Category: Books

  • The Veteran

    Frederick Forsyth

    The book is quite a departure from the regular thrillers that Forsyth is famous for, but that doesn’t take away anything from the quality of the work. It consists of five stories, which showcase the research that characterises Forsyth’s works. I’d actually have taken these for Jeffrey Archer’s work for the quality of the ‘twists’, and sometimes, even the wit.

    ‘The Veteran’ and ‘The Art of the Matter’ are renditions of the concept of justice, with the latter giving us quite a few insights about the art world and its inhabitants. ‘The Veteran’ would seem an open-and-shut mugging case and the trial that follows, but develops layers as it proceeds. There is something very satisfying about this story as well as the last one. In ‘The Miracle’, a tourist couple on their way to experience the Palio horse race in Siena, come across a stranger and his tale of the supernatural. ‘The Citizen’ involves a drug enforcement officer and a range of characters who are involved in a drug trafficking episode.

    ‘Whispering Wind’, the last story is considerably larger than others, and while the average ‘Bollywood’ viewer would find the concept familiar, it is still a great story based on ‘The Battle of the Little Bighorn’, the amount of detailing takes it up several notches.

    ‘The Veteran’ might be named after the first story or perhaps the expertise that key characters in all five stories exhibit. The most endearing aspect of this book is how it marries clinical descriptions and detailing with stories that exude warmth and humanity. That, and the excellent endings make this a great read.

  • The Curious Case of 221B: The Secret Notebooks

    Partha Basu

    Partha Basu takes Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective Sherlock Holmes and shows him as well as many of the cases that Baker Street fans are familiar with, in a wholly different light.

    The primary narrator is Jit, who comes across the secret diaries of Dr.Watson, the original chronicler of Holmes’ adventures. One one hand, the diaries recount the stories that were never formally published, with ‘mid-words’ from one Emma Hudson, whose identity is also a little mystery, and which add multiple layers to the official adventures, and on the other, we have Jit’s story and that of his parents, and how they happened to be in possession of the diaries.

    Partha Basu seems to have done quite some decent research, though whether the tales he has chosen were the best possible for this exercise would always be debatable according to personal Holmes favourites. But the concept itself is very interesting and adds multiple perspectives to the iconic character of Holmes, and to a certain extent to Watson’s too. This is more so because Holmes has always been the one on whom the focus has been on, while Watson has been content playing the foil to the superb skills of Holmes’ mind. Here, they seem to share the stage almost equally in terms of focus with Watson even outwitting Holmes in one case.

    So ‘The Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘The Illustrious Client’, ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’, ‘The Speckled Band’, ‘The Three Students’, ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, ‘Abbey Grange’ are all taken apart and reset in terms of either characters or circumstances as events that happened either before or after the case was published are brought to light, Characters and their motives are suddenly shown differently, thereby revealing that all may not have ended well. The book also gives a hat tip to the unofficial Holmes work – written by one Seamus Hyde.

    I also like the expressed aim of the author – to get more people to read the original works of Sir Conan Doyle. Its not very easy for a Holmes fan to be told that the master detective may have been wrong more than once – either in the specific context, or for failing to grasp the larger picture, and that he may have had character flaws that were significantly worse than portrayed in the published works, but if you can live with that, this book is a very interesting read for Holmes fans. I quite liked the touch of Holmes (once) corresponding with Arthur Conan Doyle.

  • And Thereby Hangs a Tale

    Jeffrey Archer

    The good news is that Lord Archer still has that amazing gift of storytelling, the bad news is that the twists seem to have been blunted a bit. Its probably the sheer amount of content that we encounter, or the tendency to predict the author’s twist, or the way reality beats fiction these days, but compared to the author’s earlier works, this one didn’t induce the jaw-dropping.

    It’d be tempting to say that since 10 of the 15 works are based on real life, the scope for the twist is limited by facts. Indeed, the way the author unfolds the story, the pace he sets are all vintage Archer. But even the remaining 5, while interesting enough, fall short of the author’s high standards of twists.

