Book review: The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

(Published in the Business Standard, October 5, 2011.)






The Cat’s Table
Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape,
PRICE NOT MENTIONED, 287 pages


“There’s a great line by Ornette Coleman about music,” Michael Ondaatje said in a recent interview. “He says you begin with the territory and what follows is the adventure.”

In his sixth novel, Cat’s Table, Ondaatje knows both his landscapes well. There is the Oronsay, a liner that feels like a castle to the 11-year-old boy who boards the “first and only” ship of his life, bound for England in the 1950s. When most writers use a ship as a setting, it remains just a backdrop, a convenient way to bring a band of characters into close contact with each other in extreme isolation. The sea acts like the white space on the page---anything could happen here, where the normal rules of life on dry land stand suspended.

For a few writers, though, Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’ Brian and now Ondaatje, the sea is elemental in the best sense of the term, and a shipboard journey may either bring forth powerful passions in its inhabitants or strip them down to their elemental selves. The nine people Michael will meet at Table 76, the least privileged and the most distant from the Captain’s Table, include two boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, and “several interesting adults”. Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael will form a gang whose actions on board the Oronsay range from the exuberantly exploratory to the actively dangerous.
If The Cat’s Table feels like a memoir in parts, this may be because Ondaatje took a similar voyage from Ceylon to England in the 1950s, at the age of 11. “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was,” the narrator writes in the first chapter, and this imagining belongs both to him and to Ondaatje.

The Oronsay is fascinating, from the engine room “at Hades level” to the gold-painted First Class swimming pool. The passengers include a great philantropist who is suffering from hydrophobia, an accomplished shipboard thief called Baron C and Michael’s beautiful cousin Emily, a first-class passenger. There is a shipboard death, a shackled murderer who inspires a plot among the boys to free him, and there are the secretive, often unsavoury lives of the other passengers who sup at Table 76.

But the real adventure, which will reverberate in the lives of Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael long after they have completed their 21-day voyage, is not so much in the plot as in the magnificent strangeness of coming of age on board ship.
In both children’s fiction and novels that feature child protagonists, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that childhood is as mysterious and as alien a world as any unexplored Amazon forest or distant planet. The best novels step into this world acknowledging that writing from a child’s point of view is essentially an act of the imagination as much as an act of reclamation.
There are very, very few can do it—many novels feature child protagonists who are basically miniaturized adults.

Michael Ondaatje is one of three writers who wrote great books underpinned by a basic truth: children see the world with a kind of merciless clarity, and with few of the calming fictions of adult life. The other two were William Golding and Richard Hughes, and it is interesting that Hughes set his eerie little masterpiece, A High Wind in Jamaica, on board ship. His protagonists, like Ondaatje’s in The Cat’s Table, were children carefully separated from their parents; generations of writers have also recognised that it is only when you allow children to be on their own that you can fully understand them.

It is easy to criticize the slender, tenuous, adventure-filled plot that forms the skeletal structure of The Cat’s Table. But it is also an unrewarding exercise. What makes this one of the most compelling and haunting novels of recent times goes far beyond the question of whether it is well-plotted, or whether its deft, deadly vignettes of characters on the Oronsay, offered up in brief chapters, add up to a satisfying whole. “Over the years,” Michael writes towards the end, “confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

Ondaatje offers us three subtly different voices in which to hear this book (it’s hard to escape the sense that The Cat’s Table should be read aloud). There is the voice, filled with a cautious rapture, of Michael the child; there is the assessing voice of the older Michael as he weighs up his regrets against the many tiny illuminated corners of his life; and there is, like a background murmur, the assured voice of Ondaatje himself, the writer in his prime, spinning out one story after another.

It would be a very bloodless reader who could resist the temptation of taking a seat at The Cat’s Table and revisiting childhood as it was, not as we would like to think it should have been. And it would be a very churlish reader who didn’t succumb to the magic of Ondaatje’s summoning up of “all new things in life”, carried by a boat that comes breasting out of the mist.

Book review: Way To Go, by Upamanyu Chatterjee

(BOOK REVIEW FOR BIBLIO/ MAY 2010)

Way To Go
Upamanyu Chatterjee,
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin)
Rs 499, 359 pages
ISBN: 9780670083527














Life is nasty, brutish and at 359 pages, not short, in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s sequel to his 1994 novel, The Last Burden. In the intervening 16 years, India has become more corrupt, more vicious, more consumerist and stayed as grimy as it was in the first book. Chatterjee’s cast of characters have moved on, too, and not necessarily for the good: Jamun’s divorce has yielded a cheerful child and a long-running TV soap opera produced by his ex-wife that reveals their lives together in grim, but TRP-grabbing, detail. His father, Shyamanand, has gone missing for reasons that remain murky until the end of the novel, and his brother Burfi faces his own set of dismal vicissitudes.


It is now understood—after The Last Burden, Weight Loss and Mammaries of the Welfare State—that the relatively gentle humour of English, August was just Chatterjee’s opening shot across the bows. Upamanyu Chatterjee is perhaps the only contemporary Indian writing in English who belongs firmly to the school of Jonathan Swift and Rabelais, but his irreverence encourages quotation from an all together more plebian source, the hashing song Life Presents a Dismal Picture:

“Life presents a dismal picture,
Dark and dreary as the tomb,
Father’s got urethral stricture,
Mother’s got a prolapsed womb.
Uncle James has been deported
For a homosexual crime,
Nell, our maid, has just aborted
For the forty-second time.”

This, in a nutshell, would be the quintessential Upamanyu Chatterjee world; dysfunctional, darkly comic, but adhering to the social conventions of a predictable order. For many readers, Way To Go (like Weight Loss) should come with a statutory warning: this is not for the squeamish. Most of Chatterjee’s reviewers have reacted with a kind of Brahminical horror to his merciless exposition of the more unpleasant facts of life: turds, suicides, corpses, uncongenial sex, shitters on train tracks, bad breath, sweat and the body’s other emanations, autopsies, morgues with “frozen putrid flesh”, “chemical effluent, slag, ordure, garbage, sewerage”, and assorted stenches.

As I read Way To Go in the company of another friend, one of us counted the number of times turds were mentioned in the text, while the other counted the number of suicides, corpses, the suicidal and the homicidal. Both figures were impressive, and it may be worthwhile noting that Chatterjee doesn’t write in order to shock: he writes with a kind of impartial observation, editing out none of the ordure and sewerage of the world.

The first chapter of Way To Go is one of the funniest and darkest in Indian writing. “For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more?” Chatterjee begins, and having softened us up with sentiment, gets to what he does best. As Jamun reports the facts of his father’s disappearance to a bored police officer in a depressing police station, the exchange moves into the realms of the surreal.

“Any hobby of Missing Person?”
“He and I played chess on weekends. He watched TV and, being constipated, while waiting in the mornings for the urge to visit the toilet, wrote poems in Bengali.”
The constable incised one word on his page. Jamun guessed it to be ‘TV’.”
Having established that the Missing Person is an eighty-five year-old gentleman, widowed and given to a fixed, stable routine, the constable proceeds:
“Bad Company had Missing Person fallen into before/ever/from time to time?”
“No.”
“Missing Person failed his school/ college exams and therefore left home?”
“No.”
“Was fed up with studies in general?”
“He loved books, the older and mustier the better.’
“If Missing Person stayed in hostel, perhaps its atmosphere was vitiated?”
“Such was not the case in the present instance,” replied Jamun, feeling—on seeing the constable nod his head in slow and steady approbation—that he had at last begun to speak his interrogator’s language.”

These are the skills that made Chatterjee’s English, August such a popular, critical and enduring success: he lays bare the fundamental bizarreness and strictly ritual nature of political, bureaucratic and social systems, and does so with his trademark black humour and impeccable comic timing. Unspoken in this exchange is the understanding that little will be done, and that the nature of the situation will not change—the reporting of the Missing Person is a meaningless, but necessary, ritual.

