"The Guide" by R K Narayan

The Guide follows Raju. We first meet him after he comes out of prison; sitting on the river bank near a village called Mangal, he encouters a villager, Velan, who believes he is a holy man. He maintains this illusion in return for gifts of food and being allowed to sleep in the temple. But when there is a drought, the swami is expected to be a saint and fast. He tries to persuade Velan he is an ordinary man by telling him how he came to be in jail. he used to run a shop in Malgudi's railway station and then became a tourist guide. He fell in love the the wife of one of his clients and then became her manager as she became a dancer.

Raju is clearly a men who lives on his wits. He has the skills of a con artist: he is able to discern what people want and convince them that he can satisfy their needs. At the same time, he is (usually) convinced that he is a good man doing the right thing. Perhaps it is only afterwards that, reflecting on his life, he achieves self-awareness. As an accidental swami, he starts to realise that he is taking advantage of the innocence of the villagers (although that doesn't stop him cheating them when he needs to).

The strength of the book lies in its depiction of life in the town of Malgudi and the village of Mangal. It is a society where religion is important but life is more important. Good manners and decent behaviour are expected, status are reputation are highly prized. There is a deep respect for rules and for the law, which contrasts strongly with an economy seemingly based on more or less unfettered free enterprise (a bit like the USA where rampant capitalism is paired with a furiously, litigious society).

Narayan's prose is very matter-of-fact, as is the story he is telling. This is a story of an ordinary man, told in ordinary words; the degree of verisimilitude is such that I, as reader, wouldn't have been surprised to encounter Raju in the street, and for that street to have all the sights and sounds and smells of an Indian town. And yet Narayan includes very little description in his book. We know very little about what any character looks like (we know that Raju came out of prison with short hair and later grew it) or what either Malgudi or Mangal look like and nothing about the sounds and smells. In this sense, Narayan is a minimalist and, like a radio player can create pictures in a listeners head, he is able to conjure up a sense of solid reality despite offering few details. This light touch helps to make Raju feel both individual and an everyman.

The chronology of the book jumps between the present (Raju as a fake swami) told in the third person and the past (Raju as a tourist guide and then an impresario, told in the first person). Raju has an interesting relationship with the past. Raju is besotted by Rosie, a dancer from a family of temple dancers whose husband has forbidden her to dance but who wants to popularise the cultural tradition of dance. Rosie's husband is fascinated by ancient artefacts and writes an important book on them. Raju himself, whose story starts with that symbol of contemporary India, the railway station, ends up as a swami combatting drought, perhaps the most ancient and yet timeless symbol of India. It is almost as Narayan is telling us that everything changes but everything remains the same, that time clothes us but that our naked selves are eternal.

The title 'The Guide' seems at first glance to refer purely to Raju's time as a tourist guide. But, of course, he ends up as a spiritual guide. He started off as an imposter, propelled into guiding by tourists who asked for him to help them and winging it all the way but in the end providing a service so valuable that he receives a begrudging acknowledgement in Rosie's husband's book. In the same way he only becomes a swami because Velan mistakes him for one, and he is a thoroughgoing fraud at the start but in the end we feel he has become a genuine saint. 

Raju's career matches the life-course of Hermann Hesse's eponymous hero in Siddhartha - a story based on the life of the Buddha - whose search for enlightenment includes becoming a merchant and a lover before ending as a ferryman, living by a river.

A Penguin Classic. Narayan was an Indian writer who write a series of novels set in the fictional Indian town of Malgudi. In Britain, where he first achieved success, he was championed by a young Graham Greene and one can feel the kinship between Greene's novels and Narayan's. 

Selected quotes:

• "The essence of sainthood seemed to lie in one's ability to utter mystifying statements. ... He was dragging these innocent men deeper and deeper into the bog of unclear thoughts." (Ch 4)
• "It seemed to me silly to go a hundred miles to see the source of [the river] Sarayu when it had taken the trouble to tumble down the mountain and come to our door." (Ch 5)
• "If he was the academic type I was careful to avoid all mention of facts and figures and to confine myself to general descriptions, letting the man himself do the talking. You may be sure he enjoyed the opportunity." (Ch 5)
• "True to the tradition of the landed gentry, he found litigation an engrossing subject." (Ch 8)

January 2024; 196 pages

Narayan also wrote The Painter of Signs, reviewed in this blog

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God