What an Altitude!

WE8217;VE all done it in our schooldays, shaken a fountain pen full of Chelpark Royal Blue onto pristine twin pages, banged shut the exerci...

WE8217;VE all done it in our schooldays, shaken a fountain pen full of Chelpark Royal Blue onto pristine twin pages, banged shut the exercise book and opened it to discover these weird and wonderful shapes of art. Mirror images of pen and ink, now in one8217;s control, the next instant creatures of their own volition.

The mirror-image cover of Coronation Talkies manages to remove some of the dreariness of yet another Raj novel. The daguerreotypes up on the wall are clever reflections of each other and so are the completely dissimilar matrons toasting something life? each other? in their china teacups.

And through the 500 pages that follow but, of course, appropriately enough it8217;s the other way round, whoever wrote a novel with a cover in mind?, debutante novelist Susan Kurosawa manages to deepen and emphasise that feeling of watching life through a rear-view mirror. Slightly more focused, slightly surreal, slightly distorted, not quite in control.

Kurosawa is Australian, and that distance comes in handy in rescuing Coronation Talkies from the Brit-Indian cliches a period work of this nature poses. She is also a travel writer, and that training is useful while constructing a composite hill-station where her social drama 8212; though set in the 1930s, the historical timeline is largely incidental 8212; plays out. But most of all, it is her iconoclastic irreverence and sly sense of humour that lifts this book.

Just as the eponymous cinema 8212; named after the ascension of George VI 8212; jazzes up life at the uncomfortably christened Chalaili, a fading, rainswept hill-station that provides the perfect setting for an assemblage of fresh-off-the-boats, stay-ons, dubious-borns and on-the-makes. Its owner is Mrs Rajat Banerjee, an XXXXL-sized reincarnation of the Wife of Bath, who shares with Lydia Rushmore, the newest England-import in town, a touching sense of parity towards her domestics, a background of maternal indifference and a desire to make something of her life.

At one point, Kurosawa has Mrs Banerjee musing: 8216;8216;Chalaili was such a self-contained globule8230; Like a talking picture, with no intrusion from reality.8217;8217; While the cinema unleashes a spate of Hollywood romances onto an unsuspecting town, it is the chemistry off-screen that gets the novel off the ground.

Each of the lead characters comes to Chalaili with their secret baggage: Lydia8217;s weatherman husband William 8216;Rainwallah8217; Rushmore is the local laughing stock after being caught inflagrante delicto with a superior civil servant8217;s wife; Mrs Banerjee8217;s husband is missing in action and Lydia herself is photographed deshabille by a disgraced rogue.

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But, at one with the best comic writers, Kurosawa has a gift for well-observed cameos, recalling Vikram Seth8217;s A Suitable Boy in their breadth and scope. As in a mirror-image, though, more lies below the surface than it appears at first glance. Kurosawa8217;s attempt to introduce pathos into the novel are also the book8217;s weakest portions. The unexpected, finely balanced comedy of the last years of the Raj crumbles into a post-Independence cliche that was eminently foreseeable.

Coronation Talkies isn8217;t worth staying up the night for, but it could help while away a few sleepless hours.