Books for our times

The Booker Prize brought Margaret Atwood to my attention. It led me first to A Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, and then to the 2019 prize-winner,  The Testaments. Ms Atwood wrote A Handmaid’s Tale  35 years ago in response to pervasive hostility towards women among zealots from the Christian right wing. Locating a truncated and conflict-ridden United States in the near future, she visualised a semi-religious tyranny ruling the republic, one in which women were kept in tightly controlled conditions and used either as menial workers or for sex and breeding. 

The Testaments picks up the narrative 15 years later. The stories are now told through the voices of four separate women, depicting a thoroughly corrupt and licentious leadership, backed by tough and ruthless security forces. Both books have resonance in the present “Me-too” era, but what the books described to me was an intrusive and intolerant authoritarian order that offers no space for diversity, creativity or dissent. 

Here women are the victims, but tyranny can demonise any group as the “Other” and sanction hate, abuse and violence. A stern warning for our times. Ms Atwood quotes science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin to remind us that freedom “is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one”. 

There is a similar warning in The Wall by John Lanchester, which was long-listed for the Booker last year. Set in the near future when climate change has devastated much of the world, England has constructed a wall along its coastline to keep out illegal immigrants, called “Others”. It is patrolled by well-armed citizens, fulfilling a compulsory two-year “Wall” service. They are tested periodically by assaults by desperate migrants whom they must repel and annihilate. The book describes the rebellion of one dissident against this brutal order. 

The “Us” versus “Them” binary, with its attendant intolerance and brutality, are, again, at the heart of this disturbing dystopian vision — a portend and an alert. The prose is quiet, bare and lucid. Thus, on his first day at the wall, the protagonist says: “It’s cold on the Wall. … You look for metaphors. It’s cold as slate, as diamond, as the moon. Cold as charity — that’s a good one. … Cold is cold is cold.”

In The Dream of the Celt,  published in 2012, Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa goes to Ireland and the Easter Uprising of 1916 to examine the life of an earlier dissident, Roger Casement. Impelled by extraordinary sensitivity toward human suffering and a strong will to confront injustice in the Congo and the Amazon, Casement later attached himself to the cause of Irish freedom. He was frequently at odds with his colleagues: He was against the uprising in 1916, believing that the militants were ill-prepared for such a major initiative.

He was arrested during the war while smuggling arms into Ireland aboard a German submarine. Though his earlier work in Africa and South America had made him a hero, the systematic leak of his diaries, most probably by British intelligence, depicting homosexual encounters, lost him much popular support. 

The notes were perhaps descriptions of the yearnings of a solitary man rather than actual sleazy encounters, but this mattered little in those times and he was hanged in 1916. Mr Llosa sees Casement in terms, described by Jose Enrique Rodo, that each of us “is, successively, not one but many”, and our successive personalities “present the strangest, most astonishing contrasts among themselves”. 

Girl, Woman, Other  by Bernadine Evaristo, an Anglo-Nigerian writer who shared the Booker with Atwood, is firmly anchored in the present. It looks at the lives of 12 women, almost all of them black, in present-day England. Every one of her diverse characters has her say, in her unique personal language — narrating their own stories of loss, pain, humiliation, struggle and occasional violence — finally emerging strong and successful, buoyed by an extraordinary sisterhood that bonds them across time and across continents. 

Though introspective at times, with words pouring out in stream-of-consciousness and free verse mode, the tone generally is light, funny, joyous and finally uplifting. As one character finally meets her long-lost mother, she notes: “this metal-haired wild creature from the bush with the piercing feral eyes —is her mother.”

The pleasant surprise of this lockdown is my discovery of the crime writer, Abir Mukherjee. I read with joy his latest book, Death in the East,  the first-person account of a British police officer working in India in the 1920s. The story veers between London in 1905 and Assam in 1920, with the two threads coming together dramatically at the end. The story depicts the ambivalence informing the British officer’s interaction with India and its people —imperial hauteur sitting uneasily with genuine empathy for the Indian, as represented by his subordinate and friend, Sergeant Banerjee. 

As the freedom movement gains in pace, passion and popular support, the sergeant increasingly reflects the emerging changes. The writing is chatty, thoughtful and well-paced. There are three earlier books and surely several more to come. A real treasure trove!