Best of Friends + Treacle Walker + more

It’s firecracker night where I am, by which I mean it’s Diwali. Historically speaking, we South Asians are not really a firecracker culture — that would be the Chinese. Speaking of which, if you haven’t seen the documentary Sky Ladder, about Chinese artist Cai Guo-qiang who uses firecrackers to make insane art works, it’s on Netflix. Jaw-dropping stuff — but we do have an unparalleled enthusiasm for making noise. That’s the only explanation I can find for the kind of crackers Indians love bursting on Diwali, which is as much a festival of lights as it is a festival of explosions. Of all the Hindu festivals, this is the one that feels the most disjunctive to me. The city looks so pretty, festooned with fairy lights. Homes are decorated with candles, flowers and rangoli. Every window seems to glitter with happiness. Meanwhile the whole place sounds like a war zone, with bombs going off every minute and the staccato clatter of gunfire-esque pataka. Jarring doesn’t even begin to describe the contrast. 

Still, one must not not look the gift horse of a holiday — on Monday, no less — in the mouth especially since it’s giving me time to write this. Last month, I was in Kolkata for a bit and of all people, my father pointedly said, “No newsletter this month.” I breezily informed him that there was still a week left in September. “I’ll whip it up in the next few days,” I said. Next thing I know, it’s October. Not only is it October, it’s almost the end of the month. Somewhere in the middle of all this, the Booker Prize was announced and the winner was Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (which originally came out as Chats with the Dead in India). The novel is set in Sri Lanka in 1989, and is about a man who discovers he’s a ghost. Maali Almeida sets out to uncover his murderer and he has to do this in the space of seven moons. Like Chinaman (still my favourite Karunatilaka novel), this book is wickedly funny and riddled with sadness. Wrapped in the way Karunatilaka uses the supernatural is a sense of desperate hope. When everything goes to hell and you feel an absolute lack of agency, there is comfort in thinking there is something beyond the chaos that is looking out for us and can set things right.

The Booker shortlist had another novel that was rooted in the fantastical: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. This is a fairy tale of a book and initially, it seems to make no sense. Who is this boy named Joe and what is “a rag-and-bone man”? What is this bizarre exchange in which Joe gives the rag-and-bone man his old pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder blade, only to get a donkey stone and a pot of ointment? Also, what the hell is a donkey stone? Garner drops you in the middle of a dream with Treacle Walker. Joe is a little boy who lives alone, reads comics and marks the passage of time by the sound of a train he calls Noony. He’s recovering from a mysterious illness that’s affected one of his eyes. When the Treacle Walker comes to his door and makes an exchange with Joe, the boy realises that there is more to this world than he’d imagined. There’s danger in here, just as there is in every fairy tale worth its salt. There’s also magic and an uncanny stillness.

Treacle Walker can feel disorienting at first. When I started reading it, the whole thing felt surreal. I knew the words that I was reading and they made sense in the sentences before me, but their meaning felt just out of the reach of my understanding. Later, Garner uses words and phrases that are bona fide gibberish, and yet it felt like I understood him because of the way the characters weaves them into their speech. It was almost as though the language was evoking meaning and response out of subconscious parts of my mind. This is one of those stories that will make you deep-dive into Google afterwards (I highly recommend this looooong critique) and thank the gods for all those who geek out and write down everything for the rest of us. I think much of the fun of Treacle Walker is in its dreamy impenetrability, but that said, there are only two things that you should know before starting to read it. First, treacle meant medicine in the medieval era so it was associated with healing. Second, as a child, Garner was periodically bedridden with life-threatening illnesses and he’s said in past interviews that this was the time when his imagination really took blossomed. If Treacle Walker feels like a story that’s wandering back to that past, it’s also a fable written by an 88-year-old writer who is keenly aware of how stories outlive people. Stay with it, be patient and you’ll find yourself cocooned in a fairy tale that’s unlike anything you’ve read before. 

Another gem of a novel is Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie. Someone described it as “Elena Ferrante, but make it Pakistani”, which sounds terribly reductive but I hate to admit that this is actually a pretty damn good description. Set in 1980s’ Karachi and post-Brexit London, Shamsie’s novel follows the tumbleweed lives of Zahra and Maryam, who meet in school and become (as the title suggests) the best of friends. While they deal with puberty, discover “girlfear” (that sense of dread that comes from knowing that your feminine gender makes you vulnerable in ways that boys and men are immune to) and become ever more determined to live their lives on their own terms, the world around them changes. Their friendship survives disruptions, tragedy and a change of location. Decades later, Zahra is a famous human rights activist and lawyer while Maryam is a startup investor who is successful enough to have access to the UK’s most elite circles of power.  

Admittedly, there are parts of Best of Friends that feel contrived and some passages seem too self-aware of their own awesomeness (Maryam is particularly guilty of this), but these bits don’t keep you from caring for Zahra and Maryam. There’s a lot that Shamsie has crammed into Best of Friends — including a heartbreaking sub-plot about an Afghan refugee who is hopeful of being granted the permission to stay in the UK — but I think what I loved most about it is the way Zahra and Maryam become the women they want to be. Shamsie writes South Asian heroines who are strong, assertive, flawed and successful, which is in itself a joy to read. It would have been very easy to tip towards self-indulgence and follow Zahra and Maryam closely, shadowing them chronologically as they go through each significant episode in their evolution. Instead, Shamsie opts for a huge time jump, practically glossing over some of the most life-altering times in both the women’s lives. It makes Best of Friends tight and binge-able (I finished reading it in two days, despite office and life), but it also means we only get scattered glimpses of these two women during some of their most transformative years, like when they’re university students or starting off in their chosen professions.  

Shamsie is so good when she’s writing about the 14-year-old Zahra and Maryam, painting a portrait of a Karachi through traffic jams, mixed tapes with Tracy Chapman songs, the illicit pleasure of meeting a boy at a video lending library, and the quiet anxiety that underpinned life in a military dictatorship. As Zahra and Maryam’s bodies change and sexual curiosity starts rippling through their everyday lives, they start seeing the world differently. The tension that a changing body can add to a room is something that every girl knows intimately and Shamsie does a great job of articulating both the discomfort and the thrill of puberty. She’s also fantastic at creating scenarios that show the tangle of prejudice and politics that trip up so many Muslims in contemporary Britain (this is at the heart of Home Fire, which is an outstanding novel and modern reimagining of Antigone).

On the non-fiction front, thanks to Trilogy, I found two delightful books: The Musical Human and The Book of Forgotten Authors. Michael Spitzer’s The Musical Human is about how music has shaped our humanity and it’s so crammed with information and trivia that it can feel a bit daunting. My father, for whom music is one of the things that makes life worth living, saw this book and said, “I don’t think I’m smart enough to read this.” I felt the same when I started reading because Spitzer covers everything from pre-history to evolutionary biology to animal song and artificial intelligence in this book. Which is mindboggling, slightly headache-inducing, but also all sorts of amazing. For example, bone flutes (the first musical instrument) were probably invented around 40,000 years ago and a gene recovered from Neanderthal fossils suggests they developed complex vocal learning, much like us. Also, hardly any indigenous group in Africa has a word for the European concept of music as organised sound. African languages usually don’t separate song and dance. There’s actually a very persuasive argument that says the feeling we get from being immersed in music is an evolutionary memory from when life was entirely underwater. And according to Spotify, the song most likely to appear on user-made ‘sex’ playlists is ‘Intro’ by XX. I don’t know how you even begin to research a book that will cover all of the above (and a whole lot more) or how Spitzer managed to corral all this into a coherent argument. Fascinating stuff.

Christopher Fowler’s The Book of Forgotten Authors is much simpler in comparison. It is precisely what it says in the title — the book is a compilation of articles about 100 authors who were very successful at some point in time, but have since been forgotten. Each entry is between three-odd pages long and Fowler tells you about the author’s life and works. The writing is witty, crisp and never feels like a dry collection of facts. Even though he’s writing about people who have mostly been reduced to scattered bits of information, Fowler presents them in a way that brings them back to life. Frequently, the lives of the authors feel more exciting than their fiction. Once again, the research that’s gone into writing about these authors is staggering. I think I recognised five of the 100 authors Fowler’s written about and by the time I reached the end of The Book of Forgotten Authors, I wanted to read each of the novels and short stories that Fowler had mentioned in his chapters. Is it depressing to know that you can be a master of your craft and still be forgotten within your lifetime? Or is it heartwarming to know that bibliophiles like Fowler will find your stories, no matter how deeply buried they are under the pile-up of published titles?  

Finally, I have for you two happy-making romance reads. One is a solid rom-com by Emily Henry, titled Book Lovers, about a literary agent and editor who fall in love while editing a manuscript. The novel also a book shop that needs saving and the lead couple use a unisex perfume/ cologne that is called “Book”. So yes, this novel flaunts its bibliophilia with pride. Somehow, Henry manages to write all this in a way that it doesn’t feel trite. There’s also a pilgrimage (of sorts) to a town that inspired a beloved bestseller and even though the two places have nothing in common, I was reminded of a friend who went to Kottayam after reading The God of Small Things, only to be wildly disappointed. I’m particularly fond of the ending of Book Lovers because it doesn’t need our career-minded heroine to compromise in any way. There’s also an entire sub-plot involving Bigfoot erotica. What’s not to love?

Julia Bennet’s The Madness of Miss Grey is significantly darker, set as it is in 19th century Yorkshire, in an insane asylum. Well-researched historical fiction makes my pulse flutter and you wouldn’t expect romance to be a plausible option considering what horrors passed as “treatment” back in the 19th century, but hats off to Bennet. Of course there’s a truckload of romanticising — this IS a romance — but she also manages to talk about women who flouted convention and class hierarchy in this novel. Plus, she writes a heroine who is no simpering victim despite being effectively locked up in an asylum. Helen Grey is resourceful, bold, manipulative when she needs to be, and just generally delightful. The hero is her doctor, which could have been gnarly, but Bennet walks that ethical tightrope well enough.  

And now that the night has finally quietened (sort of), I’ll sign off. Before I go though, here’s a poem by Muneer Niazi: 

don’t fall so silent
don’t grieve like this in parting

dreams are for dreaming
don’t make them your dwelling

your complaint will not be heeded
don’t complain to a tyrant

they may give birth to stories
don’t write words and erase them

some consideration for your status, Muneer
don’t make everyone your friend.  

Here’s to light, warmth and love, without noise or cacophony. Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.