Stockholm Syndrome

India colonises Europe,paanwallahs open shop in Swedens street corners and men are barbecued in tandoor. Is it a satire? A crime thriller? Perhaps it is just having too much fun.

If you were drawing up a map of crime fiction,the bleak,snow-bitten landscape of Sweden would have to be on it,as much as John Rebuss sour Edinburgh or 221B Baker Street. Here,a girl with a dragon tattoo kicks hornets nests and killers into submission,and detective Kurt Wallander battles his personal demons as he investigates another murder in Ystad.

Zac OYeahs Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan reconfigures this geography with audacity. Europe has been colonised by India; and Sweden thawed into a tropical country by climate change. Snow is unlikely in December,and inveterate native coffee-drinkers now sip sweetened chai. The Indian Administrative Service,in charge naturally,has deemed all paperwork to be in triplicate,and renamed every street corner into vassalage. No confusion of Nordic names such as Hornsgatan and Bellmansgatan,Brännkyrkagatan and Kungsgatan,thank you. Gothenburg city,where P.I.D. officer Herman Barsk struggles to uphold law and order,is now Gautampuri,with Friendship Chowks and Dr Ambedkar Avenues,paanwallahs and sweet shops. Even Mars has become an overpopulated suburb of New Delhi,renamed NOIDA Phase 819.

From this dystopic landscape floats up the smell of curry: how could India have conquered the world without its double-barrelled soft power of tandoori masala and cinema (represented by Phillumappa Istarjee,a Rajini-like superstar who pulls out lipsticks from his cowboy-style cartridge belt to sign autographs)? The curry raises a stink when Barsk walks into the Tandoori Moose restaurant and finds the bodies of four Indian men cooking in its tandoor (the four dismembered men get baptised Shri X1,Shri X2,Shri X3,Shri X4 in the government morgue). The investigation takes Barsk deeper into the squalor of the benighted city,and a Viking conspiracy to overthrow foreign rule.

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Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan was first published in Swedish in 2006 as Tandoorialgen. One wonders what the Swedes made of the fictional desecration of their land. To the Indian reader,though,the fantastic future is a satire on the present: Gautampuri/Gothenburg is the Indian EveryCity,with a disaffected underclass and a determined lack of beauty,and the black laughter that rings through derelict buildings and more damaged lives. The satire extends to more than India: through the neat inversion of the current world order,OYeah is laughing slyly at all possible permutations of power.

In the many clues and inside jokes that he litters the book with,it is clear how much fun OYeah has had in refashioning the world: Madonna is the UN secretary-general and Halle Berry the first woman president of the United States; Americas foremost multicultural philosopher is Michael Whacko Jacko Jackson; the Nobel prize has become Reliance-Nobel. On a chase of the murderers,Barsk is accompanied by three officials (Henning,Stieg and Salman the Kitabwallah). But you begin to fret at the laundry list of desi brands (KC Das stores and Old Monk),and the fetishisation of things Indian (one of the murdered men is Patiparmeshwar Gharwallah). And the satire does not have enough steam to last 400-odd pages.

The relentless jokey-ness of it is more than grating,and the setting frequently overwhelms the narrative. Neither is it a crime novel that takes itself seriously. Murder splinters the moral universe of a novel,and the plot has to work out a restitution,however imperfect. Here,bodies and skeletons tumble out of the tandoor,the plot knots itself into more difficulty,and yet the authorial voice remains facetious. A terrorist plot is defused at the end by a naked Barsk smeared in tandoor paste. Could this be a novel which has too much fun?