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hardback £18.99
Penguin Books Ltd
Paddyfield.com
ALSO SEE
The Guardian
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The Independent [2]
The Independent
More reviews by Nigel Collett
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta by Paul Theroux
What interests Paul Theroux in his latest novel about India is the unreal: the unreality of the country in which he has spent much of his life travelling, a place in which he indicates all foreigners see only the surface and so must be perpetually lost; and the unreality of seeing India through the eyes of the writers who have lighted on the place. The India which, he indicates, Calcutta epitomises is like an opaque mirror, begrimed with centuries of greasy accretions, telling murkily more about the observer than it does about itself. For those, like most of us, who can only see India through the eyes of a writer like himself, Theroux acknowledges that the mirror is also deeply cracked, and through the crack can be seen "the writer's boiled eyes, staring wildly." Theroux takes a perverse pleasure in attacking his own craft. "We were writers lying to each other, as writers do," he comments when his fictional hero meets his real self, brought to grotesque life in his own novel.
He enjoys these pot shots he takes at himself and gets more personal, too. When the protagonist of this tale, himself a washed up and dried out travel hack, is brought face to face with Paul Theroux, who is, he suspects, trying to steal his story, he describes himself thus: "this smirking, intrusive, ungenerous and insincere man"; "utterly evasive"; "he'd lost his looks, if indeed he'd ever had them." It is as well that we have Theroux's photograph on the back cover to remind us he is just doing what writers do, which is to lie. He's in good company in this book as a victim of his own pen; at one point he launches lengthy diatribes against the British royal family (who are, I should add, of even less relevance to the plot than Theroux is himself), and Mother Teresa. He enjoys to tease.
The novel is a mystery involving the dead hand of its title, something which is not only the physical evidence of a crime that may or may not have been committed, but which also symbolizes the writer's block affecting the American travel writer lured into solving the case. Can Theroux really be worried about writer's block in this his thirty-second novel? Again, he is playing with us, as he does all through this book, in which the unsolved crime (if it ever happened) appears and disappears in as slippery fashion as a fish seen through the weeds of a stagnant stream. The character at the heart of this tale is the American philanthropist, Mrs Unger, rescuer of abandoned children, devotee, maybe even priestess, of the goddess Kali (the pure white sari in which she drifts through the fetid regions of Calcutta in which she works is always spattered with sacrificial blood), wielder of secrets in Tantric massage. Mrs Unger is not, as one might imagine, at all what she seems, but I will give nothing away of how this is so unless I spoil your pleasure in reading the story.
Calcutta is a character in itself here. Theroux knows the place so well that he can summon up the decay, the smells, the heaving masses of humanity and the improvised way that humanity keeps the rickety place in motion: "Nothing was square, nothing was plumb. Peering closely at this bulging and buckling city, I saw the hasty joinery, the hardened putty, the rusty nails, and I thought: A barefoot man did this with an old hammer in his skinny hand." Calcutta gives this story life, provides it the loam from which its mysteries grow, aetiolated and distorted as they are by the dank, swirling clouds of physical and literary malaise. Theroux is clearly in love with the place at the same time as he is appalled by its excesses. The verdigris, the dust, the monsoon drizzle drip out of these pages to draw the reader deeper into the miasma of the tale. All the ills of humankind are on display here. What better place for another deceptively disturbing work by this master of his craft?
Nigel Collett
23/12/2009
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