An Obedient Father

So, I haven’t really been writing blog posts about the books I’ve read recently, there are a few books I’ve skipped writing about at all, but here I am, trying to get the blog back on track.  I did not pick my get back on track book wisely.   An Obedient Father is not a bad book; it’s just not a particularly great one either.  It’s kind of predictable and just a little bit trite.

Akhil Sharma’s debut novel tells the tale of the Karan family- more specifically Ram, his daughter Anita and granddaughter Asha.  The blurb promises that Ram is, “a man corroded by a guilty secret.”  To the surprise of absolutely no-one who reads even half as many books as I do, that dark secret is paedophilia.  Ram raped Anita repeatedly when she was twelve and the family covered it up to avoid scandal.  The book covers Anita suspecting that he may have similar designs on his eight year-old grandchild.  It’s such an overused narrative trope that at times it’s difficult to care about the characters at all.  Ram does himself no favours as he’s not at all guilty or penitent- he spends the majority of the part that deals with the actual rape justifying it.  I understand that it’s meant to show that he still loves his daughter and it’s not meant to be excusing rape or the incest… but it kind of is.

Anyway, Ram is also a corrupt official- again this seemed trite to me because I haven’t read about any other sort in any India literature I’ve read.  His saving grace originality-wise is that he’s not very good at it, and while playing the two big political parties (Congress and the BJP) off against each other after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, he fails spectacularly and ends up losing all the money he has embezzled.  Anita is very much the brains of their operation.  But Ram is the man and this is India.  So he is the public face.   This is actually one of the parts of the book I found most interesting, like A Fine Balance, it taught me things about Indian politics and history; things that happened within my lifetime that I am just ignorant of. 

The truth is that there was just something about this book that didn’t gel with me.   I’m not sure if it was the misogyny, shown my pretty much every character throughout the entire thing; or simply that the book is not long enough.  Sharma’s novel is only around 200 pages long and, yet, the narrative tries to wind and drift in a way that would only work if the book itself were twice the length it is.  It’s a book that I wanted to take it’s time, I wanted to luxuriate in it and I couldn’t.   It was frustrating and a real bar to enjoying the thing. 

So, there it is- my welcome back blog.  On the whole, I didn’t hate An Obedient Father.  I think it’s just one of those books that I’ve been waiting too long to read; checking the library for it every time I went with no joy.  I’d built it up too much in my head to enjoy it fully.  But at least I learnt something about Indian politics. 

Next up and already read is Sula by Toni Morrison.