Skip to main content

Religious Sins

Book Review
Order your copy Here

There are two types of religion: one which enables us to see the divine in others and the other which is about power, bullying, self-delusion, expediency and psychological consolations.  What we usually see around us is the latter type.  Such religion destroys the genuine religion.  M P Baby’s novel, The Snake Crucified, shows us both the types with a brilliant plot. 

Chacko is a Pulaya (low caste) Roman Catholic living in Karuvankode, a primitive village in Kerala.  Though he is Catholic officially, Chacko practises the ancient religion of his caste.  He is a sorcerer and there is a snake which helps him in sorcery.  The snake reveals the truths to him.  The snake is a kind of god for him.  He does not hesitate to give the Holy Communion (the sacred bread and wine from the church) to his snake.

It is Father Sebastian Maliyekkal who assists Chacko to give the Communion to the snake.  Father Sebastian is an “oversexed” priest who enjoys sexual relationships with nuns as well as lay women.  He has a motive in assisting Chacko to fulfil his desire to give the Communion to the snake.  He will get Chacko’s help in return when he needs it. 

Father Sebastian is a popular Charismatic preacher and counsellor too.  He has led hundreds of Charismatic retreats, healed the sick, performed miracles in the name of Jesus, and counselled hundreds of people to sound health of body and mind.  But there is a devil within him.  Chacko, on the other hand, is a more honest human being.  His religion may be primitive and serpentine but his spirituality is genuine: he won’t harm anyone, he won’t do what his conscience knows is wrong. 

Sister Ajitha cannot accept Chacko’s religion.  She asks Chacko to mend his ways and be a good Christian.  She will, however, come to know more shocking secrets about Father Sebastian soon which will cost her her very life.  The plot moves to a climax of many murders.

Davis Jacob, Chacko’s son who is also a prominent journalist, along with his fiancĂ©e Nisha, is on an investigation to find out who killed his father and what led to his mother’s death.  Davis and Nisha move in and out of the narrative seamlessly bringing the various elements and characters together into a gripping narrative.

The plot is immensely captivating.  However, the novel suffers from a very serious drawback.  The language is atrocious.  There are too many grammatical and spelling mistakes and occasionally the reader is left baffled by what the sentences mean.  There are many infelicitous expressions too.  Taste a sample:

“But she (Sister Ajitha) used her step strong to Father Sebastian.  She decided to resist the bond of her orbit…. He bathed in an ocean of sweat…. Face went perfect grotesque. Eyes were pools death swam in.”

A good editor would have made the novel really brilliant.


PS. The novel was given to me for reading by a colleague of mine who is a friend of the author.

Comments

  1. NISHANTH CHALAMANAMELDecember 28, 2017 at 9:55 AM

    Truly eligible opinion.....

    ReplyDelete
  2. MP BabyDecember 28, 2017 at 10:31 AM

    Dear respected sir...
    Your review on my humble work is really heartwarming. In spite of having been written in a language of mediocre quality, it finds its way directly into the hands of people like you.Recw

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
35 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
12 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more