Remains of the Fire

IF there is any connecting thread between the narratives that run through The Garden of Earthly Delights, it is fire. A fire that fascinates...

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IF there is any connecting thread between the narratives that run through The Garden of Earthly Delights, it is fire. A fire that fascinates, transforms and destroys but doesn’t necessarily purify.

The novel begins with the narrative of Hiren Bose who runs a phone booth and lives with his girlfriend at Kolkata’s 14 Banamali Naskar Lane. Before moving in with his girlfriend Uma, he lived across at 72 Banamali Naskar Lane — a sort of all male chummery, complete with endless talk sessions and rounds of food. The presiding deity here is Ghanada — the references to Premendra Mitra’s tales of Ghanada will be lost on those not familiar with Bengali literature. It is to this all male fold that Hiren returns after the fire that burns down his home — along with Uma.

The alternate story is in distant Prague where author Manik Basu is kidnapped by his publisher’s henchman in a final effort to make him write an overdue novel. The selection of Prague, the city of Kafka, is perhaps meant to invoke the writer in these twin tales of lives lived like dreams.

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Since most of Manik’s story is played out in a house, there is not much of Prague as a city in the sense that there is of Calcutta in Hiren’s tale.

As the book progresses, it appears that Hiren’s story is being written by Manik. And the worlds of Hiren and Manik meet and end neither with a bang nor a whimper but appropriately enough with a newscast. In times when things have not happened unless they have been captured in breaking news, it’s a topical twist. How TV appropriates a story and breathes its own version into it was recently also played out in the opening chapters of D.B.C. Pierre’s Booker Prize winning Vernon God Little.

As the book progresses, it appears the Calcutta narrative is being written in Prague. And then the two worlds meet.

If the aim of The Garden — Indrajit Hazra’s second novel — is ‘‘to tread the shimmering line between fiction and reality,’’ it does it pretty well. And the advantage here is that there is a certain open-endedness to the novel, a make-what-you-will-of-it. But the other side of it is that you always have a niggling feeling of not catching on to everything.

In the end there is a certain feeling of inevitability. Hiren, the pyromaniac, who through the novel has always enjoyed a good fire, finally gets to be inside one. Charred and charged with starting the one fire that he hadn’t, Hiren is betrayed by those he trusted.

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The title of the book is taken from Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch’s painting, a work that’s fascinated viewers for centuries and equally perplexed them about its intended meaning. The connection between the painting and the novel is not too clear but if there is any shared ground then it must be that both defy neat interpretation.

The ambitious structure is interesting but the writing at times appears contrived and the prose a bit stilted. Sentences like ‘‘truth be told’’ should best not be told.