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Literary Review
Redemption in love
WEST BENGAL in the 1970s and the calm of the post-Naxalite era is being shattered by an emerging student movement. Its leader, the ruthless Bacchu Sen, is savvy enough to realise that the promise of upliftment isn't enough for the masses: even a people's revolution requires a bit of glamour to attract its clients. And who better to provide this than Bappa Roy Chowdhury: poor little rich boy, motherless son of the unofficial King of Ashoknagar and a sensitive soul who drowns his adolescent angst in the three Ps reputed to be the life and blood of the Bengali intellectual: poetry, prem and politics.
In Bhaskar Roy's novel An Escape into Silence, this all-too familiar backdrop, stereotyped characters and a hackneyed plot (naturally Bappa's idealism draws him into the Bacchu web, leading to inevitable disillusionment) remains unsalvaged by either literary skill or style. Roy's prose is uneven: occasionally it soars to the heights of powerful word-paintings, recreating exquisitely the atmosphere of a small train station at dusk in winter or a fierce storm over green paddy fields.
But these, unfortunately, are intermittent flashes. For most part his writing is a jolting pastiche made up of inelegant translations from Bengali, long-winded explanations that sound like extracts from pedantic text books and passages that are so self-conscious to be almost embarrassingly gauche. Roy's characters (and there are enough to make even Dickens dizzy but almost none leaves an impression) don't speak: they lecture, exchange strange stilted dialogue or spout terrible poetry at each other.
Bappa himself evokes little sympathy and a lot of irritation. He wanders about on the margins, cypher-like; and whether it's his involvement in politics or his first sexual relationship, neither seems like acts of will on his part. Fortunately for him (and for the reader) there is the beautiful and intense Mrittikka, Bappa's love angle. And in that love story not only does Bappa find his own redemption but so too, to a small extent, does Roy's novel. An Escape into Silence is definitely not one of the finer hours of Indian writing in English.
An Escape into Silence, Bhaskar Roy, New Century, hardback, Rs.395.
ARUNDHATI RAY
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