Tuesday 18 February 2014

The Last Hangman



One of the loveliest parts of book blogging are the days you come home from a long day to be greeted by an unexpected little parcel of books. It was in one such package I received Shashi Warrier's The Last Hangman, which promised to transport me to "the heat and dust of the Indian South". Faced with the miseries of a wet London January, I tucked it into my bag and hoped it would combat the back to work blues.

Janardhanan Pillai was the last hangman of Travancore and his retirement is frequently interrupted by journalists wanting to buy his story. He is persuaded to write a journal of his past by an author and his companion after being suitably intrigued by their relationship. What follows is the story of Pillai's struggles as committing his life to paper awakens ghosts and forces him to seek meaning and answers to the moral questions his religious and educational mentors have never given him.

Warrier creates a very colourful picture of Pillai's world. He also tells the tale of the man first and foremost; although the story is told in the time of independence and great change within India, politics only comes up where it  directly impacts the hangman's life, such as his conversations with his old teacher, or when assessing the morality of hanging in the name of a now defunct king. Rather than politics, the focus is on the hangman's quest for peace and redemption. Was he right to kill in the name of the state, to be slightly outside of society, in exchange for guaranteed food for his family? Duty is a theme which continually crops up and was most interesting for me in the tale of how Pillai's father became the hangman, which was largely due to the neglecting of their duties by wealthier relatives.

The troubled hangman carries the story very well, but I couldn't help feeling there were a few gaps. The writer is a key part of the action, but his role felt very two dimensional. I think too much was unsaid here, and a secondary narrative on his motivations to write the tale would have been interesting. I also think this would have allowed a deeper exploration of the issues raised by Pillai's narrative. But then again, that would've taken the power away from the hangman; perhaps the gaps needed to be there for the reader to feel totally at one with the narrator's perspective.

Overall, this was an interesting read which takes you to a different little corner of the world. While the wind whipped around my train carriage, I couldn't have asked for more from my rush hour read!

(Available from Atlantic Books)

Friday 10 January 2014

Perfect

Before I start, I have to confess that Rachel Joyce's hit novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, is one that hasn't made it onto my to-read so I can't make comparisons. Which is probably no bad thing. I opened Perfect with no preconceptions and I was greeted with a haunting tale of class, broken dreams and how the course of our lives can change in the blink of an eye.

The thrust of the action takes place in 1972, where public schoolboy Byron Hemming is informed by his friend James that two seconds are going to be added onto time. This idea deeply troubles Byron, and a course of events and the two seconds result in an accident when his mother, taking a route through the undesirable part of town, knocks a girl off her bike.

These two seconds result in the unraveling of Byron's life as he knows it. His mother, Diana, changes before his eyes from a perfect housewife in a 1950s timewarp, threatening the security he has always known. She becomes friends with the working class mother of the child injured in the accident (although I doubt this accident actually happened and instead was a figment of Byron's imagination). Diana's transformation unleashes insecurity in her husband, convinced he is losing his grip on the wife he transformed from prostitute's daughter and stage performer to middle class housewife. His perfectly groomed house becomes a mess as his mother abandons domesticity.

I found Byron's innocence and the simplicity of his emotions as the veneer of his family's background cracks heartbreaking. Class is all around and constraining, crushing Diana's free spirit. Byron adores but does not understand his mother, placing her on a pedestal and is confused as her true self is set free. For me, this is Diana's tale and all I wanted was for her to be well and to be free. The ending for their tale moved me and stayed with me long after reading.

There was a second strand to this tale, focusing in the future with a troubled man named Jim who works in a cafe following a stint in a mental health facility. I just couldn't get into this part of the tale and I felt it added a slightly predictable element to a story that's otherwise full of surprises. Other than this, I felt this was a dark, haunting tale of family life, and definitely one to lose yourself in on a bleak January morning.

(Available in hardback, paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon)