NARRATIVE
Cliched and unimaginative
SHALINI UMACHANDRAN
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An unusual story with appealing characters but typographical and grammatical errors test the reader's patience.
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Across the Mystic Shore; Suroopa Mikherjee, Macmillan New Writing
WITH superstar authors and agents maintaining a stranglehold and most mainstream publishers not accepting unsolicited manuscripts, getting that Booker-award winning story into the world could be a trifle difficult. The Macmillan New Writing imprint is possibly a ray of hope for aspiring authors despairing of ever finding their books on store shelves.
The deal is quite simple: MNW will not pay advances but offers "an open-ended royalty arrangement at a relatively high level" (according to the MNW website), and an assurance to make the books widely available.
Suroopa Mukherjee's Across the Mystic Shore is one of the first six titles MNW published this April. The blurb describes it as exploring the "lives of four women forced to confront their past decisions", but it is as much about the men in their lives as it is about the women.
. Set in New Delhi and Varanasi, it's a quietly engrossing story of four friends who meet in Varanasi. Years later, still loving each other and in love with one another, they find themselves revisiting old passions and new feelings when they have to decide on the future — and resolve the past — of a young boy from an ashram in Varanasi.
Loose ends
As they try to work out the circumstances of the boy's birth, his mother Romola's death, and Romola's relationship with Uma, they find themselves discovering strange truths. Mukherjee sometimes leaves readers at a loose end without really resolving issues she raises. For example, the theme of the slightly sinister swami trying to control his ashram inmates could have been better developed, and the boy's paternity and David and Vandana's relationship could have been less vague.
The characters are interesting but not memorable, probably because you're never given enough time with one person to really get a sense of any one of them. The story is told through every character's eyes, often jumping from one person to the other within a couple of sentences. But what comes through is Mukherjee's ability to detail complex relationships with ease. Her exploration of the different kinds of love, the fragility and intricacy of relationships, especially those not defined by society, and the choices people make, is quite effortless.
Authors, of course, are not responsible for appallingly sloppy editing but typographical and grammatical errors do make reading a book an absolute trial. It's not very heartening to read, on the very first page, "Her double-layered chin was hobbling with excitement, and her eyes were round like two large-sized saucers." And on page two: "She had been lucky today morning." And so on for 300-odd pages.
The narrative is lax, peppered with clichés and unimaginative descriptions. For the first few chapters, the novel seems rather fuddled and unfocussed, till Mukherjee slowly finds her rhythm. Her style swings from the pedestrian to the elaborate, so the book is unexciting, over-written and wordy even though the storyline is interesting. Something that, again, good editing could have rectified.
Across the Mystic Shore is an unusual story with appealing characters that could have been rescued from mediocrity by a couple of strict editors.
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