A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance is a heartbreakingly sad.  It’s an absolutely wonderful book.  It’s around 600 pages long and a good deal of that is filled with misery and yet, it’s a delight to read.  I think it must be a cultural thing because I’ve noticed it in multiple works of Salman Rushdie as well as Arundhati Roy’s The God of SmallThings, but Rohinton Mistry tells a story that winds its way through various deviations and distractions without ever seeming extraneous.  It must have been a nightmare to edit; I’m pretty sure at least a third of the novel is completely irrelevant to the overall plot, but it’s such a joy to read. 

The book is about four people living in and around Bombay predominantly during the 1970s.  First, there is Dina Dalal widow, small business owner and surrogate aunt to her lodger Maneck Kohlah, student of air conditioning and refrigeration (don’t worry, that fascinating subject is not really dwelt on in the book).  Dina’s two employees, uncle and nephew duo Ishvar and Omprakash Darji who are tailors looking to raise funds to return to their village, round off the foursome.  The book’s simply about how the relationships between the group shift and grow.  It doesn’t sound interesting, but it is.  It’s one of those stories in which a happy ending is within touching distance and then is irreparably broken because of one decision and, chiefly, circumstance.  Even though it’s pretty obvious that something bad is going to happen when everyone’s happy in a book and you’re only two thirds of the way through, it can still be just awful when that bad thing happens. 

As with a lot of previous books, I don’t to give away too much plot because I really want people to just go and read this book and spoilers suck.  I will say, however, that it’s another book that makes me aware of my general ignorance of the history of world politics.  The book’s set during the time Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister and while I know she wasn’t exactly the nice Gandhi and was assassinated for it, I don’t know that much about her.  After she became Prime Minister through rigged elections, India moved into a period known as The Emergency.  While this name reminds me a touch of The Event from the post-apocalyptic sketches on That Mitchell and Webb look, The Emergency was no laughing matter.  It was a 21 month period in which civil liberties were oppressed, forced sterilisation took place and political opponents were either arrested or murdered.  This is the backdrop to the misery of A Fine Balance and while Dina and Maneck initially attempt to ignore the problem, its effects on Ishvar and Omprakash make this impossible.

A Fine Balance is so good because it’s tapestry of experiences and voices.  Mistry splits our time between the four main characters and so our views on the characters and events are forced to shift.  I love books that do that.  It’s too easy to just like a character throughout.  It’s far more fun when they show the complexities of a proper human, or when you as a reader have to question just why you liked that character to begin with.  This is a book about a great tragedy and injustice and, still, it manages to be humorous and show the good side of human nature.  I’m not going to say it’s a particularly hopeful book.  To be frank, by the end it’s mostly fucking grim.  But there is still a small measure of kindness peppered throughout the awfulness and I guess that that’s as good as it gets sometimes.

Next time: micro-novella (aka short story) The Nose by Nikolai Gogol.

The Nice and The Good

The best thing that can be said about The Nice and The Good is that it’s good.  Or at least, it’s not bad.  Sharp eyed readers will notice that this is a case of damning with faint praise.  As with every time I don’t enjoy a book, I’m looking to lay the blame at my own door.  Iris Murdoch was a clever lady, naturally she could do no real wrong and so any failings must be my own.  The reason that I wasn’t sold on the book was simply my inability to connect with the characters and their various affairs and shifting relationships.

The book’s a bit like a soap opera in that it doesn’t really have a main character, but more of an ensemble cast. What kicks off the action, though, is the suicide of Joseph Radeechy- very clear outsider and co-worker of most of the adult male characters.  There’s an investigation carried out throughout the duration of the book, but most of the important bits take place away from the dreary London offices with the men’s families in Dorset.  The split in the locations is actually pretty interesting.  While the men can move between the two places, the women and children stay predominantly in the country.  Out of the way of the mistresses, one might argue.  If you believe The Nice and The Good, there are very few married women in our capital city.  I can only think of one incident in the entire novel when one of the wives ventures there.

My issue with the book, as I mentioned earlier, is that none of the characters are easy to relate to.  It may just be as I was ill and a touch feverish when I started the book no-one made too much of an impression on me, but I found so many of the characters difficult to connect with.  Take Kate Gray, for example.  Going by the blurb she’s one of the main characters and yet her main role in the story is to hit on one of her husband’s colleagues and laugh about the results with said husband.  I’m not too sure of her motives (they fell in the fever period of the book) but from what I could discern it’s because she thinks he might be gay and, mostly, for shits and gigs.  In short, they are neither nice nor good.  Kate’s husband, Octavian, isn’t much better.  While Kate prides herself on the couple’s complete honesty with one another, Octavian keeps hidden his late nights at the office with his secretary. 

One of the few characters I could get on with was John Ducane- suicide investigator and Kate’s flirtation target.  He seems to have good motives: he risks his life to save a belligerent teenager, he plays matchmaker and re-unites a divorced couple.  He’s no angel, but he’s pretty likable.  My main gripe with him is that near the end he falls spontaneously in love with another of the characters.  Luckily, this spontaneous love is mutual, if not entirely believable.  It feels very much like a happy ending for Ducane that Murdoch just tacked on the end.  It simply does not ring true.

Overall, though, it is a fairly decent book.  The suicide investigation has element of black magic and black mail in it, which brings another element to the novel.  I’m pretty sure the only soap opera that would dare to attempt a dark arts subplot would be Hollyoaks, and that’s always fun.  Although with the way Murdoch writes, it’d definitely be Hollyoaks- as told by The Times.  Murdoch also raises questions around the morality of the Holocaust and the behaviour of those in concentration camps as a minor subplot.  This is the most philosophically interesting and difficulty part of the book and it’s barely given any time.  Both magic related murder and Holocaust philosophy are far more interesting than the romance nonsense happening in Dorset; it’s just a shame these parts aren’t given precedence.

Next time is the brilliant A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.