Low-level intrigue

IT must be said at the outset that Krishnan Srinivasan's novel is nowhere near as awful as it could have been. Past experience suggests that civil servants tend to believe years of writing on files gives them a certain style, and that they further believe the minutiae of their official lives is the stuff of gripping fiction, or even, God give me strength, the source of great humour. Most practitioners, or at least those who have not plunged into print, would know that there is nothing remotely funny about government. Of course, there is Lawrence Durrell whose witty, light-hearted and truly funny short pieces on life and odd times in the diplomatic service are still widely read and loved. But that is not India.

It is a curious fact that so many Indians writing in English draw primarily and so substantially on their own lives and background. The glorious exception to this rule is, of course, Vikram Seth, but others seem unable to break out of the known and the familiar. Where they do not draw on their own lives, they fall back on stock images of their part of the country. So we have Bengalis writing about other mournful Bengalis, Malayalis unable to get beyond adultery in the backwaters, and now diplomats on low-level intrigue in South Block. As Seth and Arundhati Roy have shown, any material, even autobiographical, can be handled with creativity and imagination, but lesser writers simply do not seem up to the task.

Given these dire forebodings, it is a pleasure to read Krishnan Srinivasan's spare prose. Obviously note-writing is still considered an art form in South Block. And, in Thaddeus "Thuds" Mbanefo, we have a memorable comic figure, who is funny in the best way, without knowing that he is so.

The bare bones of Srinivasan's novel are easy to describe. A peripatetic African diplomat who, sadly for his pains, gets knifed and is last heard of in coma, links two international incidents, in London and New Delhi. Other African diplomats in London have been disappearing at an alarming rate. In New Delhi, the dapper Rishikesh is caught up in a little matter involving the Maldives. For all that the incidents are otherwise unconnected, they are counterpoised neatly. However, the incidents themselves are so ludicrously childish that it only confirms the popular view that the Foreign Office anywhere is staffed by amiable, or not so amiable, twits wearing cologne and sharp suits.

The other pitfall is the form Srinivasan has chosen. The odd unsigned article, the slim volume of memoirs, the newspaper middle, the book review, the short story, all have their specific features and their votaries. The novel is an exceptionally difficult form, and cannot be served by anecdote or inside stories alone. We also need plot, characterisation and denouement. In a suspense novel, one expects motive or mystery. Above all, one would look for an exploration of human nature, with the field wide open for a novelist with some imagination. Srinivasan's characters are uni-dimensional and almost without exception, dull. And the less said about the sex the better.

KESHAV DESIRAJU

The Eccentric Effect, Krishnan Srinivasan, HarperCollins India, 2001, Rs. 195.

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