FICTION: NoonBy Aatish Taseer, Picador, 298pp. £12.99
REHAN TABASSUM has lived in the shadow of a politically and sexually rampaging father he barely knew. Despite his father’s absence the young man’s early life in Delhi was not without its joys, living as he did with an independently minded lawyer mother and a traditional maternal grandmother. In the very beginning there had even been a period in London, but that had ended after Sahil, a businessman and politician, had lost interest.
“ . . . after moving them [the boy and his mother] out of his flat on Flood Street, became difficult and unreachable. He had always travelled a lot, between La Mirage, Dubai and London, and in the end, like an airline reducing its flights to a destination, he had come to London less and less . . . After a last holiday in Kathmandu, to which Sahil bought along two children he claimed were his nephew and niece, the calls and visits came to an end.”
Son of an Indian journalist mother and recently assassinated Pakistani politician father, Salman Taseer, Aatish Taseer brings the ideal outsider/insider understanding of the tensions existing between India and Pakistan as well as some sense of the complex cultural, particularly linguistic, differences. Above all he places this world in its contemporary setting, a place in which rioters protest against the use of English words.
“At the glass-fronted shoe shops and boutiques, with their bright signage and billboards.” In a vividly-written closing sequence containing a great deal of convincingly conversational dialogue, Rehan, by then the narrator, listens as his elder brother describes how hoodlums ransacked an old man’s jewellery store. The owner had waited patiently. When they were finished he asked one of young raiders for the time. “The boy was obviously a bit startled,” remarks the narrator’s brother, who continues, “anyway, he did as he was asked. And just as the guy turns his hand over to look at his watch, you know what the old man does? He tears the watch from his wrist, throws it on the floor and starts stamping on it till he’s smashed its face. All the while, he’s screaming, spit flying from his mouth, ‘English! English! English! Even your Time is in English. You’ve destroyed my shop for nothing; you’ll never be free of English.’”
Noonhas many such flashes of insight. Here is a society at war with itself and the complications imposed by the legacy of Partition. "You see, Rehan saab, how mad the people in this country are? Everything is abstraction. You watch, there'll be a protest against oxygen next."
For Rehan, though, his responses are more personal. He admits to only half- listening to his brother’s account of the riot because he is busy experiencing “a deep sense of contentment at being in his presence. It was like the comfort of being a child in Delhi when, out with my mother at night, I would fall asleep on somebody’s sofa to the sound of adult voices.”
Rehan appears to have far more in common with the solitary narrator of Damon Galgut's wonderful Man Booker contender In A Strange Room than with any characters populating contemporary Indian fiction. Taseer's cool, intelligent narrative, which explodes into life in that final stormy homecoming, is both assured and disappointing – mainly because Taseer's superior first novel The Temple-Goers(2010) covered much the same material but in a richer narrative.
Before that, Taseer had also written an interesting memoir, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands(2009) which engaged readers almost as much as it irritated the father in question.
This new book promises much but in fairness to Taseer, who is strongly influenced stylistically by VS Naipaul, it is a variation of his previous material and preoccupations. Coming as it does a few months after Mirza Waheed's wholehearted if less stylish debut The Collaborator, Noondoes disappoint.
Taseer’s book is dominated by an account of an investigation into a chaotic robbery that takes place at the home his mother shares with her wealthy second husband. This oddly flat interlude – flat because no one seems all that engaged by it – is followed by Rehan’s visit to his father’s stomping ground, stocked with discarded lovers and various abandoned children. But this father is seldom more than a presence. Interestingly, the finest writing is contained in the opening sequence, which describes an encounter on a train en route to Pakistan. The self- absorbed Rehan also sounds like Naipaul. “I had sought isolation, but found myself more isolated than I knew. And this was not the innocence of my childhood. Though no less blinding, these isolations were of an India whose worst nature was hidden from herself. A protective screen of encoded privilege – not simply money, but as aspects of privilege, English, Western dress, values and manners: the things that put me above caste in India – made injustice, and especially cruelty, of the most casual variety, appear always as the work of others.” The coldness is there but so too is his mentor’s intelligence.
Taseer has followed a fine debut with a weaker second novel, not only because of its apparent repetition but it is stylistically and structurally less convincing, if equally confident.
There is an impressively saving languor. Taseer leaves no doubt that he is fascinated and somewhat revolted by all he sees. His disdain provides the narrative, however lopsided it is, with an unusual energy. Very few writers can succeed in carrying a weak book on the strength of a handful of observations, yet Taseer almost achieves it here. The Pakistan he has arrived in may be corrupt and falling asunder, his father is a cad and the wider family no better than bums, yet Rehan is entranced.
“There was something unreal and marvellous for me about having an elder brother. I had sought this bond with male friends in the past, but it had always felt laboured. Here it was built into the relationship, a part of its nature, and could even, it seemed . . . be taken for granted.”
Perhaps Aatish Taseer has also taken something for granted in the rather casual writing of this book; even the telling of a great story – and he certainly has one – should not be taken for granted.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
