Book review: 'Narcopolis'

Book: Narcopolis
Jeet Thayil
Faber & Faber
304 pages
Rs 499

After consolidating his reputation as an arch and bloodless poet, a singularly untalented musician and performer, and a wayward anthologiser, the indefatigable Jeet Thayil turns his hand to fiction and produces (surprise, surprise) one of the worst novels written in the English language anywhere. Substance abuse is the novel’s subject (surprise, surprise again), as is clear from the novel’s title, and the narrator-protagonist informs us that the narrative is spoken by the opium pipe though there is some ‘other I’ from which it is split.

If the opium pipe speaks and dictates the novel, that justifies the wayward narrative, the characters picked and dropped summarily, the piling up of non-sequitur non-stories, the gratuitous violence, the sexist absence of even one developed woman character, the lack of any continuity and building of narrative depth.

While perhaps all of this makes perfect sense to the narrator, it certainly does not to the reader, and the prose does not emanate from the irrational or the hallucinatory or the surreal. This is not just because it is incredibly difficult to write about induced states in a way that makes them interesting to a non-induced reader.
It is primarily because Jeet Thayil’s shallow, pretentious, pseudo-erudite, gratuitously arcane authorial persona invades the narrative and never lets it go. While the ‘other I’ is marked merely as amanuensis at the start, it appears as anything but, and obstreperously directs the narrative away from any serious engagement with the swirling conscious — and possibly roiling unconscious — lives of the novel’s various characters in prose so contrived that it pricks the brain. So, not only do we do not get any sense of what it is to be a serious addict, we are fed with large chunks of prose that go nowhere, that tell us stuff that means nothing in the larger scheme of the novel — all in a voice painfully lucid in its sorry striving for the outré.

It makes all of the characters improbable — from Dimple, the illiterate hijra who learns to read, and by the end of the novel, even as she is dying of drug abuse wants to “talk about the ideas of Burroughs, Baudelaire, Cocteau and de Quincey” (!!), to Soporo, an ex-addict who works at a rehab centre and talks to recovering addicts about complex rhyme schemes of thirteenth century poets; from non sequitur characters like a Chinese opium-den runner with a horrifyingly clichéd  story of the Cultural Revolution, to an alcoholic painter who has nothing to do with or in the novel; from Rashid, a Muslim opium-den runner with two wives, a hijra lover and, towards the end, an awakened conscience, to Rumi, a hen-pecked husband who rapes a beauty salon attendant and kills a man and drives around Californian freeways with an opera singer. The numerous ‘plots’ and ‘subplots’ (if that is what these ephemera are) of the novel simply multiply and fade with as much consequence as the wisps of smoke that surround its characters.

The backdrop of Bombay over three decades is as much of a haze. It is a seamless and invariant narrative of squalor, violence and abuse, with Hindu-Muslim riots of a piece with the daily violence of the backstreets. It is not a Bombay with any of its character. Hari Kunzru is right to claim in the blurb that the novel will change the way one imagines Bombay, but only because Thayil’s flattened and linear Bombay demands immediate imaginative escape. The novel ends with some sentimental nonsense about love from the hijra, and a regular lower-middle class family which lives next to the narrator-protagonist’s lodgings in cramped Bombay conditions looking at him “as if they too could see the shapes that filled the air.”

As usual, Thayil wants to do too many things at the same time, to impress the reader with his dazzlingly superficial eclecticism. Just a narrative that plunged into the conscious and unconscious lives of addicts might have been well worth the exploration and difficult enough, but Thayil must lay on narratives about painting, poetry, music, politics, social commentary, spiritual mumbo-jumbo, ghosts, Chinese history, Sufi spirituality, Hindi cinema, neoliberal Bombay… and the list goes on. The result is a mess but one that is so self-consciously created (like the descriptions of squalor and shit and piss and vomit that litter the novel much like Raj Rao’s artful garbage heaps) that it does not ever allow one to sink in it.

This is one trip of a novel and Thayil may well have enjoyed it but it remains a painful one for the reader. Please get your fix of whatever it is that gets you going if you want to survive this absolute washed-out joint of a ‘novel’.