“A decent sophomore effort”

The main character of this book is an insane, genocidal sociopath. First he creates people that have no knowledge of good and evil. Then he requires that they follow rules that can only be followed if they had knowledge of good and evil? What kind of sick, sadistic jerk does that?

Much fun comes from reading these Amazon.com customer reviews of The Holy Bible: King James Version – a good demonstration of what happens when you don't give a “holy” text the unthinking respect that most religions arrogantly demand for themselves, and actually read and analyse the thing instead. Some of the review headers are funny in themselves (“Epic gore-flick spoiled by weird ending”; “Poorly written horror book about an awful dictator called God”; “NOT for children”). And as an acolyte of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I endorse this review titled “Blasphemy!”:

King James has taken some of his inspiration from Pastafarianism, but corrupted its message beyond all recognition. There is no mention of Pirates, or the Heavenly beer volcano, or His Divine Noodliness, the FSM.

RAmen to that. And looking forward to more such matter-of-fact literary criticism of texts from other traditions.

P.S. On a more serious note, I'm currently working on a review of Arun Shourie's new book Does He Know a Mother's Heart?, large chunks of which are dedicated to scriptural analysis. More on that soon.

Spirit and flesh: on Urmilla Deshpande's carnal prose

[Did a version of this for the Sunday Guardian]

It's often said that Indian authors aren’t good at writing about sex – that they get self-conscious, or struggle to find the balance between biological descriptiveness and subtle, feather-touch erotica. Actually, the existence of the international Bad Sex Award – which has been thrown at such notable writers as John Updike, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe – suggests that awkward sex writing is a universal phenomenon. (The sole Indian winner of the prize so far is Aniruddha Bahal’s Bunker 13, with its analogies involving Bugattis and Volkswagens: “She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high.”) But I admit that my initial reaction on coming across Urmilla Deshpande’s Slither was to be impressed that an Indian writer has even attempted a collection of “carnal prose” (as the subtitle puts it).

Once I began reading the book, I was pleased to find that not only is much of the sex writing here quite good, but also that the stories show imagination and variety. Sexual passion, in its many forms, plays a central role throughout, but these are also searching narratives about other aspects of the human experience: loss, insecurity, nostalgia, generational and cultural gaps. One of Deshpande’s strengths is that she can bring a strong – and unexpected – charge even to seemingly mundane incidents, such as a woman and her mother-in-law chatting with each other while being measured for blouses by an old, half-blind family tailor. Or the same mother-in-law matter-of-factly saying that her aged husband acquires a temporary libido once a year, “usually after a wedding, when he has seen all you girls and your raw-mango breasts, and imagined everything that is going on in the nuptial bed”.

Like many short-story collections, Slither has its hits and misses, but the high points are very strong. In one of the best pieces, “Isis”, a young writer becomes infatuated with a long-retired movie siren; as his loins are stirred by a woman old enough to be his grandmother (and by talk of the effect she used to have on men in her heyday), we are reminded that sexual desire is as much a matter of imagination as of naked flesh. At the same time, other stories provide counterpoints to Isis’s feral, age-defying sexuality. Suman, the protagonist of “Slight Return”, is barely forty but she has never really had a sexual life at all - even her visits to her (male) gynecologist, she reflects, were warmer and more fulfilling than her emotionless trysts with her husband. When she accidentally sees her 16-year-old daughter making love with a boyfriend, she thinks about her own life and the many taboos she grew up with. But she has also accumulated life experiences that allow her to be accepting of her daughter’s sexuality: having done social work with rape victims-turned-prostitutes, she knows about women who never even had a choice in these matters. I thought the contrast between Suman's wisdom and her private sense of desolation and discomfort was very well expressed.

