| BOOKS: INREVIEW
Unmelodious
A much-hyped debut from a young
Indian writer is a dud
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue cover-dated September 9, 2004
The Last Song of Dusk
by Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £12.99
($23.32)
"SHE LOVED MOST the lusciousness of his
buttocks, their dimpled circumference, as though God had created
them only so she might pull him farther into herself and then
muffle her rapturous pleasure as she had, only a few hours back,
muffled her anguish."
This sentence isn't, as you might imagine, from a newly discovered
novel published by the estate of the late historical-romance
pulp novelist Barbara Cartland. It is from the debut novel of
Indian-born, 27-year-old Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, who is
being hailed as the next Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy or
Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Milan Kundera, depending on which
press agent the reviewer has been listening to. It has also
nabbed a Betty Trask Award in Britain, for first novels by authors
under the age of 35.
Don't believe the hype. The Last Song of Dusk has no redeeming
qualities. The book is inundated with purple prose, unconvincing
period dialogue and all manner of couplings described in sentences
that could occupy the first 20 spots of the British Literary
Review's annual "Bad Sex" prize. Nobody in this novel
is plain or ordinary, a little bit evil or a little bit good.
Every character, by description, is the most beautiful and good
or the most evil and hideous. But to the reader, all of them
are most annoying.
The novel follows the married life of Anuradha Gandharva, née
Patwardhan, a woman so beautiful (and unaware of it) that many
young men in the Sonnets Society in her town claim her as their
muse. As if that weren't enough, she also sings like a dream,
so much so that "even the moon listens."
She marries Vardhaman, a doctor who is also an amazing storyteller.
They have a son, who at the ripe old age of 18-or-so months,
starts to sing songs of such sweetness that "the canary
traders and the patrician widows, the females of flexible morals
and the asexual philanthropists, upon gauging the first measure
of his bizarrely sweet voice, would rush to the garden of Gandharva's
Dwarika house and listen with their eyes closed, and without
the slightest drift of concentration."
Inevitably, tragedy interrupts this idyll, and the Gandharvas'
lives are never the same again. In steps Anuradha's orphaned
cousin, Nandini, who at the age of 14 "was stunning any
bloody way you looked at her."
She also walks on water, is an amazing painter and later has
sex with man, woman and panther. One can accept all that with
a little willing suspension of disbelief--here a very strong
act of will indeed. But not even the most willing reader will
believe her speech, which is supposed to reflect her English
upbringing.
Shangvi has left nothing out of his story, which plunges from
high melodrama into farce, skips through the dark passageways
and torn bodices of the gothic, with a sickening dose of exoticism
and bad writing thrown in along the way. Like a greedy boy given
a huge sack of candy, he's snatched at everything--vanilla,
coffee, lemon, kiwi, chocolate and peanut butter. The result,
as expected, is a bad stomach.
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