Savio de Souza's last song

[Preamble to a review: I did a version of this piece for the Sahitya Akademi's journal Indian Literature. It was one of those rare instances where I said yes to reviewing a book that I hadn’t yet read, and I regret it now: reading the novel and then writing this review took a few weeks off my life, or so it felt. It was also a difficult experience because in writing the piece, it was important to clarify that I have no problem with ornate prose in itself – unlike many readers I know, I don’t think language must only be used as cleanly and functionally as possible. But the writing in this book simply didn’t work for me, and I’ve tried to convey why. There’s a certain type of Indian-English writing where big words get used indiscriminately, with little regard for the rhythm of a sentence or the compatibility between a particular adjective and a particular noun, and I thought this was one of those cases.

Also, I've tried to include as many short excerpts as possible so that readers can decide for themselves if this sort of writing appeals to them. Needless to say, if it does, just ignore my assessment.]

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For a convoluted, overwritten novel with many narrative detours, it’s surprisingly easy to summarise the plot of Binoo John’s The Last Song of Savio de Souza. Set over nearly three decades in a fictional Kerala town named Puram, this is a story about a man with a golden voice who divides his time between singing for a church and playing basketball and football tournaments, while friends, lovers and various colourful people flit in and out of his life.

The world of Savio de Souza, his beloved sister Silvy and their parents Simon and Tessy is one where science and faith, poverty and technology circle each other uneasily. As the book opens we learn that Simon is a long-time driver for a convent and that Silvy’s fate is to join the Order of Benedictine Sisters. With religious authorities along the coast contending furiously for miracles and believers (“the stink of competing evangelism” is one of John’s catchier phrases), poor people trying to eke out a living are caught in the middle. A launching station changes the lives of fishermen because it provides jobs for their children – but for the local priests, the sight of a rocket rising towards the sky is like “a big question mark thrown by science at the Gods”, a rude intrusion in a place where prayers were once the only things sent up to the heavens.

These details are promising in themselves, as is John’s attempt to evoke the many aspects of Savio’s largely provincial life: the slow disintegrating of his family, the inevitable changes that occur in Puram over the years, the sense of loss and resignation. And in the subplot about Silvy being separated from her parents and brother, there is the seed of a moving story about lives sundered by tradition. But unfortunately these themes aren’t given a chance to play out, for the book’s prose is so florid and meandering that one rarely manages to invest in these characters. More often than not, John’s self-consciously bombastic writing drains the energy from the storytelling.

Almost from the first page, there are awkward phrases and facile jokes. (“In general, there was a constipated atmosphere in church,” we are told when a proposal for a Western toilet – because an ageing vicar can squat no longer – is kept pending.) Occasionally a good quip does come along, as when a priest recruiting for the Vatican is called a “nun-runner of the Catholic Church” – but even here, what could have worked very well as a throwaway joke is carelessly repeated in the same paragraph.

There is too much clutter: too many side-characters, too many superfluous little incidents, and unnecessary detail that is often so much at odds with the main thrust of the narrative that it has to be put in parentheses. Thus, a description of Savio playing basketball begins well (“When he reached the apogee of his jump, he froze for a fleeting moment, stretched like a Byzantine sculpture…”) but then halts mid-jump to give us a distracting piece of information (his jersey “had ‘St Joseph’ written at the back, without an apostrophe and terribly misaligned”), so that the effect is diluted. It’s a bit like watching the handsome protagonist collapsing in a heap, instead of completing his throw with the same grace that he began it.

The cumbersome sentences keep adding up. It isn’t enough, apparently, to say “Savio resisted the urge to jump the wall and hug his father and bring him back home” when you can instead come up with a rambling “Savio resisted the urge, that genetic urge, that primordial surge of love, to jump the wall and hug his father and bring him back to the home of their childhood, of their tinkling laughter, their sorrows, their surrenders, deaths and farewells”. I’m not trying to make the case that novelistic writing must always be short and to the point, but there should at least be some elegance in word arrangements. With its clumsy juxtaposing of "genetic urge" and "primordial surge", and the banal finish ("tinkling laughter, sorrows, surrenders, deaths and farewells"), the above description lacks the rhythm that one expects from a well-constructed long sentence.

Another sample, which I offer without comment:

When this goddess led his finger to her legs, the marble smooth legs of many cataclysmic nights, dreams and disasters, when he had all the chance in the world to enter that tabernacle of desire, that alcove held together by her thighs which drove nursery kids to rebel against their mothers, when he could wash off the sin and stain of the whore by dousing himself with the moral detergent of angelic Silvy, Savio at that moment, got up.