As the novel proceeds, Chatterjee continues his exploration and excavation of the orifices of Indian society. The relatively circumscribed world that Jamun and Burfi belong to is a world of tedium, despair, violence and spectacular dysfunction. A tenant renders a building unrentable by committing suicide within its premises; the presumption that his ghost will be a co-squatter dissuades most prospective tenants. Lobhesh Monga, the builder who “fucks anything”, stands for the vicious, corrupt, unstoppable energy of the new India Shining. A neighbour plagued by leucoderma will try to find a cure in the blood of a freshly-decapitated chicken. And Jamun’s former life is summed up in the “bilingual banality” of his wife’s TV serial, Cheers Zindagi.

The landscape fits the general tenor of the novel: the rank mangrove swamp near Jamun’s neighbourhood is “Nature’s lush pubic hair”, buildings exhale the sweat of decay and waterlogging into the atmosphere, the morgue (where a stomach-turning but brilliantly observed autopsy scene is set) is located in the wonderfully named Popat Kaka hospital.

And nothing works as it should. The “blue-and-white, electric, dual-chambered, musical, ultraviolet-rayed water filter and purifier” in Shyamanand’s home hasn’t been dusted for four years. Jamun’s sex life has “dwindled to a sort of dry, rotting peanut”, giving him leisure to examine the “wretchedness of his carnal life”. “It was hurried, stinking, dry and gave more dissatisfaction than pleasure to the participants.” Even suicide is compromised, as Jamun wonders whether those who place their necks on the railway tracks recall the products of the morning shitters’ efforts. “Surely, just when it was too late… just before their skulls became blood and mincemeat, they wept and climaxed out of fear and depression at how sinfully they had abused the gift of life.”

Before the novel ends, there will be more deaths and more disappearances, but the real flaw in Way To Go isn’t the darkness of Chatterjee’s vision, or even the relentless scatology embedded in the prose. The most powerful themes in Way To Go are death, old age, and tedium, and in many ways, this is the age-old rant against the dying of the light: why must we grow old, why must all of us become bleached bones, why is the body such a sack of bile, guts and shit?

This is a more or less universal protest against the human condition; it isn’t tragedy that overtakes most of us so much as indignity, and even that will be meted out in small doses of humiliation as our will to live dwindles. In this, Way To Go is consistent with the body of Chatterjee’s work—he is the quintessential novelist of protest, and his black humour masks, in a way, a kind of idealism. Only a writer who believed that life was intended to be more than banality and corruption would be able to dwell with such accuracy on the rot within, or would resent it so deeply.

But Way To Go is overtaken by its own tedium, and the sharpness of the opening chapters gives way to a kind of despairing lassitude. The jokes get duller—the lead character in Cheers Zindagi is called Ashwamedha Ponytail; the prose sinks under the weight of its own despair, as Chatterjee chronicles the rush of builders, like vultures on a corpse, to acquire a house in one scene. He is reduced to banalities: “Words conceal rather than convey meaning…” on the way to genuine insight: “…The written word was coinage, the currency of another economy, of interest mainly for negotiating a literate country.”

The average reader, however literate, will struggle to finish Way To Go; it seems to lose interest in its own concerns and offers up a string of unoriginal observations. Death is all around us; life is corrupting and filled with disappointments; most people live lives of desperation (noisy rather than quiet, since this is India); love and sex have nothing to offer; most relationships are failed ones; God is dead; we are all rotting corpses on our way to the morgue.

Literary failure is sometimes far more interesting than literary success, though, and if you step back from the dank terrain that Way To Go inhabits, what is really of interest about Upamanyu Chatterjee is his refusal to occupy the same sphere that his contemporaries do. His novels are rarely about the grand sweep of Indian history, or the epic mythologizing of the great Indian family, or the confused angst of the diaspora. His focus is, like that other genius poet of dysfunction, John Kennedy O’Toole, on the inescapable failures of our lives, the fact that most of us are unmoored by history and unable to hold on to either the old certainties or the new promises of India Shining.

John Kennedy O’Toole wrote a masterpiece in Confederacy of Dunces. In what is now a kind of quartet of dysfunction, from Mammaries of the Welfare State to Way To Go, Upamanyu Chatterjee hasn’t yet found his masterpiece. And while this is not a novel I would recommend to the reader in search of light entertainment, or to those already on the brink of depression, Chatterjee makes good on one of his guarantees. He will always explore the underbelly of the Indian family and of Indian life, and it will, in his vision, almost always be repellently flaccid, wrinkled and flatulent.

