Call me simplistic; call me mad. But I’ve noticed a divide in anglophone novels written by, I suppose, my cohort – people born after 1990.
On the one hand, we have the so-called internet novel. Even when it’s not about online life, it borrows a wryly disincarnate voice from that sphere. The fashionably unnamed narrator drip-feeds you quips and cultural references, with barely a hint that they have a body.
On the opposite extreme, there’s the MFA book, which trades in overwrought metaphors and generational trauma; it wouldn’t know a joke if it found one among the plums in the icebox. It’s rare for a writer to take what they want from either side of the fence. Gurnaik Johal has pulled it off.
The narrative streams of this intergenerational epic all feed into the mythical north Indian river Saraswati. We open with Satnam, our modern-day British-Indian anchor, who is supposed to return briefly to his ancestral village to sell his late grandmother’s property. He lingers, dumps his girlfriend by voice note and is soon submerged in a Hindu nationalist scheme.
That’s already a novel. Then we jump into a different one about Katrina, a distant relative in Diego Garcia; then into another book again set in 1879; and on we go through disparate perspectives, all of which Johal weaves together.
The tonal range between immersive setting and deadpan social observation occurs even within the same paragraph. “[A] single travel-sized bottle of conditioner [contained] enough far-off ingredients to have made a medieval man rich”, Katrina sardonically muses in a hotel room. As her train of thought continues, this same chiselled specificity becomes genuinely moving: “[T]here was beauty in their blurred form in the mirror, the snatches of fresh, cold air through the spinning extractor fan, beauty in the texture of a towel, the wild pattern of moulted hair on the glass partition, a footprint appearing and then disappearing on the underheated tiles.”
There is unspoken privilege in the idea that our generation is uniquely existentially threatened by climate change. Johal’s narrative engages with this contemporary perception – it’s getting hotter, we’re running out of water – while locating it in a family for whom colonial violence has always been apocalyptic: “I wish I could have brought you into a better world. But was that not a sentiment expressed by every generation of mothers?”
As dire a world as this book will be published into, it deserves to be much read and much discussed.
