Red Earth and Pouring Rain

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Half-way house - Rated
Red Earth and Pouring Rain reads like the first shot of a great writer still finding his voice.

Chandra loosely intertwines two stories: one, set in India, an adventure tale in the style of old epics, and the other a modern American road story. The problem is that one infects the reading of the other; as in the mating of the mare with the donkey, the result is sterile. The earnestness of the fantastic old tale is lost. The Indian gods' appearance in a modern setting feels too much like Rushdie without the philosophy, the American road story like diaspora writing without a motive.

Perhaps Chandra didn't dare write only the epic, where one feels his real interest lay. Maybe his first submission wouldn't have been accepted by publishers without the homage to all that Indian-in-exile-on-a-US-campus stuff. And the book contains interesting writing on Anglo-Indian relations. But if, like me, you enjoyed Sacred Games and are looking for something else to read by the same author, you are better off waiting for his next novel.

Disappointing - Rated
Vikram Chandra's debut novel has received significant critical acclaim, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Published Book, and a swag of favourable reviews on this website. Despite being interested in Indian culture and history, and being an avid reader of contemporary English language fiction set in South Asia, I regrettably found Chandra's 'Red Earth and Pouring Rain' to be overall one of the most disappointing novels that I've ever read.

'Red Earth and Pouring Rain' is a novel of stories, and stories within stories, paying homage to the magic of storytelling. Stories are delivered to people - and gods in the Hindu pantheon - that come to assemble in the maidan. The most enjoyable sections of this novel are those revolving around developments in this village square as the storytelling unfolds, passages that Chandra intersperses throughout the work that function as transition markers between the sessions of story-telling: regrettably they account for a mere twenty-eight pages - a short story's worth of prose - in a massive tome of 618 pages.

Chandra's novel consists of two broad intertwined narratives glued together by the enjoyable transition scenes: a historical narrative spanning thousands of years of life on the sub-continent, and a contemporary story. The shorter of these, and by far the more enjoyable, is the contemporary story of Abhay, an Indian student returned from the United States. Abhay's adventures also illustrate the (generally negative) effects of the United States, and the West generally, on India's young elite, although perhaps Chandra is a touch heavy-handed in his portrayal of America's moral licentiousness, with two of a mere handful of characters including a female porn star that everybody appears to recognise, and a former centrefold whose allure for Abhay hasn't dimmed since he first set eyes on her in his Indian schooldays.

For the first two hundred pages or so, a confusing cast of characters are introduced and Chandra provides scant character development, little justification for the reader to take any interest in the events portrayed. Accordingly, Chandra fails to establish the essential compact between writer and reader that the words on the page are somehow more than mere words, and as a result my train of thought frequently drifted elsewhere. Primarily I persisted reading the novel on the strength of Abhay's tale and the scenes in the maidan - and a pigheaded resolve not to discard a book partly read! Granted the historical narrative becomes more cohesive with the arrival of brothers Sikander and Chotta, and half-sibling Sanjay - forgive me if this is not the correct familial relationship of the trio as even this is not without confusion - although I still did not identify with any character, and the remaining two-thirds of this lengthy work, with its liberal doses of magic realism, reads like a poor man's Rushdie.

Disappointing - Rated
Vikram Chandra's debut novel has received significant critical acclaim, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Published Book, and a swag of favourable reviews on this website. Despite being interested in Indian culture and history, and being an avid reader of contemporary English language fiction set in South Asia, I regrettably found Chandra's 'Red Earth and Pouring Rain' to be overall one of the most disappointing novels that I've ever read.

'Red Earth and Pouring Rain' is a novel of stories, and stories within stories, paying homage to the magic of storytelling. Stories are delivered to people - and gods in the Hindu pantheon - that come to assemble in the maidan. The most enjoyable sections of this novel are those revolving around developments in this village square as the storytelling unfolds, passages that Chandra intersperses throughout the work that function as transition markers between the sessions of story-telling: regrettably they account for a mere twenty-eight pages - a short story's worth of prose - in a massive tome of 618 pages.

Chandra's novel consists of two broad intertwined narratives glued together by the enjoyable transition scenes: a historical narrative spanning thousands of years of life on the sub-continent, and a contemporary story. The shorter of these, and by far the more enjoyable, is the contemporary story of Abhay, an Indian student returned from the United States. Abhay's adventures also illustrate the (generally negative) effects of the United States, and the West generally, on India's young elite, although perhaps Chandra is a touch heavy-handed in his portrayal of America's moral licentiousness, with two of a mere handful of characters including a female porn star that everybody appears to recognise, and a former centrefold whose allure for Abhay hasn't dimmed since he first set eyes on her in his Indian schooldays.

For the first two hundred pages or so, a confusing cast of characters are introduced and Chandra provides scant character development, little justification for the reader to take any interest in the events portrayed. Accordingly, Chandra fails to establish the essential compact between writer and reader that the words on the page are somehow more than mere words, and as a result my train of thought frequently drifted elsewhere. Primarily I persisted reading the novel on the strength of Abhay's tale and the scenes in the maidan - and a pigheaded resolve not to discard a book partly read! Granted the historical narrative becomes more cohesive with the arrival of brothers Sikander and Chotta, and half-sibling Sanjay - forgive me if this is not the correct familial relationship of the trio as even this is not without confusion - although I still did not identify with any character, and the remaining two-thirds of this lengthy work, with its liberal doses of magic realism, reads like a poor man's Rushdie.

A tale of splendour and desolation... narrated by a monkey ? - Rated
This massive, complex, multi-facetted book can be read in many ways: as a contemporary attempt to recapture the epic complexities of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; as a diatribe against the evils of colonialism (both the nineteenth-century British version and its new American counterpart); as an attack on the emptiness of modern capitalist consumerism... No doubt all true in their way, but for me the most astute comment on the book comes from Adam Thorpe (a man who knows a thing or two about storytelling himself): "telling a story - hundreds of them - becomes its own life-preserving act".

And what a story it is. Indian student Abhay, recently returned from the U.S.A., shoots a monkey which is stealing food. The badly wounded creature, rescued by his horrified relatives, announces that it contains the soul of the poet Sanjay: when Yama, God of the Dead, turns up (rapidly followed by several other minor cabinet ministers of the Hindu pantheon), Sanjay negotiates a stay of execution in exchange for his life story. (The obvious parallel here is with Sheherazade in "The Thousand and One Nights", and certainly Chandra's novel is very much "about" the power of narrative.) Sanjay tells us a tale that has it all: he has lived through most of the period of British colonialism, and spares us none of its horrors and injustices; but his tale also has love interest; epic battle scenes; a strong dash of magical realism, or even magical surrealism (twins are born miraculously after the consumption of sticky buns; Sanjay becomes a creature of the Undead to pursue fellow immortal Jack the Ripper through the streets of Victorian London); and perhaps most remarkably, recurrent scenes of emotional desolation on an epic scale (it's a difficult mood to describe, but no-one does it as well as Chandra: the same mood recurs in his collection of linked novellas, "Love and Longing in Bombay"). Intercut with Sanjay's tale, and drawing ironic parallels between British and American imperialism, is Abhay's own narrative of his experiences as a student in America: this has its own scenes of epic emotional desolation.

A strange, beautiful and unique book; and the best story (indeed, hundreds of them) I've read for a long time.

Symbols of resistance - Rated
Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a remarkable novel. The author has spun a web of intriguing stories, exploring the impact of British colonialism on India and the Indian people.
With an overwhelming and often humorous use of symbolism, Chandra deals with events and issues that have shaped India with devastating consequences. Independence, partition and today's communal violence are all located in the social antagonisms unleashed by colonisation.
At its heart, Red Earth and Pouring Rain conveys the torment of being robbed of a cultural identity. The novel's many characters all struggle with a sense of being a stranger in a foreign land-a theme that Chandra explores using both Indian and European characters.
Out of these struggles for personal identity there come stories of resistance to colonial rule-from a Calcutta printer, who secretes hidden subversive messages in the books he prints, to the hero of the book who leads an armed mutiny against the British.
Few books, fiction or non-fiction, have got me thinking so much about India and the affects of British colonialism. The parallels for the new century couldn't be any closer.