The stories that didn’t work for me are the ones – like the stream-of-consciousness narrative “dUI” – where the prose becomes overly turgid and self-indulgent. (“What purpose has coincidence? To dam two streams into a single flow, to stroke an eager cock, suck a succulent nipple, arch the long back of a long torso in the moment of the end of the scene?”) But it feels churlish to criticise a writer for taking risks or for reaching beyond the confines of straightforward narrative storytelling, and I admired at least the intent and ambition behind some of the more experimental pieces such as “Goblin Market”, which is a revisiting of Christina Rosetti’s controversial, symbolism-laden 19th century poem. (Writing this story appears to have been a form of catharsis for Deshpande, who says she was haunted by Rosetti’s work for years.)

I was also amused by Deshpande mentioning, in her acknowledgements, that much of this book was written in a decidedly unsexy setting – during a family Christmas in Canada. “I often found myself in a roomful of nieces and nephews and in-laws and sisters, typing carnal prose into my laptop while eating and drinking whatever was handed to me … tea or coffee, turkey-and-cranberry sauce, bhel, chicken curry.” It reminded me of the caricature of the phone-sex worker who is really a slovenly, middle-aged housewife in a low-rent apartment, going about her daily chores even as her husky voice inflames her callers' imaginations. As they say, it's mostly between the ears.

Fragrant flower 1, mushroom cloud 0: the wondrous meeting of Rajendra Kumar and Bertrand Russell

This week sees the anniversary of a defining event in the atomic age – on July 16, 1945 the first nuclear weapons test was conducted in New Mexico. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would follow less than a month later.

Now flash-forward 22 years to 1967. In the climactic scene of the Hindi film Aman, Dr Gautamdas – played by the intrepid Rajendra Kumar – single-handedly wrestles a mushroom cloud to the ground and ends the nuclear threat for good.

Okay, I’m exaggerating (but only slightly). I’m also being a little mean, because Aman is a very well-intentioned film about a young Indian doctor’s resolution to work with the Japanese victims of nuclear radiation and to simultaneously spread the message of world peace and brotherhood. This subject is handled mostly with restraint, but a few surreal moments do slip through the cracks. For example, when Gautamdas’s father sulks about his son leaving him to go and work in a distant country, we get the unusual spectre of Rajendra Kumar likening himself to a fragrant phool. A flower’s “sugandh” isn’t only meant for the maali who tended it, he says – it belongs to the whole world.

"Oh well, as long as they remember to water you every day"

Aman contains many noble sentiments like the above, but the film is probably best remembered today for one of the most unusual cameos in movie history: the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell playing himself in a three-minute scene where Gautamdas goes to seek his blessings in London.

You have to feel a little sorry for Russell. For one thing, he is referred to in highly mystical terms throughout the build-up to his guest appearance – as a devtaa, a mahapurush who blesses us with his presence only once every century, and so on. When Gautamdas receives the letter saying that the great man has granted him an appointment, he calls it a teerth-yatra or pilgrimage. I’m not sure the well-known agnostic would have approved of all this.

Besides, even a film as high-minded as Aman deserves some criticism for visiting the torment of Rajendra Kumar’s English upon a 94-year-old man. Given that the Japanese people in the story speak in Hindi (which is completely acceptable as cinematic licence), I wish they had hired AK Hangal or someone to dub Russell’s voice. Why not Raaj Kumar? It would have made the scene an all-time classic. Imagine: “Jaani, tum mushroom cloud se jaake lado. Main oopar waale se prarthana karoonga ke tumhaari vijay ho.”
 

Sadly, then, the existing Russell scene is a pale shadow of what it could have been. But it's still pretty good. Here's the video (Youtube link here).

Two Swedish novellas: Manolis' Mopeds, The Legend of the Plague King

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

The bilingual literary journal Pratilipi has done some notable work in the field of translation in the past few years. Recent titles by its publishing arm Pratilipi Books include Home from a Distance, which is an anthology of Hindi poets translated into English, and Prabhat Ranjan’s Marquez ki Kahani, a study (in Hindi) of the life and work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now, as part of a project to introduce voices from around the world to India, they have published English translations of three very interesting contemporary Swedish novels.

Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular here in recent times - with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy giving Indian readers a pretext to discover earlier classics like the Martin Beck series - but of course the region has a rich body of literature in other genres too. The slim books published by Pratilipi tell offbeat stories that combine melancholia with dry humour, and the settings range from medieval Sweden to the post-war Balkans to a sleepy village facing the advent of modernity.

I particularly enjoyed Jan Henrik Swahn’s Manolis’ Mopeds, which has been translated from Swedish to English by the author himself. The book’s fragmented narrative and whimsical tone take a while to get used to, but it soon resolves itself into a devastating portrait of an old man who has become irrelevant – even to himself. A mason by profession, Manolis lives in a Greek village, growing tomatoes and eggplants, occasionally meeting his estranged wife (she has remarried the TV, we are drolly told) and riding about on his precious moped; it’s the fifth he has owned. At times he imagines that there’s an alternate Manolis living somewhere nearby, one who opted to ride donkeys instead of mopeds. But things are changing in the village anyway: there are no donkeys around now, the quaint old buildings may soon be torn down and replaced by shiny modern ones, and even the tavern that Manolis spends most of his best moments in could be under threat. An old way of life is quietly passing.

Nothing of all he knows about the island and the islanders has he managed to pass down. He will take it all with him to the grave. He'll take the donkeys, the tobacco factory, the old chairs, the smoke house, the coffins, the barrels, the wheelbarrows, the days when the village reeked of retsina, he will take it all with him.

The strength of Swahn’s book lies not so much in the plot as in its detailing of vignettes – the tragedies and small pleasures – from a life; in the way, for instance, that it almost unobtrusively discloses that Manolis’s young son died in a car his father had saved up to buy (“at a bend in the road where no one else during one hundred years of automobile history had ever succeeded in killing himself before”). This is one of the strangest, most moving novellas I’ve read in a while.

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Reading Manolis’ Mopeds is a bit like watching the deadpan films of the Kaurismaki brothers, but Lars Andersson’s The Legend of the Plague King made me think of the indelible images of spiritual despair in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Andersson’s book is set in the same place and period as Bergman’s film – the mid-14th century, shortly after the Black Death had devastated Sweden – and centres on a meeting between King Magnus Eriksson and a hunter named Tormod Gopa. The encounter doesn’t begin on an agreeable note (the king – already burdened by an insurgency launched against him by his son – is trapped in the hunter’s throwing net and strung up on a tree), but soon the two men recognise their affinities. “It is right that I free you,” Gopa tells the ruler, “for you once freed me.” Magnus’s law outlawing slavery had saved Gopa, then just three years old, from a life of serfdom. Ironically, Magnus was also three when he first became king (effectively losing his own freedom).

This becomes the starting point for a tentative conversation that draws on Nordic and Icelandic myths, touches on the relationship between a ruler and his subjects, and encourages us to wonder what manmade laws and authority might mean in a world that has been ravaged beyond imagining. Gopa’s account of the horrors he witnessed in plague-devastated villages amount to a vision of hell, and reminded me of scenes from The Seventh Seal: a procession of groaning self-flagellators; a young “witch” being burnt at the stake; Death standing on the beach, a scythe over his shoulder. But as in Bergman’s film, there is also a note of grace and affirmation at the end.

(The third book in the series – which I’ve just started – is Agneta Pleijel’s A Winter in Stockholm. Pratilipi is also planning a series of Spanish novels translated into Hindi)

The movie star as platitude-dispenser, and other thoughts on the celebrity circus

[Did this opinion piece for Elle magazine a few months ago, though it came out only in the July issue. In hindsight I wish I had kept clippings of Priyanka Chopra’s HT City columns – could easily do a book-length commentary on them sometime]

One of the highest-profile events at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year was the announcement of the winner of the DSC South Asian Literature Prize. As a crowd of authors, media-persons and book-lovers watched, the chief guest began his speech. “Writers are fountains of ideas,” said Kabir Bedi. A short, ponderous silence. “Their role in our lives is indispensable.”

