Book Review: A Suitable Boy
Finishing or reaching the end of A Suitable Boy is a weirdly emotional experience.
Vikram Seth’s writing is beautiful in its subtlety and complete lack of pretentiousness. It is so humane in every layer and facet of the novel.
The writing rather than jarring you immediately with its grace sneaks up on you slowly. It inches its way through your heart till you suddenly realise the deep impact of it and the emotional response it has inspired in you for the content, characters and endlessly diverse and complex array of topics and feelings it covers.
The depth of feeling you, as a reader, develop for the characters lies in the details Seth so artfully incorporates making each of these people so real, so human and so relatable. For example, Mrs Mehra’s roses, Haresh Khanna’s smile and Firoz’s walking stick.
The innovation it must have taken to not only come up with such a large cast of characters with such glaringly different personalities, intentions and arcs while still being able to link them all together in a neat and engaging web is amazing.
Seth wraps the story up, full circle, with no gaps but still with very authentic open endings in places. These are sometimes cruel and sometimes rewarding. This roots the story in the real world, declaring the fact that though this is fiction, it isn’t far from reality or what we could experience.
This novel calls upon every last fibre of sympathy and empathy in you and will not allow you to stick to any of the black and white rules and values you hold yourself and the world to.
This story is a work of genius.
Over the span of almost 1400 big pages and the smallest font, Seth ensures your investment in each character’s life and story.
Seth takes a deep dive into the inner workings of politics, law, medicine, shoemaking, industry, the intricacies of Indian culture, customs and psychology sparing no technical jargon or formal speech representative of each of these realms.
He leaves almost no stone unturned in his telling of Indian society and culture. He mercilessly exposes prejudice and hypocrisy to great effect sometimes with careful and deliberate use of humour and satire. He exposes the complexities of not only this specific post-colonial era but also of morality and emotions.
Seth’s exploration of radical themes and charged events feel unbiased but emotional. He uses his characters to reveal the futility of religious, classist, sexist, casteist, all the relevant ‘ists’. Human nature is laid bare for criticism, probably calling out even the reader.
To classify this book into any genre other than historical fiction or under any broader themes would only be an injustice to the story. I went into it with no assumptions and no knowledge outside of the blurbs on the back of this floppy tome. It was never predictable and stopped my breath at turns when I thought I’d figured it all out. It is leaps and bounds greater than any blurb will lead you to believe and has more depth with every page. As many have said, it is panoramic and slow in the best way possible, allowing you to absorb everything it has to offer, drawing on every emotion modestly. To me, that’s what good books should do, leave you affected in multiple ways and thinking of them for a long time to come.
This is too short a review to encapsulate what I felt while reading this and after I turned that last page. If it has achieved anything, I hope it has convinced you to pick ‘A Suitable Boy’ up. Do not be intimidated by its size; it does not speak to its readability or brilliance.
“As with all the best books, one feels only dismay when the pages on the right of the tome start thinning out.” — The Observer
