A Looming Tower + Indira + Children of Blood & Bone and more

I remember reading Lawrence Wright’s A Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11 (Penguin, Rs 599) back when it came out in 2007 and thinking this should be made into a movie while simultaneously feeling relieved that it hadn’t been given the Hollywood treatment. A Looming Tower has everything you want in a good story, but it’s got all the inconvenient details of reality. Heroes have blemishes, villains have capacity for kindness, people are guided by their frailties, and terror is the handiwork of depressingly ordinary men (there are few women in this case).

Wright is an extraordinary reporter and writer. He shows how 9/11 was made possible only partly because of Al-Qaeda’s planning skills. The terrorists were unwittingly helped by the CIA and FBI. The agencies refused to share information and that led to a series of slips which eventually enabled 9/11. If you’re looking for some riveting non-fiction and haven’t read A Looming Tower, I can’t recommend it enough. All these years later, I realised I still remembered fragments of Wright’s descriptions – like that of CIA’s Alec Station and the end of the book, with Ayman al-Zawahiri. The book came back to me because it's the basis of a new series, also titled A Looming Tower. I think it's streaming on Amazon Prime. The book is better but the series isn’t half bad. It’s ongoing so not sure whether I’ll feel this way till the end, but I much preferred it to Wild Wild Country (which isn’t awful but has so many problems in its treatment). Comparisons aside, it’s nice to know that American producers will back a show that has a Middle Eastern man as one of its leads (the lovely Tahar Rahim plays the fantastic Ali Soufan) and not clean up the messy parts of people’s complicated lives. One of the protagonists of A Looming Tower is John O Neill, who was the chief of New York FBI’s counter-terrorism centre. He also balanced mounting debts, multiple girlfriends and one unhappy marriage. You don’t need to be interested in Islamic terrorism or 9/11 to get sucked into the tension and drama that Wright conjures with his writing. Fantastic stuff.

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When I picked up Indira by Devapriya Roy and Priya Kuriyan, and Appupen’s The Snake and The Lotus, I didn’t think I’d end up skimming through them while grinding my teeth. Both the books are published by Contxt, which aims to publish literature pivoted on politics. I hope their non-fiction and regular non-fiction is better than these two graphic novels.

The art in Indira is beautiful and it’s by Kuriyan. There’s some gorgeous detailing on every page and I have no qualms in saying the artwork is the only reason to pick up Indira. (I'm not sure about this, but I think Kuriyan is selling prints of some of the art she made for the book. Check her Instagram if you're interested.) However, as lovely as it may be, I don’t think Kuriyan’s work can distract us from the storytelling. There are choices that Roy has made as a narrator that I found curious and not in a good way. Indira is snappy version of Indira Gandhi’s life and it's contained within a framing narrative — a little girl named Indira is finding out about Indira Gandhi because her homework assignment is to write about her name. The girl and her mother are wretchedly poor, but of course they’re happy, sweet and gaze upon Gandhi with shining eyes. Roy doesn’t use the contrast between the two Indiras’ circumstances to talk about elitism and privilege. Instead, the child’s point of view becomes a reasoning for seeing Gandhi from an innocently admiring standpoint. Indira doesn’t feel like a book for kids and yet it’s frequently simplistic. Gandhi’s ability to manipulate, the way she used her social class in her professional life and her understanding of democracy are just some of the aspects that needed to be addressed much more critically. Operation Bluestar and the Emergency are mentioned, but perfunctorily. All in all, this felt like reading disguised Congress propaganda, which I’m as opposed to as reading Exam Warriors.

Appupen’s The Snake and The Lotus is determined to be weird, which means that a lot of the response will depend on what kind of art and storytelling a reader likes. The one thing it isn’t is a kids’ book. Appupen’s work is dark, both thematically and literally. In a mythical land, there is a white city in which “godlings” live while being drunk on “lotus milk”. Outside, “The Green” has been ravaged and all that remains of it are insects who are killed if they venture into the white city. But The Green calls out to one person, a girl, who goes to the city and becomes an embodiment of hope. I’ve used this many double quotes because most of The Snake and The Lotus didn’t entirely make sense to me. I mean, I recognise the phallic symbols and the references to man screwing the environment etc, but it just … stayed in the realm of weird imagery and didn’t come together like a credible, alternative world. And then, for no reason whatsoever, there was a rape scene and I lost whatever little interest I’d had in this world. It was suddenly a bad Bollywood film from the ’90s. If you’re curious about the male gaze, find the rape scene in The Snake and The Lotus.

It’s not that I didn’t get the symbolism in the rape, but I’m sick to death of woman characters being shoehorned into situations where they will be sexually abused in order to serve a grand metaphor. No, it doesn’t make it ok that the saviour is a woman if she needs to be raped to become empowered. Whatever the lofty intentions of The Snake and The Lotus, the fact is that a woman is used by the story in a way that’s needlessly sexualised, demeaning and humiliating. It’s a tired trope and to my mind, an irresponsible one because no matter how niche your readership, with depictions like this, you're lending heft to the warped notions of sex and femininity prevalent in our society.

So yeah, abandoned that one. Zero guilt.

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The highlight of my reading this week has been Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, which is the first book of a trilogy set in a fictionalised Nigeria. The book is intended for young adults, but take it from this adult — there’s nothing child-like about it despite all the magic, kings, princes and princesses.

Odisha was once a land woven with magic, with 12 clans who controlled different elements. But then the magic started fading and one night, the cruel unmagical King Saran ordered The Raid, which enslaved and killed all those who could wield magic. All that remained of the magical were descendants, marked by their white hair. They're called “maggots” and are considered the lowest of the low in Odisha. A little more than a decade after The Raid, three magical objects resurface and a few young teenagers from different backgrounds discover their magical potential. Zelie and her brother are poor and live in a fishing village. When they go to the capital city to earn a little extra money, they chance upon the runaway Princess Amari. Amari has with her a scroll that reawakens magic in Zelie and next thing you know, there’s an army headed by Amari’s brother Inan chasing the trio.

Children of Blood and Bone could have been a little tighter. It has its share of clichés — kids going on a quest to save their world; a love story between the prince and the commoner who find themselves on opposite sides because of their sense of duty; an evil king who is just entirely evil without a shade of redeeming grey — but I loved the world Adeyemi created. The quest itself isn’t what holds the novel together. That’s actually one of its weak links. I, for one, almost forgot that Zelie and gang have things to do and a secret island to find. But there are some wonderful, unpredictable characters and the hunt between Zelie and Inan is fantastic. Inan, who is horrified to discover he too has magical abilities. He's the son of King Saran and a maggot. His is a really well-etched character. Amari also has potential and Zelie is impossible to hate.

So yes, there are wobbly bits, but this is only the first book and I devoured it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the curse of the sequel doesn’t befall the incredibly talented Adeyemi (she’s only 23. I can barely remember what it was like to be 23).

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In other news, my first novel comes out next week. It’s called Hush A Bye Baby and you can read extracts from it on Juggernaut. The book is about a police investigation into a doctor who is accused of doing sex-selective abortions. I’ve tried to not do as a writer the things that annoyed me as a critic. Plus, I had stern instructions from my mother to not make it boring. People I don’t know from Adam seem to be liking it, which is all sorts of happiness-inducing. The book’s also available on Amazon and my mother hasn’t read it yet, but I’ve done my best to not make it boring. If you do pick it up — it’s only Rs 280. That makes it cheaper than a movie ticket. And definitely better written than Baaghi 2. Just saying — let me know if you liked it or hated it. If you’re not in India, Juggernaut is serialising the novel so you can read it there.

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Finally, thanks to all of you who wrote in with your opinions on the frequency of this newsletter. Most of you don’t seem to give a damn how often it comes in, which is great. The way real life is working out, I think fortnightly is the more realistic option. So yeah, thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back in a fortnight.