefied world of Indian movie-making in which the trap- pings of stardom constitute a camp exten- sion of the 1930s movie studio atmosphere, distorting and parodying the original.
Sanjay, hero of this pleasingly old- fashioned story, whose ending so cleverly subverts the Horatio Alger up-by-the-boot- straps convention, is a child of the streets, born on the pavement among pi-dogs and raw sewage, and doomed initially to living off whatever he can filch from roadside stalls. His family is not altogether the dys- functional nightmare of modern sociology, since he has at any rate the regulation brace of parents in the hovel called home. A run-in with his brutal father, however, soon after the seven-year-old urchin has stumbled by chance on the Silver Castle Itself, drives him onto the world, which, after somewhat grudgingly swallowing him up, spits him cynically out again.
The castle is, as we might expect, an affair of plywood and pasteboard and the actors and actresses posturing in front of it can hardly pretend to any greater degree of moral authenticity. Each of them neverthe- less contrives to teach Sanjay something, for besides much else the novel is essential- ly a Bildungsroman, a sequence of 'in which our hero' episodes, providing metic- ulous perspectives for each of Sanjay's varying educational experiences. Besides the coaching in sophistication he receives from stars like Miranda, who installs him in the spare room of her flat as an agreeable accessory to be fondled whenever ennui threatens, he is given a cultural going-over by Adrian Desmond, an American homo- sexual whose soirees include much talk about Borges, Diana Vreeland's lipstick and the crucial differences between poor India (the poverty of want) and poor America (the poverty of abundance insulating rich kids from the outside world).
Because James is evidently not in the fairytale business, whereby Sanjay might become miraculously transformed, via such encounters, into a paragon of suavity and erudition, the young man emerges with lit- tle more than an English dictionary and the smattering of Indian mythology and folk- lore which Desmond has been at pains to teach him. Sanjay is, we soon realise, the focus or the emblem of everybody else's projections and desires. People talk at or around, seldom, if ever, absolutely to him, and his tragedy — for such, in a deliberate- ly subdued, ironic fashion, it appears — is that nobody is prepared to concede him any sort of autonomous personality. No wonder that Miranda, for all her seeming admiration for 'the most natural boy in the world', decides that his screen surname should be Nul. 'It means nothing. In French.'
This quality of absence and emptiness in Sanjay's great adventure, which turns out to be nothing of the sort, gives The Silver Castle its necessary spine of narrative con- sistency. If we think of the author purely in terms of the avuncular television wag, Sun- day night's favourite dinkum cobber invit- ing us to titter at funny foreigners, then the underlying seriousness of intention in this book may come as a surprise. The Andy Roach factor undoubtedly gets in the way, especially at the start where scene-setting becomes a matter of bijou National Geographic lecturettes on multifaceted Bombay, and there are moments when James's notorious penchant for cultural name-dropping is not kept well enough under control, but there is enough original- ity and intelligence here to make it worth our while following Sanjay's story through to its starkly moralising conclusion.
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