The blurb of The Valley of Masks , besides heaping praise on the novel, as blurbs on book jackets usually do, is also vaguely threatening. A quote from Ashis Nandy, it kind of insinuates that if the reader is not able to grasp fully the import of this novel of much gravitas, the fault is probably with the reader: “This brilliant, superbly imaginative but terribly disturbing novel transcends borders, cultures, reading habits and literary fashions.” Right, I am suitably chastened, and give myself a thorough once-over to see if there are any lingering habits or fashions left over inside. Even before I start, I want to like this novel.
Contrasts
I'll admit it's a bit of struggle though. The novel is set in the Himalayas in an otherwise geographically indeterminate place and tells the story of a religious movement/sect started by the One, Aum, and its quest for the perfect individual and society. Everything in the novel, the location, the sect and its ideas and practices (there are shades of all the major religions of the world here) is seen through a just large enough tilt so that familiarity to our everyday world is retained while we are distanced at the same time too.
The novel sets out to be a fable; “Men must know what I have to tell; men must think about what I have to tell; and men must act on what I have to tell...” says the narrator. A fable, then, with this proposition at its heart, that ideas, and ideals, can be enervating, they can lead individuals and societies to outdo themselves and lead them ‘higher'. But, ultimately, because truth is individual and no man, or woman, can speak for another, and because the quest for truth inevitably becomes a quest for power over time, they can turn tyrannical.
Evil against truth
Much of the evil in the world is made possible because “men” find it easier to obey orders than to work out the truth for themselves: “I know the minds of men, everywhere, are like mango pulp. They can be squeezed into a glass or a spoon, or even be splattered on a plate...I have learned that most men are happy to leave their pulp in the care of others. I have also learned that the world has seen grand pulpmasters, some impossibly noble, and some responsible for gutting the entrails of a million. In the eyes of these men lie knowledge and madness. The knowledge that men yearn for a greater purpose; and the madness to find for this yearning a door and a space” (p.3). All we can do, like the drain inspector in the novel, is engage, with all our imperfections, with the world, with all its imperfections.
As an idea, as a proposition, I guess this has as much validity as any other. A writer doesn't need to cover all the ideological bases and if he chooses to write only about the horrors of the collective or the commune, that is his prerogative. I only wish the idea was translated into narrative form as a novel with better skill. For a novel that says putting ideas before people is a bad idea, the inescapable irony is that The Valley of Masks more often than not becomes an exposition, often laboured and tiring, about an idea, and its many corollaries. Tighter editing could have helped enormously. There are very few real, fleshed-out characters one can relate to, or even learn from, as they live their lives, the dalit drain inspector and Parvati being among the very few exceptions. Most others are subordinated to illustrating points and come with moral markers that can be seen a mile away. One ends up with a novel that at times feels like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” meets Animal Farm, but without the soaring soap-opera entertainment of the former or the conceptual and narrative tautness of the latter.
The Valley of Masks,Tarun J. Tejpal, 4th Estate, 2011, p. 330, Rs. 499.
