Compassion in a post-truth world

Book Review

We live in a topsy-turvy world. Mass murderers get acclaimed as messiahs, hard-core criminals are apotheosised as yogis and sadhvis, and absolute ignoramuses are elevated as dignified gurus of ancient wisdom. On the other hand, sane voices are being muffled, if not silenced altogether. How does one create credible fiction with conventional heroes and plots in such an inverted world? Impossible. What does writing amount to in such a situation? Paul Zacharia answers that question and does much more in his debut English novel, A Secret History of Compassion.

Zacharia is a renowned Malayalam writer. His stories and longer writings provide refreshing peeps into human affairs. He can be funny and serious at once, spiritual and irreverent, mystical and cynical. In his first English novel, he is most of all that, yet much different from his usual self. A Secret History is a baffling novel. None of the characters is realistic. The whole setting of the novel is a dream world. The narrative is post-truth.

The protagonist, Lord Spider (who has a few other pseudonyms too), is a popular writer whose annual income from his thrillers and mysteries is a mind-blowing sum. He has been entrusted with the job of writing an essay, his first non-fiction work, by the Communist Party with which he has more than friendly associations. The transition from fiction to non-fiction is quite arduous for him. Fortunately, Jesus Lambodara Pillai who is a hangman by profession in addition to being a mystical voyeur and aspiring writer offers his assistance. The essay which is completed towards the end of the novel is a product of the hangman and Spider’s wife Rosi. Rosi is a freelance philosopher. Lord Spider’s contribution to the essay is almost nothing though he claims the authorship.

The essay which begins with the futuristic claim that “The time is not far off when robot armies, interstellar ships and AI units controlling WMDs and slaughterhouse machinery run by EI will be programmed with Compassion” is really not the central theme of the novel. What the three writers of the essay say and do is what makes up the bizarrely absurd phantasmagoria of the novel.

God and Stalin are women in that world. Jesus flies about in the sky and J L Pillai meets him occasionally since the latter can alter his shape into a bird or whatever he chooses. Pillai has a blood relationship with Jesus too. Satan turns out to be quite different from what we know about him.

Everything from God to Satan, compassion to communism, fiction to truth is different in that world. Patriotism is a multipurpose strategy which has nothing to do with love for one’s nation. Religious martyrdom is an act of folly on the part of both the martyr and his torturers. Lovemaking is fiction. God shares the profession of the fiction writer. “We share the same profession,” God says when Spider tells her about his profession. “Only, I don’t write fiction. I make it happen,” God elaborates.

Before meeting god, however, Spider was of the opinion that “gods simply don’t get any sleep” because they suffer from insecurity feelings about whether they will be replaced “tomorrow” by other gods since “replacements were aplenty”.

What we should beware, according to the essay on Compassion, is “the shroud of silence that hides History’s unending massacres of the Body’s Uprisings – the brutal extermination of the Revolution of Passion. O! Beware the silence masking the tragic History of love and lovemaking. Listen, if you can, to the fearsome last rites of orgasms, to the inconsolable whimpers from the annihilated universe of sweet lust…. Ask: Who expelled Compassion from the paradise of love?” [Emphasis added]

During its convoluted course, the narrative mocks the usual elements of popular fiction: “terror, horror, pathos and salvation.” Zacharia’s novel does not offer these; it offers more – it offers the “fear in a handful of dust” of a bewildering Eliotean Waste Land.

The novel is replete with literary and historical allusions. There is also much religion and philosophy interspersing it. Only those readers who have some literary finesse are likely to enjoy this novel. Even they may not wish to read the book more than once unlike much of the other works of the author.

A page from the novel

XzX

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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

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

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog