The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you \u201ccan only really see a building \u2026 once the building becomes a ruin\u201d runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India\u2019s former capital. There\u2019s no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that \u201cwhat Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow\u201d.<\/p>\n
Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as \u201can undertaking\u201d. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a\u00a0place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book\u00a0opens in 1941, instead of today\u2019s sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve not read a book by an author this year who\u00a0so clearly loves what he\u2019s writing about<\/p>\n
The book revolves around young communist revolutionary Nirupama, whose ill-fated romance with an African American soldier leaves her with a semi-orphan son, Saki (named after the freshly Oppenheimered city). He is our future narrator, assembling history out of scraps of memories, inventions and outright fabrications. The narrative combines the story of her political and emotional development in the chaos of the Japanese yomp through south-east Asia, filtered through that of her son in the years after Indian independence as he struggles to find his voice as an artist, stuck between the two worlds of his parental inheritance. There are a host of other characters \u2013 confused apple-cheeked young bluestocking Imogen, gin-soaked upper-crust intellectual artist Kedar, pickpocket turned hidden market impresario Gopal and many other Indians, British, Americans and French of varying political and alcoholic affiliations.<\/p>\n
The communists did end up winning, of course, for a while, ruling West Bengal as the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They even\u00a0ran the titular hotel as a state enterprise for 30 long, mouldy, complaint-stacked, orgiastically corrupt years, before it was mercilessly or mercifully privatised to resounding success, sold off in the 2000s by the last stuttering communists, lacking fluency in India\u2019s modern electoral language of multi-ethnic sectarian clientelism. They were the ones who changed the city\u2019s name to Kolkata, a\u00a0wan attempt to appeal to Bengali linguistic nationalism, but it wasn\u2019t enough \u2013 it never is.<\/p>\n
The hotel isn\u2019t as central to the plot\u00a0as it was to that other great novel\u00a0about Calcutta hotel intrigues, Sankar\u2019s Chowringhee, with its glamour, gossip and Grand Hotel rococo raffishness, and there\u2019s none of\u00a0the densely plotted balletic regimentation of Amor Towles\u2019s hotel-bound A Gentleman in Moscow. What we have instead is a panoramic view of second world war-era Calcutta, with alcoholic artists, rambunctious chefs, wily servants, plotting communists, smoky jazz bars, rattan chairs and indolent ceiling fans. The\u00a0Bengal famine lurks in the background, rural peasants slowly stumbling into the big city, \u201cskeletons whispering in dialects we rarely heard in Calcutta\u201d, first a trickle, then a\u00a0flood. The hotel isn\u2019t just a model of the city by the end, it is \u201calive and constantly moving across the planet, sliding from Bengal to Biafra to Cambodia and then back to Bengal, and then going god knows where else\u201d \u2013 a metaphor for the horrible glamour of life and death, feast and famine, stalking the 20th and 21st centuries.<\/p>\n
Joshi has a vast canvas to play with\u00a0here, and it\u2019s heady, sensually described, deeply felt stuff. He has a\u00a0gift for evocative, Technicolor phrases.\u00a0Doors are \u201clike two lovers parting in a\u00a0puppet opera\u201d, the British are \u201cdried\u2011up rinds of lime in the evaporated gin and tonic of your Empire\u201d, a character\u2019s eyebrows are Molotov and Ribbentrop. There\u2019s a\u00a0slight relentlessness to the English and\u00a0Banglish wordplay \u2013 a \u201cbe-mansioned and be-knighted\u201d character and his employee are \u201cSir\u00a0and Sir-vant\u201d \u2013 with nicknames and political in-jokes aplenty.<\/p>\n
Despite its panoramic approach, the\u00a0novel does often stray into the\u00a0hotel genre\u2019s greatest pitfall, familiar to anyone who ever opened a\u00a0doorstopper from its 70s maximalist heyday, wherein characters become types, mere bits of stage scenery to take us places and deliver lines: the\u00a0naive young British woman, the outrageously plucky street thief, the unscrupulous proto-Greene American eyeing the rotting carcass of empire. There\u2019s a sometimes cloying tendency by the protagonist-narrator to announce themselves as \u201can architect-engineer\u201d constructing a \u201cstory-hotel\u201d \u201croom by room\u201d, and that there is \u201cno\u00a0way that I \u2026 could have forged a\u00a0proper narrative, but it was useful to try\u201d. These retrospective passages, narrated by Saki from his abortive career as an architectural historian in 1970s Paris, are the novel\u2019s weakest \u2013\u00a0too knowing, too wry, too pat.<\/p>\n
But Joshi\u2019s ability to render place and time is truly first-rate. I\u2019ve not read a book by an author this year who\u00a0so clearly loves what he\u2019s writing about. There\u2019s an absurd combination of fun and wonder and horror on every\u00a0page. We can only hope that having taken 25\u00a0years to write his second novel, he\u2019ll\u00a0be back sooner with his next.<\/p>\n
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