Book review: 'Black Bread White Beer'

Book: Black Bread White Beer
Author: Niven Govinden
Publisher: 4th Estate
Pages: 185
Price: Rs350

What do you call a book that has a beginning, no middle and no end; that has moments of spot-on lucidity derailed by the depths of self indulgence?

Niven Govinden’s Black Bread White Beer opens with its narrator and protagonist Amal Joshi minutely observing maintenance workers go about their job in a London park. It’s a slow first chapter, but then this isn’t the first book to start slowly. It will surely get somewhere soon, you figure.

It does. Amal goes to the car wash. Tantalising hints are dropped that all is not well with his world. Eight pages in, he reveals his wife, Claud, has had a miscarriage at 21 days. The rest of the narrative, set in London and the Sussex countryside, is a rambling account of the next 24 hours in the life of a grieving man and wife.

Reading a novel whose narrator is also the protagonist is like being stuck inside that person’s head and, in this case, he’s a weak, whiny little man. Seeing the world through Amal’s prejudiced eyes is an exercise in battling claustrophobia. The weight of his many perceived inadequacies — including that of being a brown son in-law in a white family, which sits like a redwood tree upon his shoulder — bears down upon the reader. The book isn’t divided into chapters and this adds to the feeling of being trapped.

Black Bread White Beer isn’t a total write-off. Govinden has captured the understated tension between the Indian-origin protagonist and his white wife and in-laws exceedingly well. Amal is hyper-sensitive to digs at his non-white origins. There’s a scene in which he and Claud go into a shop. She picks up a tartan car blanket and he asks, “Since when have you been into tartan?” She replies: “Tartan’s something everyone’s brought up with in Britain.” The narrator retreats wounded. “Those final two words, randomly chosen to put him in his place. His parents were not born in England. He wouldn’t understand….”

Govinden also subjects his readers to shock therapy occasionally as they somnambulate through the book. In a 15-page-long scene set in a church — where Amal takes refuge because he’s unable to deal with the festivity of a village fair based on a pagan fertility ritual — he meditates on life, his parents and Catholicism (he converted to marry Claud). Without warning comes this fragment, which packs a vicious punch: “… willing the one who died for our sins to absorb his petty frustrations: a sore cock and balls from Claud’s shagging schedule…”.

The jacket’s artwork looks unusual and at first glance doesn’t say anything about what’s inside. But look closer: you struggle to read the blurbs, it’s a cacophony of different fonts. Actually, the cover art has brilliantly imitated its contents. It’s filled with the same claustrophobia. Maybe this is one book that can be judged by its cover after all.