Successfully spooky, written with surgical precision, thrilling to the psychological core
A practising surgeon, Swaminathan is one of those hyphenated few: a "writer-physician", which small band of brothers (for they are mostly men) includes Abraham Verghese, Michael Crichton, A.J. Cronin and even Anton Chekhov. Like them, she wields her pen with the precision of a scalpel. And like her novel’s protagonist, Dr Liaqat Khan, she too is in search of the truth—the murky, complex, heart of the matter beneath the surface. The good doctor finds himself playing detective in a series of mysterious deaths, all surrounding his elderly patient, Clarice Aranxa. The work of a physician and that of a detective are not so very different after all. Symptoms are, after all, clues; the diagnosis, the smoking gun. "It’s the iceberg effect," explains Dr Khan. "All I see, all I’m told is the one-eighth on the surface. The seven-eighths that lurks unexplored is what makes up Clarice’s life."
The novel unfolds the remaining seven-eighths in a series of personal accounts by Clarice; her long-standing companion and servant, Pauline; her grown-up daughter, Marion; and Dr Khan himself. At the centre of the web is Clarice—like a black widow spider, immobilised by a degenerative muscular disorder, but spinning away to deadly effect. Imagine a mixture of both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s characters in the 1962 classic film noir, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, add a dash of post-Rhett Scarlett O’Hara, and set in a house that would spook even the guests of Norman Bates’ hotel, and you have something of the flavour of this disturbing and brilliant novel.
If this makes Bougainvillea House sound like a melodramatic Grand Guignol, I have done Swaminathan a disfavour. The plot, characterisation, and styles of writing she employs make these characters seem all too real, and if the themes she tackles—adultery, divine justice, homicide, sex and death—have the air of Greek tragedy, the style she employs is thoroughly contemporary.
As the body count rises, all the signs point one way. The frail, semi-paralysed old matriarch radiates toxicity like a hunk of kryptonite. As Clarice narrates her life and thoughts, the pages reek of bitterness, racism, the most excoriating sexual prudishness, old lace, Estee Lauder and Gucci shoes: "No Indian cow’s going to cover my feet, sacred or otherwise. Indian leather stinks."
She repeatedly points to the Hand of Fate, or chance, or God, or some higher justice, to exonerate herself from guilt: "I tell you these silly details only to show you how little I can be held responsible for the events that followed." Dr Khan has the unenviable task of making sense of her story. Is she telling the truth or is she a pathological liar? Is she merely deluded? Who is she trying to protect? And whom is she striving to implicate?
Understanding the mind of a patient is—to an enlightened doctor of medicine, and especially a neurologist—as crucial to effecting a remedy as understanding the subcutaneous mysteries of the body’s organs. But sending Dr Khan into battle with as accomplished and deadly a schemer as Mrs Aranxa seems like pitting Dr Watson against Moriarty.
A mother’s love is a dangerous thing: and when it goes awry, the effects are cataclysmic. Lionel Shriver’s Orange Prize-winning novel We Need to Talk about Kevin is the only other recent book I can recall in which one of our most hotly defended taboos—that of the naturalness and sacredness of a mother’s love for her child—is broken. Shriver narrates the thoughts of a mother whose teenage son has gone on a killing spree at his school in an attempt to understand the exact extent, and the precise limits, of her responsibility for his actions. Clarice Aranxa has no such self-awareness, but it is a tribute to Swaminathan’s skill as a writer that the answers to those questions emerge, in chilling detail, as the faced-paced narrative carries the reader deeper and deeper into the twilight zone of Clarice’s twisted mind towards a brutal denouement.
Doctors preside over the same liminal moments that bracket our earthly lives—death and birth—and are often attributed the same mystical aura as others, such as priests or shamans, who deal with life’s great mysteries. It is precisely this territory—the grey and infinitely shaded half-light between life and death—that Swaminathan stalks in the pages of this powerful and disturbing new novel.