Delusions

Book Review

The meaning and purpose of life are themes that have enchanted thinkers from time immemorial. Philosophers and psychologists have given us umpteen theories on them. Novelists have entertained us with gripping stories about the same. Manu Joseph’s novel, The Illicit Happiness of Other People, is another gripping novel on the theme of life’s meaning and purpose.

The real protagonist of the novel, 17 year-old Unni Chacko, is dead three years before the novel begins. He jumped to his death from the terrace of his three storey apartment. Why did he commit suicide when he was a brilliant student and exceptionally gifted cartoonist? His father, Ousep Chacko, wants to find it out and the novel is about that quest.

Ousep is an alcoholic. Once upon a time he was a promising writer. Now he is a mediocre journalist and a total failure as a husband and father to Mariamma and Thoma respectively. Mariamma would love to see him dead and even thinks of killing him. Ousep is intent on solving the mystery of his elder son’s death and he does succeed in the end.

The plot is as simple as that and yet quite complex as Ousep moves like a phantom among Unni’s friends and acquaintances picking up every thread that he can use to complete the warp and woof of the fabric he will weave in the end. Ousep’s quest makes the novel a suspense thriller and a philosophical thesis at the same time. There is plenty of humour too though it tends to hit us in the darkest chambers of our subconscious mind. For example: “My wife died three months ago,” says a character. “Have you heard this joke, Ousep? ‘My love, I feel terrible without you. It is like being with you.’”

The novel delves into the many ineluctable paradoxes of life and hurls at us certain axiomatic statements like “Truth is a successful delusion” and “In this world, it is very hard to escape happiness.”

Truth and delusion are explored in detail since that was one of Unni’s favourite quests. What is truth if the same reality is understood differently by different people? “A delusion is many times more powerful than a lie,” says Dr C. Y. Krishnamurthy Iyengar DM, FRCP (Glas), FRCP (Edin), FRCP (Lond), FAMS, FACP, FICP FIMSA, FAAN, Neurosurgeon, Neuropsychiatrist and Chairman Emeritus of The Schizophrenia Day Ward and Research Centre. “The distinction between a successful delusion and a lie is very difference between a successful saint and a fraud.” The doc goes on to declare that “All our gods, from the beginning of time, have been men with psychiatric conditions.”

The novel can shake orthodox religious beliefs when it shows how religious beliefs are delusions and how delusions are contagious. Did a delusion steal the young Unni’s life? Or was it an anguishing truth that did it? Wait till the end of the novel to know that. And then you begin to wonder which of the two – delusion and truth – is more desirable.

The novel grips the reader right from the beginning with its rare mix of suspense, philosophy and humour. The only problem is that towards the end it begins to sound like a thesis which the author is trying to establish. That is not a serious drawback, however. It is not easy to conclude an intricate and philosophical plot whose chief characters are a dead cartoonist, an alcoholic quester, and his “buffalo wife” and “idiot son”.

Comments

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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi. Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...

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...

Yet another Christmas

“Please, I beg you not to turn us away,” Joseph says to the innkeeper once more. He has been pleading with the innkeeper for some kind of a place where his wife Mary could give birth. Joseph, Mary, innkeeper - they were all kids from the primary school of the parish. Jenny was sitting in the audience watching the Christmas skit presented by the little children. She knew what would come: the innkeeper would shut the door saying rudely that he didn’t have any more rooms left. Especially for a couple that didn’t have anything much to give in return for all the troubles they were going to create with a delivery and what not. Then Joseph and Mary would go to a cowshed and the cows will be far more benign than humans. Cows are great creatures, Jenny learnt recently from her country’s dominant political party. If they give birth to a female calf, they are greater still. That bastard in your belly ! Her mother shouts at her a million times a day referring to the baby she is carry...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog