BOOKS

A foreign country is the past

James Buchan

A SUITABLE BOY by Vikram Seth Phoenix House, £20, pp. 1349 n the present fallen condition of litera- ture, we are still haunted by an idea of the novel from its Golden Age: a big book, set in a big country at a time of some national drama, in which a young woman's search for love and happiness runs into innumer- able obstacles — of family, reputation, con- sanguinity, religion, social class, politics or accident — but eventually wins through, though her goal has been transformed by her search: War and Peace, say.

Such a novel is now generally thought unwritable in the atomised and fluid soci- eties of the late 20th century, at least in the Metropolises of English — England and the US — except as historical pastiche or airport fiction. What Vikram Seth has done in this long novel is, in effect, to say, But why not set in India, my dear fellow, with its heat, dust, light, extended families, its violence and smells, its rigidities of caste and community, its premium on virginity? You can have anything you want: a hunt, by all means, princes, religious processions, rigged elections and masses and masses of weddings. All right, you may have to go back a bit in time — to, say, 1951-52 — but this is not a historical novel in the tradition of Waverley but recognisably of modern India.

The result is a great success. You read A Suitable Boy, effortlessly, and over days or weeks, enjoying literary pleasures you'd thought had vanished from the world like certain foods of childhood. Also a little uneasily, as if the book's remote and con- trived setting, far from heralding the invigoration of the old-fashioned, multi- volume novel in the Metropolis, were its provincial swansong.

The heroine or Natasha of the book is Lata Mehra, a student of English Litera- ture at the University of Brahmpur, an invented city on the Ganges in the invented state of Purva Pradesh. The book opens at the wedding of her elder sister, Savita, where Lata — not unnaturally — suddenly passes into her mother's matrimonial firing-line; and ends, 1349 pages later and in approved 19th-century style, at her own wedding.

She has three main suitors: Kabir Dur- rani, a fellow-student, a cricketer and, as a Muslim, a most Unsuitable Boy; a Kanpur shoe executive named Haresh Khanna, who is a Hindu and Lata's caste-man but wears co-respondent shoes; and Amit Chatterji, a Calcutta poet with an Oxford degree.

In these persons you can already see a vast social and topographical panorama Opening before you; but they are not the half of it. As it turns out, Savita is marrying a university lecturer, the son of Mahesh Kapoor, State Revenue Minister and old Congress fighter, and you are drawn into other directions of academic skullduggery, Congress infighting, feudal land reform; while the brother-in-law's brother is help- lessly in love with a Muslim courtesan, who carries you into the febrile and courtly world of Persian and Urdu love lyric and Indian classical music. As the book pro- gresses, no stone of social India is left unturned, so that, just as one's thinking — what about the condition of the Scheduled Castes, then? — so, at the end of a muddy lane, one sees, first faintly, and then laid out in Dickensian horror and detail, a tan- nery.

The scenes of the Indian shoe industry are, by some distance, my favourite; but Vikram Seth has an almost Russian delight in regional and social differences and in the varieties of family atmosphere. He manages to avoid journalism and travelogue; and though he sets the book in the year of his birth, he can still dramatise the capital political problem of India today: whether the entity handed over by us in 1948 will survive more or less as it is minus a couple of Muslim states, or whether there'll eventually be three, four, a thou- sand confessional Pakistans.

The opening of the book inspires no con- 'One quintillion and three., one one quintillion and four . . fidence at all: You too will marry a boy I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra to her younger daughter. Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking round the great lamp-lit garden of Prem Nivas. The wedding-guests were gathered on the lawn. `I-Immm,' she said. This annoyed her mother further.

I didn't think I could tolerate 10 evenings of hmms and adjectives; but, in reality, Vikram Seth's English is elegant and unobtrusive, except when he wants it not to be. He has a mimic's ear for the varieties of English, both in prose and, above all, in verse: for the debates of the P. P. Legisla- tive Assembly, a great barrister pleading in the Brahmpur High Court, a cricket report in the university newspaper, Nehru's letters to Chief Ministers, a hymn to India at the Brahmpur Literary Society,

Who a child has not seen drinking milk

At bright breasts of Mother, rags she wears Or silks?

Love of mild Mother like rain-racked gift of cloud.

In poet's words, Mother to thee I bow,

and the incurable rhyming of the Chatterji family.

If I felt unease, it was because of this: that the inspiration of the book is primarily or exclusively literary. The melodramatic scenes that involve the courtesan Saeeda Bai touch daily life at no point but are reconstructions in prose of the violent hyperbole of the ghazal; while the lovely passage about the armless beggar at the polling booth is an imaginary and retro-active justification of some insane piece of British-Indian regulation:

and shall, in the case where all his fingers of both the hands are missing, be construed as a reference to such extremity of his left or right arm as he possesses.

Why Lata — a sweet creation, if some- times forced, by the literary burden she's carrying, into speechlessness — chooses the suitor she chooses is not at all clear, and the fragmentary justification from Arthur Hugh Clough, while admirable in its flouting of literary fashion, is inadequate.

I sense that Vikram Seth had not thought her through and had not looked beyond his literary models into the hearts of men and women. I think that is why I was nowhere touched by the book in my (admittedly dull) emotions. A Suitable Boy is a brilliant book, long-winded, robust and whatever the opposite of vulgar is, but it is an antiquarian exercise, a product of a Sil- ver Age.