High-spirited set-pieces abound, such as the night-time tiger hunt where two caged, drugged tigers are released for the benefit of the British party. Drugs have not been confined to the tigers, however, and, the sound of the popping of champagne corks notwithstanding, the beasts eventually stumble on a scene of socio-sexual pandemonium. Kunzru characteristically proves not quite equal to the scene he has himself set up, but it's nevertheless not bad for a beginner.
If the general impression of the early part of this book is Rudyard Kipling meets Hunter S.Thompson meets Will Self, then so be it. There is a great deal of knowledge hidden behind the high-spirited text -- of phrenology, spiritualism, British and Indian history and, especially, colonial theories of race. And there is a speed and impatience about the book which, despite its length, shows a young mind eager to download its insights and varied perceptions.
For the last 20 years scholars have been researching the violent and exploitative side of colonialism generally -- the enthusiasm of the European powers for punitive aerial bombardment, expropriation of land, and the violation of the rights of local peoples. The Impressionist is evidence that this academic push is now bearing fruit in the fiction of its students.
Long narratives dealing with a Scottish missionary couple in Bombay (Pran is their adopted waif), London and life at an English "public school" (Pran now fully anglicized), Oxford, Paris, and finally West Africa (this last section reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh and Redmond O'Hanlon), suggest The Impressionist may be several earlier attempts at a novel strung together. But the sprawling, enormously versatile result nonetheless gives a coherent vision of the farcical, and in particular the sexually dishonest, nature of the British of old, and of their entire imperial enterprise.
This is a novel everyone will soon be reading. It has many of the major virtues, and its plotting, its extensive knowledgeableness, and its use of comedy to undermine the ethos of empire, are masterly indeed.
Pran struggling with an English ethos of cricket, lawns, rain, anti-Semitism and institutionalized sadism, Pran as an apprentice ethnographer in tropical Africa moving up a river to a point of no return -- the best books infect the mind with a kind of benign delirium. You want to put them down and do something else, but they keep drawing you back into their unique imaginative world. Nothing else pleases until you've got to the end. This excellent novel, while not perfect, nevertheless inhabits that special category.
RSS