One said to the other
| What makes Irving unique, though, is that he represents an unlikely Indo-US clinch, and one that works too: a sort of creative engagement that spans generations (think music and Woodstock). What's more, Irving's novels are not for the easily scandalised, which limits Indian readership. But his obsession with India has been one of devouring detachment. In A Son of the Circus (1995), a desi circus lion chomps off someone's hand. In The Fourth Hand (2001), a Gujarati circus cat does an encore, but the victim gets a hand transplant with conditions imposed by the donor. And now, in Until I Find You (2005), easily Irving's most compulsively complex novel, there's no mention of "India". None. From the start of the text (on page 4 of the just-out-in-India paperback) to the closing acknowledgements (of Bob Dylan lyrics) on page 844, none. |
| What's the novel about? |
| It's about the split-parented life of Jack Burns. In a tragic tale told with comic intensity, this obsessive character starts by holding on dearly to his mother's lonely hand, undergoes a fatherless childhood that defies anything that could possibly slot itself in the "normal" range (even in an America that muzzles people to the bosom of Ma Liberty), tumbles in and out of relationships that would not do Plato too proud (and certainly not Sophocles), and turns into an androgynous actor before he gets round to questioning his memory ""only to see his entire life story flip around in a climactic crescendo of symphonic proportion. |
| It's about a cross-continental deal so weird, it attains its own logic of plausibility. It's about symbols and cymbals. It's about tattoos, those self(?)-inscribed marks for life, as much as it's about social and self-demonisation. About the kind of child abuse that is thought of as such, regardless of evolutionary implications, only by a few. About the legitimacy of maternal power, and about sanity-surrendering paternal frustration. In its aesthetics, at least when Burns is not stumbling around, it's a paean to musical harmony. |
| Above all, it's a story of love as it could've been, or ought to be, and as earnest a plea for forgiveness as ever there was. The plot doesn't permit Irving to sneak Dylan's lonesome wail of I and I into the sforzando scene (he's got Matthew IV.10 in German instead), though he could well have entrusted some of the music to the Indian notion of bridal beauty. And done so, even at this penultimate stage, as split-parented-and-now-greying Burns begins to strive for the first strains of intellectual independence. He could well have""for the sake of optimism. After all, it's the coincidences that make one wonder. "Either there are no coincidences in this town," goes a refrain from this masterpiece, "or everything in this town is a coincidence." That is, in LA. |
| UNTIL I FIND YOU |
| John Irving Ballantine Books Price: Rs 275; Pages: xvi + 844 |