    My favourites would be “Blind Date” for the sensitivity displayed, “Where there’s a will” for the subtle variation in a done-to-death plot, “Double Cross’, again for a subtle twist well delivered, and “The Undiplomatic Diplomat”, for a strong plot and a superb ending. The India story – “Caste – off”, which I remember him mentioning (that he had got an idea for a story) when he visited Bangalore for ‘The Prisoner of Birth’ tour, is precisely that – typically Indian, and that perhaps, is why, it didn’t appeal much to me. 🙂

    Having said all of that, the book is still a good read simply because Archer still hasn’t lost his mastery over words.

  • Johnny Gone Down

    Karan Bajaj

    The good news is that Karan Bajaj moves away from Chetan Bhagat territory (which can’t be said of his earlier work ‘Keep Off the Grass’, though I found it better than Five Point Someone) and he’s not really among the ‘Rakhi Sawants of Indian literature‘ (if it is what I think it is), the bad news is that contrary to what he says, I thought he was more connected with/in KOTG, and therefore the work had more depth, as though he was sure of his footing.

    Having said that, he has made the canvas wider with this work, not just geographically, with a protagonist – Nikhil/Nick, who moves from MIT to Cambodia to Thailand to Rio to Minnesota to Delhi but also with the trades he picks up – from Buddhist monk to drug lord to an internet-boom millionaire, and therefore the experiences and people related to each theme.

    While this works in providing a racy script, it also means that I felt a superficiality in the way each theme was handled. The ‘Second Life’ styled virtual world, for example, while it typified the kind of services that were launched in the boom era, was way too easy. And that’s just it. Everything, from the beginning, whether a positive or negative, just fit in and flowed, too smoothly, just like Karan Bajaj himself describes Nikhil’s state when his life begins to settle back. But I think its still a good read and the pricing really helps. 😉

    [Spoiler, relatively] I’d rather have had an unpredictable end in line with Nikhil’s life until then, but instead it turns philosophical. In fact, I thought KOTG’s ‘comfortable in own skin’ was better than the ‘highs-and-lows life better than even keeled, stable existence’. A better thrust on transience would’ve worked better for me.

    But like I said, unless you’ve been a Colombian drug lord, you’ll find the various karmayogi avatars in Nikhil’s life interesting enough for you to not regret picking it up. 🙂

  • Abandon : A Romance

    Pico Iyer

    I’m quite a fan of Pico Iyer’s travelogues, so this was a book that had to be checked out. The protagonist is John Macmillan, an Oxford-educated Englishman, in California to study the work of the Sufi poet, Rumi, and complete his thesis under the guidance of his professor Sefadhi. On a trip to Damascus, he happens to meet a reclusive professor, who requests him to carry a package to California, to be handed over to a Kristina Jensen. While doing that, he happens to meet Camilla, Kristina’s sister, who, despite her flighty and fragile nature, makes inroads into his life. And then starts a journey that’s part a search for an Iranian manuscript, part an inward search for John, much like the sufis – “We are even mysterious to ourselves, they believe: a part of us going through the rituals of our daily life, while another part, a deeper part, cries out for whatever it is that can take us back. The stranger whose voice we recognize as our own.“, “..for the true Sufi, the looking is the key. Even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.“

    The word ‘Abandon’ too can be seen from different perspectives – from the Sufis’ mystical version of abandoning themselves to a higher power, John’s need to let go of his notions and caution, and Camilla’s seemingly unconscious way of living her life in abandon, even as she fears that John might her leave her because of it. To me, the novel by itself was a kind of ‘abandon’, just like John’s thesis in the book – as though the author worked on a structure for some part before, towards the end, he let the work chart its own course.

    I do think the book might have a lot of subtext that deals with Islam, its interpretations, and its relationships with the rest of the world, but I’m not really qualified to explore those aspects. Even otherwise, its a very good read, in which there seem to be layers hidden beneath each statement, waiting to be uncovered, just like the excellent poetry that is shared within.