This is an astonishingly rich and complex story. Kunzru's writing
is so confident, and his plot so audacious, that it is hard to
believe that this is his first novel. It seems a lazy comparison to
draw parallels with Salman Rushdie, but the colourful streetlife of
Bombay at the turn of the 20th century forms the same kind of
compelling backdrop as Partition-era India does in Midnight's
Children. Pran Nath, son and heir to a wealthy money-lender, is
brought up in luxury, his pale skin a sign of his superior caste.
However, a secret known only to his opium-addicted mother, who died
in labour, and one of the servants, is that his real father was
English, and that he was conceived at the height of a cataclysmic
rainstorm, explaining his doom-laden astrological chart. Cast from
the household in shame, Pran sets out on a sequence of fantastical,
if nightmarish adventures, from being sold to a pair of eunuch
prostitutes to a key role, dressed as a young girl, in the court of
a squabbling pair of royal brothers. Revealing how he resurfaces in
the red-light district of Bombay as Pretty Bobby, fixer
extraordinaire, and ends up studying at Oxford would give away the
most outrageous twist in the book. The final chapter, in which he
journeys to Africa as part of an anthropological expedition after
being rejected by his bohemian girlfriend for being 'too white',
does strain the reader's credibility, but you forgive Kunzru for a
slightly ambitious overreach on the grounds of his vivid writing
and interesting characterization. Pran's many transformations raise
many questions about racial and gender identities, but Kunzru makes
his point in an entertaining rather than didactic way, and any
political subtext in the book - the decadent last days of the Raj
and the rise of political discontent in the slums are themes - is
secondary to the sheer joie de vivre of the exhilarating narrative.
(Kirkus UK)
In India, at the birth of the last century, an infant is brought howling into the world, his remarkable paleness marking him out from his brown-skinned fellows. Revered at first, he is later cast out from his wealthy home when his true parentage is revealed. So begins Pran Nath’s odyssey of self-discovery – a journey that will take him from the streets of Agra, via the red light disrict of Bombay, to the green lawns of England and beyond – as he struggles to understand who he really is.
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