Book Review: Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2010)

Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage

Elizabeth Gilbert

Bloomsbury,

POUNDS 12.99, 285 pages



In 2006, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir that simultaneously annoyed and fascinated the world so much that we couldn’t stop talking about it. Men hated it; as Gilbert progressed from weeping on her bathroom floor after a trainwreck of a divorce to personal revelation via pasta in Italy, ashrams in India and faith healers and the dashing Felipe in Indonesia, “whiny” was about the kindest thing most male critics had to say about Gilbert.

Many women hated it, but for subtly different reasons. Some, like this reviewer, were baffled at the fact that we were engaged and touched by a memoir where the author’s tone ran the gamut of emotions from chirpy to, well, whiny.

Some were horrified at Gilbert’s “selfishness”. It was bad enough that she had left her marriage and was a professed sceptic about the institution. What was far worse—even unforgiveable—was that she had found happiness, and even love. This was apostasy; how could you abandon marriage, skip off to travel the world, and still find a happy ending? (Many of us, of course, cheered.)

What pulled us in was Gilbert’s honesty and optimism—two undeniable, if occasionally irritating, virtues. Gilbert never expected Eat, Pray, Love, to become a bestseller, or expected more than a handful of loyal readers to “enjoy a rather emotional first-person chronicle about a divorced woman’s quest for psychospiritual healing”. Nor would she have written a sequel to it, if it hadn’t been for the Department of Homeland Security.

Committed catches the zeitgeist: the social contract we know as marriage has never been more open to question—or been the focus of such high expectations.

If, as Robert Louis Stevenson noted sourly in a line Gilbert uses as an epigraph, marriage is a friendship recognized by the police, there has also been no other period in human history where we have expected so much of that friendship. Your partner is supposed to be your ideal lover—and to keep the flame of desire burning over years of towels on the floor, chickenpox epidemics among the children and the other detritus of long relationships—your intellectual equal, your best friend, a great co-parent, the visible indicator of your social status and your soulmate. If we had similar expectations in the workplace, no one would ever draw salaries.

Gilbert and her Felipe do not intend to get married, until a “border incident” denies him access to the US, a country where he has been a frequent traveler for years. When Gilbert asks how he can secure a better, more permanent visa, the Homeland Security Officer looks at both of them: “Honestly? The two of you need to get married.” Given their resistance to the institution—Felipe, too, has been through a bad divorce, the conversation turns surreal. There are few of us who will receive marital advice from a deputy of the US Department of Homeland Security in an interrogation room in the bowels of the Dallas/ Forth Worth international airport.

Gilbert’s reaction, as displayed in Eat, Pray, Love, is to research the hell out of marriage and share the relentless self-scrutiny that ensues. She breaks little new ground here; it will come as no surprise to Indian readers, for instance, that non-Western forms of marriage often see it as a purely practical working arrangement, and the statistics that prove that marriage benefits men more than women have been common knowledge for a while. (Men in marriages tend to enjoy better health, more financial security, longer lives and a better quality of life. Women in marriages tend to have more financial security, and sometimes more emotional security. I know, life’s not fair.)

The parts of Committed that shine come from the personal journey, as she and Felipe struggle with being relatively privileged exiles living precariously in South Asia, permanently temporary residents. As Gilbert goes back through the history of three generations of women in her family, there are moments of splendid, and moving, revelation.

She shares a story about her grandmother cutting up a prized coat—a reminder of the glamour of her pre-marital days—in order to make baby clothes. “What my grandmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all the women of that generation did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. …. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle in life: They gave.”

This is not what Gilbert wants her shotgun marriage to be. And as she and Felipe struggle towards a more honest understanding of what they want and are prepared to work towards in this most basic, most challenging of relationships, it would be a hard-hearted reader who didn’t wish them luck. While Committed is unlikely to touch as many chords as Eat, Pray, Love did, it fills a gap. Most books on relationships stop at the traditional ending to fairy tales: “And they lived happily ever after.” Committed asks how this might be possible, especially in this century.