FEBIN JOY (5031)
Q & A (Slumdog Millionaire)
In Q & A , Ram Mohammad Thomas tells the story of his life and
all its ups and downs.
He's just eighteen, and yet he has experienced one hell of a
roller-coaster ride of a life, its fast and abrupt falls and rises
leaving the reader dizzy and whiplashed.
Swarup is relentless, too: he never eases up on the pace or the back and
forth between good and bad fortune.
In many ways the book is like one long retch, with those brief deceptive
periods of comforting calm between otherwise unstoppable flows.
Framing the story is Ram's greatest triumph: he participated in an Indian TV quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion ? (also known as W3B) -- and, despite being an uneducated waiter, became the first contestant to answer all twelve questions correctly and take the prize. At the beginning of the book he is arrested for this grand feat, the television producers charging that he must have cheated and that they shouldn't have to pay up. Tortured by the police, he gets a reprieve when a lawyer is willing to at least listen to his side of the story, demanding to hear the full story of how Ram could have answered all these questions. By telling episodes from his life Ram slowly reveals what he has experienced -- and, incidentally, how he came to know the answers to these particular questions.
It's not a bad framing device, and for the most part it works surprisingly well. Some of the larger ideas in the novel -- all the way down to a dramatic final showdown over the last question -- also work quite well (and should make for a decent film version). What works less well is Ram's teeming life story: all of Dickens' books put together don't seem to contain this much misery, evil, heartbreak, retribution, and reversals (and re-reversals) of fortune. Ram isn't merely orphaned once, but several times. He has to fend for himself from a relatively early age, and every time he seems to have found a place where he is safe catastrophe strikes. From the spectacular murder-suicide of the priest who had raised him as a young child to his going to work for someone he discovers is a contract killer, there's blood and gore and danger everywhere.
This is a book full of murders, with a couple of suicides thrown in for good measure too -- as well as additional horrific demises (death by rabies !) -- not to mention sexual violations galore, the intentional maiming of children, theft, corruption, international espionage, all -- except the last -- in numerous (it sometimes seems: countless) variations. There's also one very lucky coin ..... Ram makes some good friends and (inevitably) falls in love with a prostitute and he tries to do good and sometimes winds up doing bad (there's quite a bit of blood dripping from his hands too, by the end).
There are many scenes from the life of the poor and their particular hard lives (the lives of the rich he encounters are hard too, just differently) and Swarup introduces all sorts of characters suffering all sorts of Indian fates. Unfortunately, the book is almost all a blur, as he only quickly recounts the stories (or rather: miseries), before hurrying off to the next episode. This book skims the surface (adroitly -- it stays afloat) and doesn't ponder any depths, murky or clear. There's some fun in all this, but it wears a bit thin after a while too. Swarup is creative in his invention, but the book is more a cartoon than anything resembling a novel.
Swarup gamely plows ahead -- and ahead and ahead, all the way to ... well, we won't give it away, but you can guess how most things turn out. His narrator is only eighteen years old, and Swarup doesn't offer a fully convincing voice, but it's adequate for his purposes. Q & A is readable, and on some level quite entertaining -- but it's too eager and too simple and ultimately only a throwaway read.
Framing the story is Ram's greatest triumph: he participated in an Indian TV quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion ? (also known as W3B) -- and, despite being an uneducated waiter, became the first contestant to answer all twelve questions correctly and take the prize. At the beginning of the book he is arrested for this grand feat, the television producers charging that he must have cheated and that they shouldn't have to pay up. Tortured by the police, he gets a reprieve when a lawyer is willing to at least listen to his side of the story, demanding to hear the full story of how Ram could have answered all these questions. By telling episodes from his life Ram slowly reveals what he has experienced -- and, incidentally, how he came to know the answers to these particular questions.
It's not a bad framing device, and for the most part it works surprisingly well. Some of the larger ideas in the novel -- all the way down to a dramatic final showdown over the last question -- also work quite well (and should make for a decent film version). What works less well is Ram's teeming life story: all of Dickens' books put together don't seem to contain this much misery, evil, heartbreak, retribution, and reversals (and re-reversals) of fortune. Ram isn't merely orphaned once, but several times. He has to fend for himself from a relatively early age, and every time he seems to have found a place where he is safe catastrophe strikes. From the spectacular murder-suicide of the priest who had raised him as a young child to his going to work for someone he discovers is a contract killer, there's blood and gore and danger everywhere.
This is a book full of murders, with a couple of suicides thrown in for good measure too -- as well as additional horrific demises (death by rabies !) -- not to mention sexual violations galore, the intentional maiming of children, theft, corruption, international espionage, all -- except the last -- in numerous (it sometimes seems: countless) variations. There's also one very lucky coin ..... Ram makes some good friends and (inevitably) falls in love with a prostitute and he tries to do good and sometimes winds up doing bad (there's quite a bit of blood dripping from his hands too, by the end).
There are many scenes from the life of the poor and their particular hard lives (the lives of the rich he encounters are hard too, just differently) and Swarup introduces all sorts of characters suffering all sorts of Indian fates. Unfortunately, the book is almost all a blur, as he only quickly recounts the stories (or rather: miseries), before hurrying off to the next episode. This book skims the surface (adroitly -- it stays afloat) and doesn't ponder any depths, murky or clear. There's some fun in all this, but it wears a bit thin after a while too. Swarup is creative in his invention, but the book is more a cartoon than anything resembling a novel.
Swarup gamely plows ahead -- and ahead and ahead, all the way to ... well, we won't give it away, but you can guess how most things turn out. His narrator is only eighteen years old, and Swarup doesn't offer a fully convincing voice, but it's adequate for his purposes. Q & A is readable, and on some level quite entertaining -- but it's too eager and too simple and ultimately only a throwaway read.
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