Soho Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
This year I’ve had the good fortune to read several novels by extraordinary writers of South Asian origin, among them Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup, Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshanantha, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar. To this group of gifted storytellers I now add Siddhartha Deb, whose sprawling novel, The Light at the End of the World, carried me across India, from crowded alleys in Delhi to the base of the Himalayas and an island in the Andaman Sea.
This is a challenging but rewarding read that opens in Delhi in what seems contemporary time, though it’s difficult to say for sure. The air is polluted, electricity is sporadic, and city traffic is always gridlocked; people queue up to exchange old, discontinued currency for new magenta-colored banknotes; India and Pakistan are at war. India is exploring Mars and creating a super-weapon called the Brahmastra. Mass protests and violence erupt spontaneously. Delhi is a city of “congealed darkness and blazing lights.”
Bibi is the central character of this section, a former journalist now working a joyless job in a middling public relations firm. She often skips work to wander the streets in search of her old life and a colleague named Sanjit, a muckraker who is believed to have been murdered by a clandestine army unit. Many strange things happen to Bibi while she wanders. Sometimes her phone works and sometimes it powers down of its own accord and barely decipherable characters float across the screen. Unknown callers attempt to reach her, and articles she wrote years ago about secret detention centers suddenly come to the attention of the authorities; the official scrutiny is unwanted, threatening.
This first section has the feel of a dream that never stops, a hallucination that never ends, and an imagined tale that continues to unfold. “A gradual dissolving of the boundary between the fantastic and the real is in progress,” is how Deb frames it.
Nowhere is this balance between the real and the fantastic more evident than in the three sections that form the middle of the novel, all of which are based on historical events: Bhopal on the eve of the Union Carbide chemical disaster in 1984, Partition in 1947, and the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion in 1859. Each represents a significant event in Indian history and Deb undoubtedly structured this part of the novel deliberately, though the relationship between these sections isn’t directly explicated. He gives readers peculiar lenses through which to experience these events, in particular the Bhopal disaster, one of the worst industrial calamities in recorded history.
The section titled “The Line of Faith: 1859” is the most fantastic of all. It follows a group of British soldiers who are hunting the last surviving leaders of the Sepoy Rebellion. They come across a bizarre procession led by a corpulent man who calls himself the White Mughal, “a figure that seemed to belong most naturally not even to the phantasmagoria that happened to be India but to some medieval allegorical woodcut…” When they reach the White Mughal’s castle high in the mountains — his White Castle — protected by a small lake covered by thick scum, the sense of hallucination that Deb has conjured intensifies. The White Castle is part fortress, part museum of fantastic oddities — the skull of an Indian elephant, sharks and snakes in tanks of greenish fluid, ingenious weapons, communications devices and a mechanical tiger. Inexplicable things happen in the White Mughal’s ragged fiefdom. But what does it all mean, is it an allegory about the ultimate futility of British rule over such a diverse, perplexing and unruly continent? The fatal arrogance of European colonizers?
Perhaps. The Light at the End of the World is replete with riches and like all great novels is worthy of rereading and slow contemplation. In one sense this is a story about India’s present and past, about the drive to develop weapons and reap global power, the extraction of resources, and the ceaseless generation of profit and power, human and environmental consequences be damned. It’s also about violence and the dehumanizing effects of ethnic bigotry and rigid social hierarchies that reward a few winners and condemn many losers. Darkness and light, congealed and blazing. The entire world is in flux.
