"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

"Secret Water" by Arthur Ransome

 Another classic Swallows and Amazons adventure. This time the children are camping on muddy tidal islands, tasked with creating a map of the archipelago. They discover another gang of sailing kids (the 'Eels') complete with a shy lad called the Mastodon who lives in a wreck. The muddy adventures include being caught on a tidal causeway with the water getting deeper by the minute ...

Great moments: 

• "It was as if they had come across a skeleton and on looking at the skull had been greeted with a wink." (Ch 8)
• "He woke with a queer feeling of gloom. It was like waking on the day after he had written parvissimus instead of minimus in an examination paper." (Ch 29) What a wonderfully dated concern that seems to us now!

A great yarn if suffused with colonialist attitudes. May 2021; 373 pages

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

The Swallows and Amazon series contained twelve books:

• Swallows and Amazons: Children camping on an island in a lake have sailing based adventures
• Swallowdale: More sailing adventures are threatened when the Swallow sinks
• Peter Duck: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint sail on a big yacht into the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure; pirates pursue
• Winter Holiday: the lake freezes allowing a sledge-based expedition to the 'north pole'; the 'D's are introduced
• Coot Club: The Ds join the Death and Glory kids in the Norfolk Broads but the excitement is just as great when birds have to be protected from rowdies.
• We Didn't Mean to go to Sea: The Swallows accidentally find themselves at sea in a yacht they scarcely know: for my money this is the most dramatic and exciting book of the series.
• Secret Water: The Swallows are joined by the Amazons in an expedition to map some tidal mud-flats
• The Big Six: The Death and Glory kids have to be cleared of accusations of crime; the Ds help.
• Missee Lee: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint are shipwrecked near China and captured by a lady Chinese pirate with a taste for Latin.
• Pigeon Post: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds search for gold in the hills above the Lake; one of my favourites
• The Picts and the Martyrs: The Ds have to hide in the hills when the Great Aunt comes to stay with the Amazons
• Great Northern: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds and Captain Flint are protecting birds in the far north of Scotland

The internal logic of the series suggests that Secret Water comes immediately after We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea and also after Pigeon Post and probably after The Picts and the Martyrs.

"The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu

A Chinese nanotechnologist discovers a countdown imprinted on developed photographs; he observes the cosmic background radiation flash. This is all linked to a computer game he has started to play, a sort of fantasy role-playing game set on a planet that has three suns which interact chaotically. It is also linked with an astrophysicist who was assigned to a secret military project during the Cultural Revolution and who has made contact with Trisolaris, the real planet with three suns, who is now sending its battle fleet to destroy the Earth.

This is the sort of science fiction that, like The War of the Worlds or  The Invisible Man by HG Wells and like the novels of John Wyndham, but unlike Hyperion by Dan Simmons, is firmly set in the real world.

The style is very alien. The author is utterly objective, detailing what happens, recording conversations, as if this is a scientific transcript. There is no drama, there are no emotions. There are murders but there is no fear, no guilt, no remorse. As a result I was unable to empathise with any character: they were no more than avatars in a computer game or bugs crawling about under my microscope. I found it difficult to care what happened.

Perhaps this is a cultural thing. Cixin Liu says: "Chinese brush paintings  are full of blank spaces, but life in Qijiatun had no blank spaces. Like classical oil paintings, it was filled with thick, rich, solid colours." (C 26) Perhaps I am trying to read a brush painting from the perspective of an oil painting.

I suppose one character, the detective, does come through because of the things he says (eg "I'm a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass."; C 10). Perhaps this book employs the ultimate show don't tell and I am too blind to see what is being shown to me. Most of the characters I do see are cold to the point of psychopaths.

Selected quotes:

• "the new rebels were a pack of wolves on hot coals, crazier than crazy." (C 1)
• "compared to the huge sky and open air of Inner Mongolia, the biggest cities in China's interior were nothing more than sheep pens." (C 2)
• "Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form." (C 2)
• "Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?" (C 6)
• "The long years had ground away all the hardness and fierceness in their personalities, until all that was left was a gentleness like that of water." (C 8)
• "A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything." (C 8)
• "The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace." (C 14)
• "I felt like a libertine who has always fluttered carelessly from one woman to another suddenly finding himself in love." (C 16)
• "Why does one have to save people to be considered a hero? Why is saving other species considered insignificant? Who gave humans such high honors?" (C 27)

Lots of plot and some intriguing science. February 2020; 424 pages

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

"The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin

As well as writing children's fantasy books (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu) this talented author also wrote science fiction.

It starts with the brilliant image of a wall around a space port. "Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on." (p 5) From one point of view the wall encloses the space port and the space ships that come and go and by extension space and the universe; leaving the rest of the planet 'free'; from the other perspective the wall encloses the planet: "a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine." (p 5) What a great first page!

Anarres has been colonised from its twin planet Urras. The colony is still small and works on purely cooperative principles; the people equal to one another in respect and dignity; each contributes what they can and takes what they need.  Shevek, the top physicist from Anarres, is the first man ever to return to the capitalist, battling, home world of Urras.

Despite the utopian vision of Anarres, a sort of global kibbutz, these are still people with their needs. One of the early compelling moments is when the lads, Shevek and his mates, raised in dormitories together, play at prisons (echoes of the Stanford Prison Experiment) and imprison one of their number, taking on the role of guards: "They were not playing the role now, it was playing them" (p 35). There is real tension here, although Shevek feels ashamed afterwards. And in the famine, as people starve, they turn selfish and greedy and violent. And systems can be manipulated by those who seek power to prevent the people they dislike from succeeding. And public disapproval, even not backed by any rule, can make a person miserable.

With echoes of Mao's cultural revolution, soviet Russia, and the worst excesses of capitalism, this is a book about an individual struggling to achieve fulfilment against the backdrop of two very different societies, each of which, in their own way, conspire to prevent him.

• "To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself and lost the rest." (p 9)
• "All through those hurried days ... he had not felt that he was doing all the things he did, but that they were doing him." (p 10)
• "You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws." (p 16)
• "There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them though he was perpetually hiding behind them." (p 17)
• "prostitution ... copulation in the economic mode." (p 18)
• "'I never thought of that before ...'
• Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of this remark." (p 37)
• "There are people of inherent authority; some emperors actually have new clothes." (p 49)
• "The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on." (p 62)
• "You can't have a nervous system without at least a ganglion, and preferably a brain." (p 82)
• "Shevek walked in rain as the Ioti walked in sunshine, with enjoyment." (p 112)
• "Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers ..." (p 150)
• "Life, said the stream of quick water down on the rocks in the cold dark." (p 152)
• "exuberance was perhaps the essential quality of life." (p 155)
• "In a pen by himself the herd sire, ram or bull or stallion, heavy-necked, stood potent as a thundercloud, charged with generation." (p 172)
• "As if deserving meant anything! As if one could earn beauty, or life!" (p 172)
• "He had often seen that anxiety before ... Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little they had, there was always somebody who had less?" (pp 172 - 173)
• "People do not usually gaze at one another intently at very close range, unless they are mothers with infants, or doctors with patients, or lovers." (p 180)
• "We think that time 'passes', flows past us; but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers." (p 184)
• "When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow-countrymen bitterly reject you, it is not hard to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor." (p 292)
• "We each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward." (p 295)
• "They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?" (p 317)

The greatest thing about this book is its incredibly detailed vision of a society of anarchists in which everyone has to struggle to make ends meet and no one is very rich, in which the individual has the ultimate right to live life as they wish and contribute nothing to society, and yet where most individuals volunteer to contribute far more to society than they could ever be made to. A vision of an altruistic anarchist society on an unforgiving world worked out in every particular. Incredible.

May 2017; 319 pages