Not People Like Us

The Silver Castle has been talked about in the British media as a Booker Prize contender. It is not among the two novels publishers Jonathan Cape put up as their nomination for the prize. James is said to be disappointed and surprised by that decision. Readers, particularly in India, may not share the surprise. The story itself is far from surprising. It is a fairly standard gutter-to-glitter, grime-to-glitz tale of a boy who grows up on Bombay streets to step haltingly towards cinematic stardom. But the bare plot of a novel says nothing, the how of it says all. Ironically, the novel gets as Bollywoodish as some of the Bollywood it pans. If this was by design, then it is unworkably over-subtle.

More than about the central character Sanjay, this novel is about Bombay seen through the tint of a foreigner's glasses. That's fine. But at times you see just the tint. The story gets lost somewhere. San-jay is born to the streets. James has a pretty long horror list of what that can mean. His father was at work the day Sanjay was born so he didn't see the dogs eat the afterbirth.

The setting of the novel is a simple pair of extremes: between The Silver Castle of film sets and stardom, and the unsilver-like life of the streets. Sanjay begins life in the world of beggars on the edges of The Silver Castle. One day he wanders into the film studio and actually gets spoken to by filmstar Miranda, the dream he touches and can never forget. He grows up to become, one day, her in-house gigolo. But the boy has some growing up to do through an almost touristic catalogue of the seamy side of Bombay.

Sanjay progresses from unsuccessful beggar to petty thief by age seven, now and then picking old bottles for recycling. That happens in the West, too, but in Bombay the bottle is reused for every sort of thing. This stated us-and-them tone announces a western response but hardly sits easy in a novel, which gets diluted far too frequently by interruptions of essay. The author is too often the western social commentator, who keeps talking to western readers in asides.

The story sometimes says as much about a view of Bombay as the author does directly. Fate smiles one day even on this boy of the streets close to the Towers of Silence. It was a vulture that brought Sanjay his lucky charm. The only reason it made a noise was that it contained metal. Sanjay bent to examine the rotten but still identifiable outline of a human ear. The metal was a tiny domed cylinder in its lobe. But this lucky charm does not work instant wonders. Sanjay fails as a beggar because he is not a star amputee. So a discouraged Sanjay moves on to his next job—picking this time pieces of the bodies of passengers who fall off trains. By way of example, it takes a long time to find the foot of one man until a laughing policeman holds up the find.

There is more Bombay horribilia through the novel. Ghoulish extremes get presented as pictures of the real Bombay. Somehow the assembled notes do not add up to a rounded picture, even such a picture. Some western writers like to do another reality the way American tourists do cities around the world. There must be a market for sounding laidback about the terrible. To key in sentences on the meanest of the mean must advertise a familiarity with how hard it can be, it must inspire guilt as it releases one's own.

The catalogue of horrors follows almost every cliche of perceived poverty in Bombay. Sanjay progresses to street entertainer with a gang that also steals when it can. He then finds more money getting buggered by Arabs until he finds a middle-aged British boyfriend. He learns to read from a Christian teacher and then Pratibha, an upper-class Bombay woman who goes for his pants as fast as he goes for her breasts. Pratibha is there because enlightened middle-class families of Bombay commonly send their sons and daughters to help at the mission for one day a week.

The novel itself has a touch of the rich-poor Bollywoodish ways. Sanjay finds another crush come to nothing because the girl's brother finds he isn't as rich as he pretends to be. From entertainer, San-jay progresses to stunt man at age 16, then enters the fringes of Bombay cinema. For some time he works with a TV crew out to shoot the poverty of Bombay—it could have been a Clive James crew. From film studios to a meeting with Miranda (who always seems to have a plum halfway to her lips) and then to her bed is fairly easy. Meanwhile, he encounters a series of foreigners, a Mr Scott and a Mr Rochester and so on. The Western reader has to reach The Silver Castle through a little of his own world.

The novel ends with a sermon from the author. Sanjay's story, he notes, though sad, should give us cause for hope. Yes, all this is part of the novel. Sanjay is only one person among many millions waiting for the first scraps of the new free enterprise society to come drifting down. There are signs that the situation is at least no worse. There is less corruption in the public services. There are only half as many people who have to be paid off if you want to get anything done. They have to be paid twice as much but at least you save time. It would be nice to think that time did not matter, but fine talk about eternal India should not be allowed to obscure the fact that it does.

Clive James quotes Kafka at the beginning as saying: "You can stand aloof from the sufferings of the world; you are free to do so and it expresses your nature; but perhaps that very aloofness is the one suffering you might have avoided." Clive James has a right to his intentions, of course, but Kafkaesque this novel is eminently not.