While bibliomysteries, or adventures centred on books and the surrounding world, are quite common in the West — Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón has recently quite popularised the genre — in India, they are still a rarity. With The Book Hunters of Katpadi , Pradeep Sebastian opens up the magic casement to this forlorn land.
Of course, it needs a bit of specialisation to know that a battered copy found in a second-hand bookshop or a book leaf perforated by silverfish can be worth a fortune or a murder or two (there is no murder in Book Hunters though).
But anyone who has been following Sebastian’s column, ‘A Typophile’s Notes’, in these pages of Literary Review would be familiar with the significance of rare print editions, bookmaking, book collecting, antiquarian book dealing, and so on. Book Hunters also explains these topics at length, preparing the ground for more bibliomysteries to follow in the future.
Lost world
Fittingly, this book about books is a lovely object in itself, with its quaint pen-and-ink illustrations, silk-ribbon page-marker and dust jacket in black, green, gold and white. For many book lovers, it will bring back a lost world of gilt-edged hardbacks found in shadowy library nooks or grandparents’ damp-decorated bookcases.
Book Hunters resurrects a bygone era not just in its form but also in its content. While being set in contemporary Chennai, it invites you to imagine, via the bibliomysteries it sets out to solve, the Madras and Ooty of yore when sahibs and memsahibs walked the streets. In a moment, mundane present-day Chennai becomes the new-England city where the British went about building the first railways, hospitals, churches, libraries and schools. For me, reading Book Hunters was like getting a key to the past — the thrill is akin to the one you get while gazing at the strangely denuded and unthinkably orderly roads of colonial India in the paintings by the Daniells. It is apt that Book Hunters has a golden key embossed on its cloth-bound cover. The key opens the door not only to this book also to long-lost days pickled in words: is it not in books that the past is most perfectly preserved?
Part of the mystery of the past in Book Hunters involves a particular Englishman, Francis Burton. This explorer of lands and languages who gave prudish Victorians just what they wanted by translating One Thousand and One Nights and Kamasutra had spent some time in Ooty when he was in India. Sebastian weaves his adventure around Burton’s activities, writerly and otherwise, in the hill station. A fragment of a notorious report by him is announced to have survived, and Kayal, a young Chennaite who helps run Biblio, India’s first full-fledged antiquarian bookshop, goes on its trail. In the process, more secrets tumble out.
Jaywalker’s guide
There are three threads of mystery. They are disparate, apart from the fact that they are all pegged on books. This gives the novel a somewhat episodic nature and prevents the central mystery surrounding the purported Burton manuscript from gaining depth.
The adventure also tends to fizzle out in the long passages of information about the world of antiquarian books. There is something of Ray’s detective stories featuring Feluda in Book Hunters . Ray had a habit of using the young sleuth as his mouthpiece for enlightening his young adult readers on sundry subjects. In those stories, as in Book Hunters , the frequent paragraphs of information glitter with esoteric knowledge, but can also make you roll your eyes in exasperation, especially when you are eager to get to the end of the mystery.
But these are minor irritants, which are almost cancelled out by the other pleasures. Book Hunters is also, in a way, a city novel, and the city at its heart is Chennai and its old avatar, Madras.
Chennaites will feel the happiness of sweating through crowded George Town, buzzing Mylapore, or the sprawling campus of Madras Christian College in Tambaram. If one of the delights of reading is to recognise the familiar in it and to love it anew through words, then Book Hunters is the book to be hunted down and read.
The Book Hunters of Katpadi ; Pradeep Sebastian, Hachette, ₹599
