Skip to main content

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

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

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

Face of the Faceless

“When you choose to fight for truth and justice, you will have to face serious threats.” Sister Rani Maria, the protagonist of the movie, is counselled by her mother in a letter. Face of the Faceless is a movie that shows how serious those threats are. This movie is a biopic. It shows us the life of a Catholic nun who dedicated her life to serve some Adivasis of Madhya Pradesh [MP] and ended up as a martyr. If it were not a real story, this movie would have been an absolute flop. Since it is the real story of not only a nun but also the impoverished and terribly exploited Adivasis in a particular village of MP, it keeps you engrossed. It is a sad movie, right from the beginning to the end. It is a story of the good versus evil, the powerless versus the powerful, the heroic versus the villainous, the divine versus the diabolic. Having said that, I must hasten to add one conspicuous fact: the movie does not ever present Christianity or its religious practices as the only right way

All the light we cannot see

Book Review Title: All the light we cannot see Author: Anthony Doerr Publisher: Fourth Estate, London, 2014 Pages: 531 What we call light is just a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most part of the electromagnetic spectrum remains beyond ordinary human perception. Such is human life too: so many of its shades remain beyond our ordinary perception and understanding. Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the light we cannot see , unravels for us some of the mysterious shades of human life. Marie-Laure LeBlanc leaves Paris with her father Daniel who is entrusted with the task of carrying a rare diamond, Sea of Flames , to safe custody when the second world war breaks out. The National Museum of Natural History, Paris, has made three counterfeit diamonds of the Sea of Flames. Four men are assigned the task of carrying each of these diamonds to four different destinations. None of them knows whether they are carrying the original diamond or the counterfeit. Marie-Laure a

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart