Who can ever know the alchemy of desire?

Writing about a novel has never been easy.

A movie review is always peacefully done. Infact, gleefully done, if the movie sucks. The suckier the movie, the richer the review would be.

But a novel spends more time with us. For me, the relationship with a novel usually starts as a suspicious shapeless lump of emotion, whose image gradually takes shape in mind. It rises and falls in stature, undergoes subtle changes and somewhere around three-fourths of the book's length, I would have established a firm relationship with the book, the wavelength of which generally determines how well I associate with that work of fiction.

Good novels leave me with a sense of elation and emptiness at the same time; Elation of completing something of value and emptiness at its abrupt termination, with my mental inertia expecting me to turn to the next page when there isn't one. Better ones might even leave in mind a phantom leg effect lingering on for a day or two when the characters and incidents float around in my head in a typically messy but inviting manner, almost indulging me into opening the book once again. But that being said, the truth will invariably surface; That I can never relive the virgin read of a novel. It has already been done; experienced; penetrated, so to speak.

Also, some of the best works are almost always read only once. They would always warrant another experience, but, any such attempts would at best result in just a fond caress of the curves and wilted edges of the book, an indulgent smell of its fragrance and a wistful exploration of a very few pages. It needs a will of sorts to complete a reread of a book that has had a profound impact on me. Nevertheless, strong is our desire to do something to reflect on the fact that we have experienced something significant, a special moment to be savoured, recorded for future reference perhaps.

My reviews are conceived thus and they usually die before they see the light of the day. At this point when I am writing this sentence, I do not know if this will ever come out. Such is the difficulty, or rather, unpredictability of the process of having to write simple and defining collection of sentences about a complex mesh of life, emotions and relationships that is a good novel.

What Tarun Tejpal has conjured up here is one hell of a good novel. The problem I have faced with indian novelists is that though the intent is always there, it is seldom backed up by a flowing language and the right tone. The result often is a mixed experience where we are impressed with the plot, but are left disappointed with the treatment, the craft, and at times we do not fully identify with the characters; flaw not being so much in the characterization as in the delivery of it.

Tarun comes out a winner precisely in this aspect. His prose, like a flowing liquid, always fits itself to a T with the moment it is set to describe, rendering itself as delightfully sophisticated or as disbelievingly simple as the situation warrants. The transition is seldom noticed by the reader and we end up purring our way through Hapur, Garhmukteshwar, Gajraula, Moradabad, Rampur, Bilaspur, Rudrapur, Haldwani, Kathgodam, Jeolikote, Gethia guided by ecstatic descriptions of the lower himalayas.

Tarun knows India's local botony and zoology well. He knows the names of each plant and tree that he has ever seen, every bird that has ever crossed his eyesight and all the animals that he has encountered. He knows their local names, habitats, sound and colors to an amazing extent and he makes full use of them all through the novel. He rations the usage so that it gets intertwined in the other descriptive passages of this book, which takes its own sweet time to grow on you, to build its characters and redefine them as necessary, all the time jumping at the first opportunity to embark on elaborate descriptions of an incident, a place, an individual, a moment, an emotion.

In his narration, nightjar doing its toc-toc-toc, Master UlluKaPillu, the owl, hooting his opinions, all of them play an integral part. So do fumbling real estate agents with their noproblemmadam and verygoodmadam and naive sardar brothers with their Theoneandtruegodbemerciful. Tarun loves to tell stories. Little anecdotes to drive home a point. Lengthy anecdotes just for their sake without driving home any point. Short and sweet. Lengthy and lucid.

Many novels treat eroticism as a tantalizing starter or a delicious dessert in an otherwise different main course. But here, eroticism is the main course. Safe books bore Tarun. So, he comes up with this mighty bold novel; a novel in which the characters worship their desire. Desire defines their life. Pleasures of the body is not a de tour on pursuing some higher aspirations of life. The pleasures are a goal in themselves. They are defining points that shape up the lives of the individuals of the novel. With such a premise, it is very easy to get tempted to go overboard; easier to indulge in reams of descriptive prose without any other meaning or purpose except a probably obscene elaboration of an action.

Again, Tarun sidesteps this temptation to produce something unique. He goes at length with his erotic prose, but it is always poetic and subtle, not once repulsive. Every encounter, each peak scaled is an action with a purpose. There are descriptions of voyeurism, but the prose never even once ventures into the direction of voyeurism in description. It spells out the moments honestly and does not tease the reader with that false tone which is usually meant to just giving the reader an erection. Catherine and Fizz, the nameless protagonist and Gaj Singh, Syed and Fr John all of them are part of this honest exploration of sex (both garden variety and otherwise).

The canvas of the novel is enormous and ambitious. It does not restrict itself to a main storyline with military precision. It explores a broad gamut of possibilities. Set in present tense in the dying end of twentieth century, the novel explores the build up to that end from the pre-Indira days. It also jumps decades back to the days of the british raj to depict the colonial India and the dark days of the partition. Tarun never misses an opportunity to spell out his social and political beliefs, mostly through the voices and minds of his characters. Sometimes he digresses visibly so that his point is put forth, sometimes even proving to be a slight deterrent to the flow of the novel; the journalist prevailing over the novelist. That being said, he is successfully able to blend a lot of his digressions into the core material of the novel. A classic example is the protagonist's (let me call him Prot) stint with a newspaper office - the greasy pole; the house of the gleaming glansmen, where glowing words take precedence over the truth and burning passages, and not learned opinion and facts, is the order of the day.

Three distinct setups emerge. The Prot's life in plains and cities, his life in Gethia in the hills 'where mists hide the truth' and finally Catherine's life in Jagdevpur and Gethia. These three have distinct flavours, though highly coupled to each other. We can see our mood visibly changing when we change over from one flavour to another. That in itself is an achievement, considering that the storyline jumps back and forth between these flavors and still we get the correct mood back according to the flavor in which we are in currently. He is able to achieve this with his consistent imageries of these set ups. His description of Gethia is a triumph. The teeming activity of Jeolikote, the gloomy valley of Bhumiadhar, the geometric sectors of Chandigarh, the noise and commotion of Chandni Chowk, the vistas of Salimgarh, the pompous palaces of Jagdevpur - Tarun's prose brings them all to life.

Tarun knows his characters intimately and he has the ability to showcase them as immensely believable, even though they are hardly the normal people who we meet in our lives. I was immediately able to identify with Prot and his agonies as a writer. Replacing the Brother with a Core 2 Duo, I can see myself clanking out scores of paragraphs whose ultimate fate is the biblioblackhole and hence shift-delete is a boon to the mankind to avoid the need to search for deep-water lakes. But I digress here. Writer's commandments, timetables, choice of plot, characters before plot - all familiar jokes of all of us aspiring literary revolutionists.

But not everyone can identify with a character like Catherine or Syed. Infact, when Catherine's story starts in the novel, we are left bewildered for a moment. We feel as if the story is slipping out of our grips and entering into some unknown. But soon enough, we realize that it is yet another dimension that we have to come to grips with. Of all the characters, Fizz wins hands down with her charm. I started to almost visualize the world lighting up as she flashes on of her beaming smiles. Etched with a lot of craft and immensely beautiful, won't we all want to have a character like Fizz in our lives!

There are a few primary relationships that are the backbone of this novel. Prot and Fizz, Catherine and Syed, Catherine and Gaj Singh, Catherine and Prot. While the first one is beautifully defined and lovable, the other three are deliberately dark. One thing which troubled me is the extent to which Prot is mesmerized by the wordwheels of Catherine. While her story is very rivetting and it is possible that the text might be elaborately sexual/sensual, would that push him so much as to drop his feelings for Fizz, to have hallucinations of sexuality with a ghost, to embark on a journey to New York to seek an end to Catherine's story is still debatable.

With Catherine enters the darkness in the novel which lifts at the logical conclusion of Catherine's story. At that point, Prot is left with an emptiness in which we want to fit in Fizz. But even we cannot do it since our minds are so occupied with Catherine and we no longer know how Prot and Fizz used to be like. So, in a deliberate masterstroke, Tarun brings back the much needed fizz in the story by some Fizz memories. Thus, he brings us all back to normal along with Prot and provides us with the nice and cheerful ending we all had been hoping for.

The Alchemy of Desire is a bold and honest debut. It is engaging and unputdownable. Impeccable prose, imageries and eroticism are its strengths and with the help of them, Tarun might have thrown in a little masterpiece here. The effect of this book is such that I do not want to take up another novel to read till this headiness clears. I am afraid I would find any next novel pretty bland and conservative. Tarun has set himself high and mighty standards. I wish he really writes another novel that would push them higher. But even if he doesn't, he is already up there. After all, Harper Lee had to just write one book in her life.