Too Much Is Half
A little overtaken by craft ... Ambition, even literary ambition, has to be made of sterner stuff.
But the book does contain some wonderful snippets of life, possible only in the periods thoughtfully indicated. A whole village wasted by cholera and a helpless doctor and his assistant facing a paucity of medicines. The extraordinary courage of a 16-year-old girl bent on having her own way despite being branded three times by red-hot metal by her father. The legend of Arabipatnam where the local king gets 10,000 Arabian horses in exchange for spices, only to find all but one horse dying in a year because he had not thought of protecting their hooves with horse-shoes. A Brahmin village where a woman ejects tapeworms thinking she’s giving birth to snakes; the whole village is infected due to a belief that eating pork would ward off an epidemic.
The novel crisscrosses over generations with a liberal dose of misadventure, including a Kathakali performer ending up as a kept man in London for a while. Ambition, even literary ambition, has to be made of sterner stuff.