Skip to main content

Call of the Forest




Book Review


Title: Dattapaharam: Call of the Forest

Author: V J James

Translated from Malayalam by: Ministhy S

Publisher: Penguin, 2023

Pages: 164

The forest is an enchanting place for many people including me. The chief reason why this book drew my attention is that the forest plays a vital role in it. We live in the forest through this novel. We move in the forest, climb its rocks, bathe in its streams, and sleep in its caves. The smells and sounds of the forest envelop us.

The hero of the novel, Freddie Robert, vanishes right in the beginning. He is somewhere there in the deep forest living with all the wild animals because the call of the forest is far sweeter to him than the allures of human civilisation. His friends begin a journey into the forest to find him. The novel is about that journey.

The novel is about forest, rather. About the need to merge into nature. The human world is replete with hypocrisy and deceit. The animals are far better. They turn out to be kinder too in the novel. Only, you should know how to deal with them. Rather, you should reach their level of existence – a high level of ‘transparency’. Freddie Robert is seen by a team of researchers as completely naked man. Freddie’s nakedness is a mark of his transparency. Nothing, not even clothes, now separates him from nature.

Before Freddie’s disappearance, he tells one of his friends: “Only the forest has a pure present time. The one who can live like a wild animal, after understanding himself, is fortunate. Without worrying about what is behind him, and without concerning himself with what is yet to come, he can exist purely in the present.”  

Is such bliss of living purely in the present possible? Maybe, in the forest it is. But what motivates one to seek such bliss? In the novel, mysticism is not what motivates Freddie to abandon human civilisation. It is not spirituality of any kind either. There’s not even any convincing metaphysical reason suggested. Towards the end of the novel, a very ordinary human motive comes to the surface. I don’t want to discuss it because it will be a huge spoiler in case you wish to read this novel.

Freddie was a gang leader at college. His gang was called the Pandavas. Freddie was Yudhishtira, but one without any sense of dharma. There is a Panchali (Draupadi) too but playing a completely different role. Freddie has to learn his dharma from the forest, the place where “there are fewer wicked animals … when compared to the mainland.” The human world today is led by “charismatic masters who are frauds” and “devils who read the scriptures seated on commercialized spiritual pedestals.”

How do we redeem ourselves in such a world? Can the forest be of help? This novel suggests it can.

I didn’t find the suggestion very convincing. The plot and its movement toward denouement will keep you hooked to the pages. But the characters turn out to be rather unconvincing. Superficial. Towards the end, it is impossible to believe what they are saying and doing. Not because the forest has deluded them; they are deluding themselves because their creator (the author) has a lesson to teach the readers.

Eminent writers like Bernard Shaw have written with the clear purpose of teaching certain lessons to the readers. But their didacticism didn’t detract from the literary eminence of their writing. James stops short of belonging to that category of writers.

Comments

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

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

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

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r