Now this is a reasonable statement in a school-level sort of way, but consider the context. At one of the world’s largest book events – where far more nuanced thoughts about writers and writing were being expressed in discussions hour upon hour – here was a former movie and television star (and not someone who had occupied the highest rungs of his profession for that matter) as the cynosure of all eyes. Present on the dais was one of India’s best literary critics; in the audience were dozens of well-known writers, including Nobel laureates and Man Booker winners from India and elsewhere. Any of these people would have been a more appropriate choice to make this keynote speech.

To be fair to Bedi, he took the occasion seriously (even quoting Saul Bellow and alluding to Francis Bacon!) and refrained from playing to the gallery. I don’t know if the same can be said for other filmi performers who have been the plat du jour at book events in recent years – Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan at earlier editions of the Jaipur fest, for instance, or Goldie Hawn at the Kitab festival in Delhi a few years ago.

But as we know, movie stars – or movie have-beens – shine ever so brightly even when they are far outside their spheres of expertise. They take centrestage on TV shows that have nothing to do with acting, their sheen drowning out the efforts of “ordinary” people who deserve a brief moment in the spotlight. Thus, Akshay Kumar’s dubious culinary skills take pride of place on what is meant to be a serious cooking show. On song and dance contests, participants spend less time performing and more time gushing about what a privilege it is to meet their idol. Tushhar Kapoor appears on a pet-lovers' show and displays his empathy for other species by wondering aloud if gender differences even apply to animals. “I mean, a dog is a dog, right?”

For the ultimate testimony of our eagerness to cling to Bollywood’s coattails, consider how smoothly movie stars have turned into all-purpose columnists and advice gurus. Having given up on the main sections of newspapers a long time ago, much of my weekly dose of unintended humour in the past year came from a Priyanka Chopra column, full of unselfconscious banalities about “embracing the universe”, "just being yourself" and “going with the flow”. It is both amusing and in poor taste when people who owe a large part of their own fame and fortune to good luck – being in the right place at the right time – narcissistically inform their readers that “you can achieve anything if you seize the moment, like I did”. (News for you, Ms Chopra and others: the vast majority of us will never come close to achieving everything we desire, no matter how lovingly we scrutinise your platitudes.)

Of course, this ranting puts me in a tiny minority: these columns were more than justified by the market for them. They inspired hundreds of thousands of fan letters by devotees asking for advice on relationships or insights into the burning political topics of the days, or perhaps just sharing salacious gossip about a rival actor. Star-worshippers do tend to have a lot of free time on their hands.

Incidentally, one of the star columns I thought had promise was the one by Imran Khan, who – we kept being told – has a wacky sense of humour. Until something strange happened: every time Khan was about to write something even vaguely irreverent, he would preface it with a few lines asking that people shouldn’t get offended. More space was devoted to the pre-emptive apology than to the supposed cheekiness, and this brings us to another point about Bollywood stars: when you have to be constantly mindful about the views you hold on sensitive or potentially controversial subjects, how can you not settle into a bland public face, even if your default mode is to be blasé?

In India, movie stars quickly become spokespersons for safe, middle-of-the-road ideologies. Thus, even if their lifestyles are deemed racy by middle-class standards, they must be seen as upholders of tradition and culture in the areas where it Really Matters. For example, they must be photographed entering temples on special occasions. (In an interview a few years ago, the normally-diplomatic Bachchan was brusque with an interviewer who mentioned that his late father Harivanshrai had been an atheist – the tone of the superstar’s response almost suggested that his dad had been insulted.) When a star bride celebrates her first karva chauth, TV channels must park themselves outside the house for that precious exclusive shot of her sighting the moon from her window.

