A few years ago, I came out of a screening of a Hindi film called Shaandaar feeling hungover. Like I’d been willy nilly made part of someone else’s drug-induced experiment.
The Book of M gave me déjà vu . I read it quickly, finding it unputdownable not because I thought it particularly gripping — frankly, there were times I just wanted to lay it down and forget about it — but because I was never sure what the heck was going on and I just wanted to get it.
Told from multiple points of view, the novel is what one might call dystopian fantasy fiction.
One fine day people all around the world, starting in India, begin to lose their shadows and thereafter their memories, creating the worst kind of chaos, and soon dividing and subdividing into demented factions of the shadowed and the shadowless. All of this madness is compounded by the fact that the shadowless start modifying the world around them to suit their new reality so that the world keeps morphing according to how those individuals see it. It is never clear why some people lose their shadows and others don’t.
A tiny fraction of the book is set in India (small details will set your teeth on edge) but most of the action takes place in the U.S., where, from survival drama it transforms into an elaborate road trip replete with violence and gore that will put any video game to shame. In fact, that’s what the book really should have been. It’ll probably be a movie coming to a theatre near you instead.
An attempt is made to link all this brain-addling to a myth, a story about a shadow dislocated from its owner, and the memories of elephants, the connection so slight that the dots don’t join at all.
Sometimes I felt like what I was reading was entirely within parentheses with everything outside it gone missing. I found myself reading and worrying all the time if the ungettableness of the book was just me. To make it worse even the end offered no explanations, only a new babaji-type leader for the new world order .
The writer is the author of Jobless Clueless Reckless, a novel about teenagers.
The Book of M; Peng Shepherd, HarperCollins, ₹599
Published - July 21, 2018 04:00 pm IST
