2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 5

Posted 6 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize |

The Assassin’s Song, by M.G. Vassanji. Doubleday Canada, $34.95 cloth, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0-385-66351-9.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: 2004, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (winner)

1994, The Book of Secrets (winner)

Other Awards: 1990, Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (The Gunny Sack)

From the Publisher: “A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between the ancient and the modern, between legacy and discovery, between the most daunting filial obligation and the most undeniable personal yearning — The Assassin’s Song is a heartbreaking ballad of a life irrevocably changed.”

From reviews: “Intertwining a 700-year-old family epic with a mystical mystery, Vassanji … crafts an intense and haunting work of fiction.” — Christian Science Monitor

“The chapters set in the present, especially those in the 1960s and ’70s — American hippie culture, Karsan’s marriage and fathering of a son — become increasingly clichéd. The connection hinted at between Mansoor and Nur Fazal — the repetition of religious violence through history — is clearly intended to be central but is never sufficiently explored. As a result, the tension established in the initial chapters leaks away.” — Vancouver Sun

“There are echoes of Rohinton Mistry in Vassanji’s lampooning of post-independent India’s frenetic nationalism, of V.S. Naipaul in the insistence that solutions can arrive only from a thorough understanding of the past, of Salman Rushdie in the disclosure of a history composed of personal narratives and myths. But the quiet lyricism of Karsan’s contemplations, the careful evocation of place, the writer’s obvious warmth for his characters, the sense of compassion layered into the story — these are all Vassanji’s.” — Washington Post Book World

Representative passage: “I imagine Bapu-ji sitting on the floor in his beloved library, his writing table across his knees, addressing his apostate son, uncertain about his own life and fearful for the ancient shrine of which he is the spiritual lord. Extreme violence has spread across the state, narratives of the horror out there keep arriving with every fresh batch of devotees, and this time it looks impossible to stanch the flow outside the village, there seems to be an absolute intention to its fury and no force to counter it. The police are nowhere. I can’t see his face: that old official photo won’t do, and I don’t have a recent picture in my mind to help me visualize him. He must have retained those outlines of his face that I always knew — though how much did that beatific smile shrink over the years? The elongated face I recall, and the large flat ears; the hair must have grown white and thin … There is no preaching in this letter, only a confession of sorts. Does this portend closeness or distance?”

My assessment: What begins as a coming-of-age story about Karsan, the next in line to be the Saheb, or lord, of the Shrine of the Wanderer in Pirbaag, India, becomes a story about filial duty and the cost of pursuing personal freedom.

There is a sense that Vassanji has attempted to do too much in this novel, incorporating the history of India post-independence with the story of a young man who is in line to be a lord, interspersed with the history of a fictional thirteenth-century sufi. The theme of filial duty and tradition clashing with the forces of modernity is certainly not new to post-colonial literature set in India, having appeared in the work of authors as diverse as Rohinton Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Shyam Selvadurai; it’s not entirely clear that Vassanji has anything particularly new to add to this rather well-covered literary territory.

Still, the scenes in 1960s Pirbaag are the most successful in the novel, largely because they are the most fully developed. Karsan’s interaction with Mr. David, a teacher at his school, is presented as a complete arc (although it’s patently obvious from the outset where this particular subplot is headed), and his involvement with a nationalistic youth group provides some good moments.

But by the time Vassanji bundles his character off to Harvard, and then to British Columbia, the narrative has dispensed with any pretence of developing dramatic scenes and become little more than a synopsis of Karsan’s adventures in the West. Poorly fleshed out characters appear and disappear within pages; in one instance a putatively tragic event befalls one character, but since the character in question was introduced a scant ten pages prior to this event’s occurrence, it’s impossible for the reader to work up any emotional investment and the scene falls flat. Even using the word “scene” is stretching a point: the “tragedy” is dispensed with in a single sentence.

Vassanji tries to cram so much into the second half of his book that the whole thing comes off feeling rushed and underdeveloped. He ignores the hoary old writing school directive to “show, don’t tell,” and even goes so far as to include the kind of plot-advancing letters I was complaining about in the Poliquin novel.

The Assassin’s Song does deal, if only peripherally, with terrorism and the clash of religious ideologies, and so has a contemporary resonance; it’s hard to escape the feeling that the Giller jury nominated this book more for its subject matter than for its literary merit.

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