Threads and Shards
[In the following excerpt, Couto praises Ghosh's characterization and storytelling abilities in The Shadow Lines.]
In his first novel, Circle of Reason, Amitav Ghosh wove a complex pattern of histories connecting lives in rural Bengal and remote Al Ghazira with a linguistic verve and technique clearly influenced by Midnight's Children yet without that book's power and impetus. In Shadow Lines, Ghosh has found his own distinctive voice—polished and profound. A narrative of three generations—the narrator's Bengali family in pre-Partition Dhaka and Calcutta, and their English friends, the Prices, whose histories encompass both world wars, the Left Book Club and shades of contemporary London—The Shadow Lines does not tell yet one more tale of the Raj but sets out to illuminate the absurdities of borders and frontiers, the lines of disillusion and tragedy that intersect with private lives and public events.
As in Circle of Reason, Ghosh's narrator is a spectator. Here, engagingly introspective, he has many different faces: a wide-eyed boy in suburban Calcutta for whom the world is revealed in snatches of overheard conversation; a poor relation who awaits the intermittent visits of sophisticated relatives with their accounts of a charmed life in foreign capitals; a devoted follower of cousin Tridib, a Bohemian archaeologist who reconstructs with authentic detail his one visit to London during the Second World War, when aged nine, in order to shape his invented persona, lest he be forced to live with the inventions of others. Finally there is the shaping consciousness of the boy who, as a student in Delhi and Oxford, tries to piece together the fragments of the many lives and times which comprise him. The novel weaves many stories into a seamless texture, threading apparently disconnected detail into a coherent and compassionate whole.
Ghosh's characterization is lively and well-observed. Cousin Ila, a product of international schooling, is serenely confident in “the centrality and eloquence of her experience, in her quiet pity for the pettiness of lives like mine, lived out in the silence of voiceless events in a backward world.” Her colourful, imperious grandmother, Mayadebi, and her husband, the grand “Shaheb” with “the beautiful Calcutta voice, rich with pipe smoke and whisky,” are objects of affectionate satire.
The emotional centre of the novel is occupied both by the narrator's grandmother and by Tridib, who gives the boy eyes to see the world with imaginative precision. In different ways they reveal traditional and distant worlds. Ghosh reflects on the history of the grandmother, from her awed admiration of a terrorist leader during the National Movement to her early widowhood, an unforeseen career and the loss of her beloved Dhaka with Partition. Given form in two sections entitled “Going Away” and “Coming Home,” these refractions from shards of a remembered life reveal that home is the memory we carry within us. The Shadow Lines is a compelling novel, wistful in its tone, assured in its achieved vision.
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