Frankly, much of this obsessing is unavoidable given the huge hold commercial cinema has on us. In a media-saturated time, you expect these hotties to be all over the place, gazing out of newspapers, wearing their carefully rehearsed “spontaneous” smiles or the tiny frowns that their public relations staff have told them are photogenic. It’s annoying, but one must live with it. Nor am I suggesting that all movie stars are unqualified to hold forth on subjects outside their immediate field – much less that they should be stopped from doing so. However, when disproportionate importance is attached to their views, when their frequently trite views are canonised as inspirational words of wisdom, when they are indiscriminately felicitated as youth icons even though some of them have records of law-breaking and cases pending against them – well, then it may be time to wonder why we are so starved of role models from other walks of life.

Sholay – notes on an establishing scene

Some movies have been so thoroughly analysed – in books, mainstream media and academic literature – that you feel almost silly writing about them. What more can a cineaste of my generation possibly say about Sholay, for example?

As the cliché has it, any true movie-lover has seen it at least 30 times (I won’t make such claims for the entire film, but I’ve certainly seen some of my favourite scenes dozens of times). Most Sholay buffs know every line by heart. (One of the first audio-cassettes I owned was the two-tape set of the dialogues.) We have deified the film and in some cases, as our cinematic horizons have broadened (or over-familiarity has bred tedium), we have deconstructed, undervalued and perhaps even scoffed at it. Responses have run the gamut from blind adoration to “Huh! Seven Samurai was better.” Pedants (I’ve been one in my time) enjoy telling less informed viewers that the Sholay look – so much more sophisticated than other Hindi films of its time – was inspired by the work of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and others; that the family-massacre scene – complete with the ominous sound of the wind blowing, and the shot of a gun pointed at a child cutting to a piercing train whistle – derives from Once Upon a Time in the West; and even that the Holi attack includes what might be a small homage to the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin!

In the Internet age, the film has been further scrutinised and demythologised: we now know, for example, that R D Burman’s classic gypsy tune for “Mehbooba Mehbooba” was lifted from a song by the Greek musician Demis Roussos. On YouTube, you can see the videos of two scenes that didn't make it to the final cut, and which once had near-mythical status for Sholay buffs: an extended version of the morbid scene where Gabbar Singh prepares to kill the young village boy Ahmed; and more importantly, the original ending, which had Gabbar being killed by the Thakur.

Like every other Sholay fan, I had convinced myself that the film couldn’t possibly hold further surprises for me. But a few weeks ago I saw it on DVD and realised that all these years there was a crucial link missing in my viewing experience: I had no memory of most of the opening-credits sequence, where the Thakur’s manservant Ramlal leads a policeman – on horseback – from the railway station to the Thakur’s haveli.

The back-story is that throughout my childhood, my Sholay-watching was done on a videocassette specially brought for me by a Lagos-based uncle on one of his India trips. Bits of the film, including the opening sequence, had been snipped to fit into the cassette's 180 minutes. The first shot – the railway station and the camera gliding down slowly to meet the train – was intact and so were the first few credits (accompanied by Burman’s lilting music and the shots of a sunbaked landscape that might have come from a classic Hollywood Western). But only the names of the six principal actors appeared in this print; there was an abrupt cut from the title "And Introducing Amjad Khan" to the post-credits scene where the Thakur is speaking with his visitor.

Whoever cut out the rest of the scene must have figured that opening credits are superfluous – as they indeed were in many films of the time. But watching the full sequence on DVD, I realised that here was one of the best establishing scenes I'd come across in any Hindi film.

As Ramlal and the policeman make their long ride, we are taken through the entire setting where the main action of the film will occur. First they pass the talaab where villagers and dacoits alike presumably get their water from (this is also where Gabbar’s men will accost Basanti as she waits for Veeru). As the two riders approach the village itself, the camera draws back to give us an aerial view of the houses as well as the temple, the mosque - and in the far distance, the water tank where the comical "suicide" scene will take place. Long before the film’s central narrative brings Veeru and Jai to Ramgarh, we become acquainted with this self-contained little community. We see the village centre and its people as they go about their daily routines: shopkeepers preparing for the day's business, children playing, women carrying water-pots, a goatherd driving his animals down a rough path.
 

This lively setting is left behind; they cross more barren land and finally, as the music reaches its crescendo and the title “Directed by Ramesh Sippy” appears, there is a pan to the haveli – symbolically cut off from the rest of the village – where the Thakur and his widowed daughter-in-law lead solitary lives. (Before we know about the Thakur’s tragedy, we see that the size of the house is incongruous with the number of people staying in it. Surely a whole family should be living here.)

Taken as a whole, the sequence is beautifully staged. (Also note the changing motifs in the score, from a guitar-dominated tune to a more Indian sound as they pass through the village.) Many Hindi movies of the time leapt straight into a narrative without spending much time on creating a mood, but Sholay is an exception. The film's visual power – its economy of storytelling, its assured shot composition and framing – begins right here, with this almost dialogue-less opening.

You can see most of the scene here, or in the video below: 

On A Kiss Before Dying, complexities of book-to-film adaptation, and the world of noir

I’ve been thinking about books, especially in the crime and suspense genres, which are highly resistant to being filmed – or at least resistant to being filmed faithfully. In other words, it may be possible to turn the basic plot into an excellent movie, but the nature and method of its suspense would be unlike that of the book, because of fundamental differences between literature and cinema.

Consider one of the best crime novels I know of: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which was filmed twice in America (in 1956 and 1991) and loosely adapted by Bollywood for Shahrukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar. In each case, the film had to make significant departures from the source material; to understand why, here’s a plot outline of Levin’s novel.

(Note: no major spoilers – most of what I’m about to reveal is contained in the first dozen or so pages, and I’m not giving away the central twist.)

A young man, a gold-digger, has been romancing a girl named Dorothy, the daughter of a rich entrepreneur. For reasons I won’t get into here, he decides to kill her, and the first third of the book (approx. 90 pages) is about the carrying out of his scheme. Throughout this segment, we are privy to the furious ticking of his mind – his anxiety when things don’t go as planned, his careful anticipation of glitches, even his self-congratulatory smugness. The narrative is in the third person, but we are as close to his inner state as it’s possible to get; the writing is so taut and intense that even as the reader condemns him morally, it’s hard not to feel personally invested – even implicated – in his actions.

But here’s the rub: we only get a bare-bones description of this man (he’s blond, blue-eyed, very handsome), and most crucially we never learn his name. He is referred to simply as “he”, and though that might sound forced or gimmicky, it works here because Levin so masterfully ties us to his protagonist’s consciousness. (After the first few pages, “he” becomes as precise a pronoun as “I” would be in a first-person narrative; the word can only possibly refer to one person. Some readers might not even realise that they don’t know “his” name until quite late in the story.)

Levin’s reasons for doing this become apparent in the next part of the book, as Dorothy’s sister Ellen starts making private enquiries about the men her sister may have been involved with at the time of her death. She encounters a few of them, and of course she learns their names. But the reader is flummoxed: we are now seeing things through Ellen’s eyes and it’s possible that the killer is one of the men she meets, but we have no way of knowing who it is. Because of the shift in perspective, the person we knew so intimately in the first section of the book is now a stranger to us.

This, then, is the set-up for the novel’s major twist. Like all of Levin’s books, A Kiss Before Dying is made up of several ingeniously constructed moments of suspense – but the revelation of the killer’s identity is the pièce de résistance. 

Given this summary, I’m sure you can see why A Kiss Before Dying is so difficult to film exactly as it was written. A movie (at least a movie that uses a conventional narrative structure**) would have to show us the murderer’s face right at the beginning – which means that when Ellen begins sleuthing, the viewer wouldn’t be in the dark about his identity. The film would have to generate suspense using other methods, perhaps by changing the story’s focus or chronology, or by keeping us initially uncertain about the man’s intentions. (The book dives straight into his psyche by opening on this classic pulp-fiction note: “His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him...”)

I wrote in this post about another Levin book I love, The Boys From Brazil. His best work creates an almost tangible sense of paranoia, which transcends conventional ideas about “suspense” writing. I can read The Boys From Brazil and A Kiss Before Dying over and over and discover something new each time, long after their major plot secrets have been revealed; these books are lessons in how to construct a story by putting together little details, and I think any budding writer – even one with “literary” rather than “genre” aspirations – can learn from them.

