Paul Theroux: A Dead Hand

[SuduNona]

Subtitled: A Crime in Calcutta, we experience much more than the murder of a young boy found by the light of a mobile phone lying in a rolled up carpet on the floor of a dingy hotel room in the centre of the city.

The later discovery of his dead hand results in a detecting trail of diplomatic drinks parties at the American Embassy, fragile orphanages, child labour in carpet factories and supposedly philanthropic schools. We follow it by way of interminable rackety trains reeking of fetid life, by tasting the foul air and absorbing the reality of life at the lower ends of Indian society as if by osmosis. For this is Theroux, supreme master of the written word, the magical evoker of images, immediacy and startling impact.

Yes, there is a crime, the dead hand a symbol of inhumanity in Calcutta, but there is no relentless, depressed detective with angst as big as his ego, just narrator Jerry Delfont, amateur investigator and professional journalist. Incidentally in the middle of the book, he meets Paul Theroux, the author, for what could have been a clumsy twist but is handled so deftly that you marvel and admire the juxtaposition.

The magnificent Mrs Unger is a dominating presence throughout. She fascinates, bewitches, tantalises, infuriates and leads Delfont in a well plotted dance of bloody sacrifices to the goddess Kali, her white sari stained with red blood an overpowering image which overshadows her humanitarian work with the lost and starving children of the city. The roller coaster relationship between Mrs Unger and Delfont dominates the book with emotional torment, borderline obession and accounts of tantic sex like no other you have read.

This is a story which takes you to the heart of Calcutta in all its forms in such a way you not only see and hear, are shocked and horrified, hurt and cry but still are engrossed as you experience the story in your mind's eye in cinematic Technicolor without a single picture or illustration. Theroux truly has the gift of getting into our heads, our imagination and creating a story where we cannot but be drawn in and experience as Delfont.

Simultaneously, Theroux sketches the petty bureaucracy in Calcutta, sibling rivalry, the brutality of one caste over another, the disposability of life in a city teeming with beings, through the jealousies, power of connections and the universal suffering of writers who are stuck in creative process.

I loved this book. Read it and be stunned, exhausted but exhilarated and give yourself plenty of time for you will not want to leave it for other tasks. If ever a crime book deserved four out four it is this. It almost merits a genre of its own.

[suzy1124]

Paul Theroux, one of my fave writers, check out The old Patagonian Express, The Mosquito Coast, The Great Railway Bazaar, etc......................

Can't wait to read his new book on Africa...