First-time authors usually make a fundamental error, or their editors do: There is too much crammed into one novel, maybe in the fear that there won't be a second one, and readers are subjected to a Clockwork Orange scenario where we are forced to see worlds upon worlds while sitting stunned in our chairs.
Perhaps that's why the inexplicable blurb on the cover of John's book speaks of a ‘kaleidoscopic family saga that is universal and of all time'. It's only kaleidoscopic insofar as there is a tumult of characters and events that blind the eye, making you constantly check back to keep individuals fresh in your mind. So there's Savio, his sister Silvy, his sister's friend Silvy (!), his friends Rajah and Verghese, Brothers and Sisters and Fathers of the cloth variety, a Bishop, Yesudas, the restaurateur Ramaswamy Iyer, Murugan the cobbler, Saramma the practical evangelist....and we've only got to Page 97. Even Chaucer gave his people enough of the spotlight without mixing one story up with another; it wasn't All Their Tales, was it? But John does successfully decimate the Church just like Chaucer did, more anon.
Add to the deluge of personas, the monologues various people start spouting as though declaiming on the stage, like Savio's sister Silvy to her father when she leaves home for the convent, and one is as dismayed as Silvy's family: ‘How many times have you picked me up, Appa, father of my sorrows, my prayers, my joys? Don't you remember the time when you first bought a ball for Savio and I took it and hid it, Appa? How unbridled was that joy!' and so on.
Strange dialogue
It's a strange kind of dialogue, somewhat lacking in veracity, again echoed when at one point students look up friend Silvy's dress, (enjoying all the while the ‘two pieces of throbbing architecture in front of them'), and a mother complains ‘I don't want my young boy to walk around with a perpetual hard-on'. Which South Indian mother would say something like that?
Even when hostel boys watch friend Silvy walk past, at the end of which perambulation the balcony floor is ‘awash with semen', it doesn't seem plausible. Unless this is some kind of hallucinatory moment.
John has a nice sense of humour, though. The chapter where a dead man's dentures pop out and he looks like he's laughing — ensuring a domino effect which will give rise to the Church of Resurrection where the bottom line, as with so many religious endeavours, is money — is cinematic.
Talking of bottom lines, the ‘nun-running vicar' who feels up sister Silvy's behind while muttering ‘Mother Mary' may shock you, dear reader, but no one else in Kerala. Later, when sister Silvy reads about the testing of Princess Diana's virginity, she thinks the vicar's own test ‘had been done at the wrong end'.
My favourite bit was when a cook without hands who makes parippu vada by slamming it against his chest is spoken of as ‘I can imagine how he makes the uzhunnu vada with the hole in the middle.'
John even has a line, which may be worth the price of admission, so to speak. It comes when he writes about the horror of killing monkeys to make an elixir and later arrives the brilliant description of a man ‘lying like an evolutionary commentary with a macaque on each side'. If only that could have been carried forward in the tsunami imagery, where only one line, again, stands out: This is where hands reach toward dead hands, quite opposite to the moment of creation depicted by Michelangelo's Genesis, marking a second, this time unintentional, ironic parallel. In the final hours, when sister Silvy is open to a glorious Sunday morning while Savio renders up his last song, we appreciate the writer's delicate touch. It should have permeated the whole.
The Last Song of Savio de Souza,Binoo K. John, Harper Collins, Rs. 350.
