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A subtle and keenly observed debut, but one that too often reads like a prize story

An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Anuradha Roy
Picador, Rs 395A subtle and keenly observed debut, but one that too often reads like a prize story

Though it appears the 8220;innocuous colour of darkening sepia8221; in a picture, a river slowly and hungrily inches its way towards a house. Anuradha Roy8217;s debut novel meanders through the lives of three generations at 3 Dulganj Road in the small mining town of Songarh.
In 1907, after Amulya moves his young family from Calcutta to set up a factory there, he soaks in the very silence that oppresses his wife Kananbala and locks her 8220;within a bell jar she felt she could not prise open for air8221;. Next door, her English neighbours, the Barnums, have their own marital troubles. But unlike the explosive denouement of Mrs Barnum8217;s drama, Kananbala turns her suffocation inwards, against herself 8212; until she loses her mind, responding with innocent obscenities to every situation and mortally embarrassing her family.

The next section traces the lives of her children 8212; Nirmal, a widowed archaeologist whose impossible relationship with a young widow, Meera, is one of the most affecting parts in the novel. But the book8217;s central characters are Bakul, Nirmal8217;s daughter who prefers to think of herself as a foundling, and the orphaned Mukunda who her grandfather had taken in. The unspoken oppressions of the age press in, just as later, a priest casts Mukunda out of the puja room, uncertain of his caste.
Mukunda, 8220;awkward, lanky, easy to upset8221;, who lives on the family8217;s scraps, feels his lot lightened after Mrs Barnum takes him under her wing, unconventionally tutoring him and opening up her library, which he makes his way through with indiscriminate diligence. His other great sustenance is his friendship with Bakul 8212; like Heathcliff and Catherine, they wander the town, they 8220;had populated Songarh with their own secret places and people. To them it throbbed with magic and meanings which only the two of them could share8221;. Until they are separated and Mukunda is dispatched to Calcutta, and where he wends his middling way through life, resolutely shutting away the image of his childhood companion, until years later, his work forces him to return and confront the very people who had taken him in.

An Atlas of Impossible Longing is a subtle book, keenly observed and prettily written, though it rarely soars above. There are some wonderful moments, like Kananbala8217;s complicity and bond with Mrs Barnum, her one irresponsible jaunt rendered meaningless by the disaster that strikes her family 8212; 8220;her act of what had looked like desperate rebellion, her drunkenness, her ruined velvet slippers, all went unremarked8221;. Nirmal, in particular, with his inconsistent kindliness, is a remarkable character.
But all too often, An Atlas of Impossible Longing reads like a Katha prize story 8212; virtuously weighted down to the time and place it is set in. It feels like a novel reconstructed from other novels, fictional associations 8212; the romance of the railway, the crusty benevolent old neighbour, the mutinous orphan, the love that cannot be denied, the waters that will rise and flood.

Which is not to say that it feels the least bit laboured, or that the novel is about George Eliot or Dickens or Hardy getting a Songarh spin. The novel succeeds remarkably in anchoring the same abiding themes in its own quiet way. But it8217;s exactly the kind of book that calls up Henry James8217; dead-on formulation, 8220;I liked all of it, except the whole thing.8221;