But there’s something else to be said about A Kiss Before Dying: in addition to being an excellent suspense novel, this is also a fine entry in the tradition of American noir literature of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

One of the essential themes of noir is the discontent that can lead people into a life of crime – the gnawing sense that the world is an inherently unjust place and that there’s a better life to be had, if only you can reach out and seize the moment. (Eventually, of course, even minor transgressions lead into mazes and cul de sacs, and the best-laid plans unravel.) The killer in A Kiss Before Dying is first and foremost a social menace and an opportunist, but he is also a small-town lad obsessed with a giant copper-manufacturing corporation that is making much more money than it knows what to do with – and there is a sense in which his story can be read as subtle social commentary.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Shah Rukh Khan character Ajay in Baazigar. Such were the imperatives of mainstream Hindi cinema in the early 1990s that this psychotic “hero” had to be given an elaborate back-story to partly justify his murderous acts. (As a boy, he watched his family being driven to ruin by the businessman whose daughters he now targets. As an adult, he earns a quasi-heroic death scene in his adoring mother’s arms; any Hindi-movie leading man who passes thus can automatically be considered redeemed on some level.) The protagonist of A Kiss Before Dying doesn’t have a dramatic revenge motive of this sort, and there is no attempt to turn him into a sympathetic character – but Levin does permit the reader to think about the personal circumstances and ambitions of an intelligent young boy from a family that’s struggling to make ends meet; a boy who has little interest in the mundane jobs he has to hold down, and who comes to believe that he deserves better. Where might his sense of the unfairness of things lead him? It's a classic noir question.

Where the dragon bears down on the lambs

Martin Amis once wrote with admiration about another fine practitioner of popular fiction, Thomas Harris – specifically about Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs: “Lecters I and II are thrillers, procedurals of pain and panic, and they involve the reader in various simplifications and unrealities. But Harris maintains human decorum too. His prose is hard and sober and decently sad as he takes us to the place where the dragon bears down on the lambs.”

That last sentence applies to parts of A Kiss Before Dying too. There are moments of unexpected poignancy here: in a casual description of the things packed by a giddily romantic, gullible young woman for a honeymoon she will never go on; or in the betrayal felt by another lady, a loner, who discovers that her emotions have been toyed with. Even some of the throwaway passages are revealing: when a girl, a side-character, ends a mostly subdued letter to a murder victim’s father with a frivolous reference to the current fashion trends in her college, we get a glimpse into the inner world of a student who wants desperately to fit in.

Levin was just 23 years old when he wrote A Kiss Before Dying. This is credible if you look at the confidence and audacity of the book’s structure, and the many risks he takes; only a (very precocious) young writer with nothing to lose would try some of the things he does here. But when you consider the real feeling expressed here for the lonely-hearts and misfits who make up the victims (and occasionally the wrongdoers) of the noir world, it’s staggering to think that this book could come from such a young person. At 23, even as he wrote a bloody good page-turner where our point of identification is largely with the killer, he also found a way to evoke sympathy for the lambs that get preyed on by dragons.

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** One avant-garde approach to filming the first section of A Kiss Before Dying would be to let the killer’s eyes be the camera – so that we see everything from his viewpoint and never get to see his face at all. Something like this was done in the 1940s Hollywood film Lady in the Lake, but needless to say it’s a gimmicky technique, and if it isn’t well-executed it can easily become laughable or just monotonous.

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Important note: if you plan to read A Kiss Before Dying, do avoid reading about it on Wikipedia or even the plot summaries on Amazon.com – some of these rather foolishly give the killer’s name away. And if you do buy it, I'd recommend this lovely-looking Pegasus edition, available on Flipkart.

[Some related posts: Noir's arc - an anthology of American noir writing; Levin’s The Boys From Brazil; Thomas Harris, monster-maker]