Unlike the excellent Elvis, Raja, Moyez Gulhamhussein Vassanji’s ‘03 novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is determined to bore, dedicated to the proposition that suspense must be deflated and stimulation must be snuffed out. Vassanji confuses foreshadowing with giving away the plot up front. Almost nothing happens without being foretold 30 pages ahead. It’s like the author is driving at some sadistic, literary version of Dogme 95.

The novel, an account of a desi man’s complicity in government corruption after the Kenyan independence struggle, contains stretches of eminently quotable writing:

Nothing else in an Indian woman’s life quite approaches the sheer ecstasy of arranging a brother’s wedding. She turns into a child again… an enthusiastic, busybody sister… [Mother] would have preferred a Punjabi girl… [but] better an Indian and respectable Hindu in hand… than a Punjabi in the bush somewhere in India…

Beside me stands Dadaji… he too looks down at the [Great Rift Valley]… This is the route he toiled on… with fellow Punjabi labourers, here he lost the tip of his pinky fingers as the rails were laid down one after the other on the muddy slopes during March rains… and on our left at the foot of solitary, nipple-shaped Mount Longonot stretch the dustry Masai plains where once Dada witnessed his friend Juma Molabux’s wedding with the Masai girl who would become our Sakina-dadi…

… this trip is a treat fom me, Vikram Lall, newly hired at the Ministry of Transport, Nairobi; it is my gift for a grandfather… whose name is supposedly etched in wriggly Punjabi script on one of these rails he helped to lay down… she and the other Punjabi women present shower the 5607 “Sir George” with rice, anoint its sweating crimson-painted iron body with orange paste… with a cheerful though discordant song… about a gaja, an elephant.

But it’s as slow as A House for Mr. Biswas without the humor and as self-serious as Ondaatje without the poeticism. You doggedly read this long, slow narrative thinking it’s an epic, hoping it’s building up to something, but it never does. The eponymous Vikram Lall is pushed around by the vicissitudes of history; the novel has the same slackerly feel and suffers for it.

I read this book at the suggestion of Jai Arjun, who loved it:

… beautiful, moving and very elegant… It’s hard to write about this book; it must be read, savoured, experienced for itself. [Link]

Vikram Lall isn’t as eye-crossingly boring as Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, a technical manual for Ottoman miniaturists, but damn, macaca. If you want to inflict drudgery, let them watch Farah Khan movies.

Vassanji’s latest is The Assassin’s Song. It just had its U.S. release.

Previously: Indecent proposal, ‘Elvis, Raja’