The narrative is also characterised by a recording of events, so that the characters are constantly explained to us, instead of gradually revealing themselves through conversation. And when conversation – or interior monologue – does occur, it usually takes a dramatically exaggerated form, as in the stream-of-consciousness passage where Silvy addresses her father:

“Appa, are you leaving me here, friend and guide of my childhood, are you leaving me here? … How many times have you picked me up, Appa, father of my childhood, father of my youth, 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! Are you leaving me here, Appa?”

This goes on for another half-page. The repeated use of “Appa, are you leaving me here” seems intended as a poetic refrain, but good poetry is usually not what results when you string together a lot of sentences like “When will we go again, Appa, to the beach of my childhood to skip and hop, when the naughty waves come all the way up?” This is a case of affected language substituting for real emotion instead of expressing it.

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The immediately identifiable literary mode in The Last Song of Savio de Souza is that of magic realism. There is a view that this form is now dated or irrelevant – that it was an expression for the social complexities of regions that hadn’t yet found a distinct novelistic voice for the world stage, and that its ability to startle readers has worn off. In itself, this is a suspect idea: there is no reason why a particular type of writing shouldn’t continue to flourish as long as there are authors up to the task of using it meaningfully. The real problem is that magic realism seems especially susceptible to misuse, often becoming a tool of convenience. Want to convey a general sense of an exotic setting where unusual things happen (or where people yearn to have unusual things happen to them)? Well, just throw in a few obviously supernatural incidents at irregular intervals, and call it “heightened reality”. Anything goes.

There’s something very random about the magic-realist bits in John’s novel. Among them is a prolonged episode where Savio’s friend Hamid stabs an eve-teaser named Camel, who then transforms, literally, into a dead man walking – his bleeding carcass saunters through the town’s streets until it reaches Camel’s room (by which time it has turned into a skeleton). There is also a moderately engaging description of monkey slaughter that results in a biology teacher and two macaques laid out together on the ground in an “evolutionary tableau of the dead or the dying, the half-dead and the fully alive”, and a gratuitous account of a “satyagrahi” named Sumati protesting outside a secretariat for the return of her land. She quickly becomes a prostitute, servicing just about every man in the region, and eventually destined for “communal rape” (her “valiant vagina, that mute uncomplaining receptor of many Puram phalluses” is evidently meant to be a symbol of something, but I couldn’t figure out what).

On view throughout is a massive Gabriel Garcia Marquez complex, what with meta-references to things that will happen in the future (“In the ecstasy of that moment, when Savio bent to nibble at the offering, Regalia saw the python slithering in front of her and choked in exactly the way she would, many years later, when the sea swelled with a deep cosmic upheaval and became a rising wall just a few feet from her, when everything was to end”), and more specifically, to fluids which gather in improbably large quantities. Tessy’s tears formed a little rivulet in the house, it is revealed; they “flowed along the baked brick floor, touched the rolled-up sleeping mats, flowed past the easy chair which Simon had picked up from a waste shop in Chalai, before making a reflective puddle in the corner”. Later, the “rivulet of blood” from Camel’s wounds will trail slowly behind him on his long death-walk. Apart from being highly derivative of Marquez, these soggy interludes add nothing to our understanding of the story or its characters - they exist purely to create eye-popping moments.

In any case, the book may as well have been titled “Chronicle of a Tsunami Foretold”; from the start, it’s obvious that everything in Savio’s life and the life of Puram is leading up to the tragedy of December 2004. Ironically, it’s when the apocalyptic wave arrives (and here is a real-life event that can make even the excesses of magic realism seem feeble) that John’s writing becomes a little subdued, as if constrained by the graveness of the occasion. The climactic passages are an odd mix of two very different writing styles – one characteristically baroque, the other the prosaic style of reportage. There is surreal imagery (notably in an account of Savio and a former girlfriend playing amidst the flying fishes, crabs and octopuses that have washed up on the beach), but there are also descriptions that tread close to conventional journalism: “A few miles down the Velankanni coast in Nagapattinam, Arko Datta captured raw tragedy and death as few have, either before or after. The desperate mother, her palms turned helplessly towards the heavens...”

This makes for an uneven end to a very ambitious, busy but frustratingly laboured novel. On this evidence John clearly has many stories to tell – perhaps too many – apart from a certain knack for observation and empathy. But for the human element of his stories to come through, his prose needs to be tidier and more discerning.