City of Ghosts - Bali Rai

[bookgazing]

‘City of Ghosts’. This book did not go well for me.

'City of Ghosts’ by Bali Rai opens with an assassination in 1940s England. Within five pages Rai has introduced principle characters and used a dramatic event to capture the reader’s attention. He then proceeds to direct his readers away from the action of this opening chapter to a different time and place, transporting them to the Punjab city of Amritsar in 1912, presumably to explain why the assassin Udham Singh shot Michael O’Dwyer. The flashback narrative is a device that I know some people hate, but usually I enjoy a story that uses flashbacks to increase the tension of a book (although past life narratives tend to make me impatient). I was expecting to enjoy this book because of how this device quickly interested me in Udham and what sentences like 'What a shame, thought Udham, that O'Dwyer hadn't listened to the voices of the people he'd governed all those years ago.'.

Narratives that switch between decades and storylines need to be tightly structured in order to produce tension and encourage interest. Authors using this device need to switch time lines at significant points, to generate excited anticipation. They also need to remember to constantly link the story set in the past to the story set in the present in some way, otherwise the present narrative (which is probably shorter and less developed to ensure a sense of mystery remains until late in the book) begins to feel irrelevant to the reader. In the Amritsar chapters Udham Singh is a background presence who the reader is never allowed to significantly connect with. Trying to work out how his story relates to the Amritsar chapters becomes unpleasantly frustrating and it’s easy to forget that he is even an important character as he’s referred to so infrequently in the 1919 strand of the book.

In the Amritsar chapters (the main bulk of the book) we meet a host of main characters who each get their own plot line. Gurdial is an orphan in love with Sohni, the daughter of a rich, unpleasant cloth merchant. Her father and stepmother are in an unhappy marriage and have done some awful things to others. Mohni is a servant who knows all about their secrets and has made a promise to Sohni’s dead mother to protect her from them. Jeevan is Gurdial’s friend, who gets involved with Indians opposed to the British occupation. Bissen Singh was an Indian soldier who fought for the British during WWI and is now waiting in Amritsar for a letter from his lover, who is an English nurse.

Most of these characters get a section of the book that is dedicated to their story, where readers can follow their stories and motivations, but many of these characters feel as if they are only allowed to develop so far. Readers learn details about the characters that allow the plot to move forward in the way the author has decided it will go, instead of being fully developed people. Readers are told about Sohni’s love for Gurdial and her sadness over her mother’s death, which both relate to the book’s plot, but really learn nothing else about her. Javeen is a little better developed as readers learn that he is a bit of a clown, which has nothing to do with how the plot moves forward. Then they find out that he is looking for somewhere to belong and readers hear a terrible story about his mother, which provides motivation for his actions, which will help to further the plot of the novel. These character’s stories could be wonderful if expanded, or if they were separated into their own novellas. Rai would have time to fill in extra emotional details about his characters. He would also be able to express the ideas, such as resentment over British rule, that he tries to associate with different characters in fuller, more cohesive ways.

Unfortunately when these characters are put into a novel where there are other exciting storylines that need to progress there simply isn’t space, or time for all the characters to be developed into full human beings. The plots of each character’s individual story are enjoyable and original (especially Sohni and her parents stories) but I often felt removed from the characters because I didn’t know enough about them.

In my opinion, Bissen Singh is the most fully developed character, as later in the book his back story is explained and it is a story that has little impact on later events in Amritsar. However, I did think that my own interest in stories set in WWI and my basic knowledge about Indian soldiers who fought for the British in WWI made this storyline feel more developed than other readers might find it. Bissen’s story often seems caught between making a larger point about Indian soldiers relationship with the British and trying to avoid making any kind of definite political point. If Rai had taken either of those directions I would have been happy, but a state of uncomfortable, thinness is created which leaves Bissen’s narrative feeling unsatisfactory as an explanatory narrative and slightly self conscious about being ‘just’ a story. Still, I really enjoyed reading about Bissen’s time in France, his romance and the small parts of the book about Bissen’s life in Amritsar easing his pain with opium, while he waits for a letter.

The novel switches between three different time periods (Bissen’s backstory is told in long flashback section, where the story goes back to 1912). Gurdial’s story contains what starts out sounding like a folktale aspect, as Sohni’s father asks him to return with the most precious thing in India by Vakshika if he wants to marry his daughter and Gurdial has to puzzle out the riddle, with some supernatural help. There’s a supernatural element that follows several of the characters and takes the book almost into the territory of magical realism. There’s a fifth perspective offered on events, as readers watch British army officers react to revolts in Amritsar. I’ll never be one to tell you a novel is too complex because it has a big cast, or follows multiple time lines, or wants to investigate a multitude of complex ideas, but in ‘The City of Ghosts’ a fatal combination of too much and not enough occurs. The mix of timelines and different literary tropes (magical realism, romance, political thriller) sound original, but the book feels cluttered. Collected together all the different stories compete and distract, continually asking the reader to readjust to a different kind of story. In this one case, in this one novel I feel like the constant readjustment of perspective, is too much to ask of readers (or me at least), especially when Rai leaves so many characters undeveloped and so many political aspects unexplained. The changes between the way I was expected to read the book were just too abrupt for me, as it changed from a piece of magical realism, to a realistic narrative set in WWI, to a typical novel of India seen form a British military perspective. Again if all these types writing has been separate novels I think I would have enjoyed them more, but all together I just found all the switching about needless.

Like I said above many aspects of the political situation in the Punjab in 1912 are sketched in quickly and left mostly unexplained. Rai seems to have assumed his readers will have previous knowledge about the political situation in early twentieth century India and that seems a rather unusual assumption to make, especially considering that this is young adult novel. I don’t think India under the Raj is a subject that gets a lot of attention in secondary school education, which is not to say teenagers aren’t able to find things out independently, but I think the majority of teenagers and adults could do with a bit more background to what helped to create the tense atmosphere in Amritsar. Coming out of this book I still didn’t have a clear idea of what the Rowlatt Act was, though it was mentioned many times and I got the vague idea it had something to do with increasing taxes. There were other subjects that I felt were touched on briefly, too briefly for someone starting with almost no knowledge of Indian history. The reader is bombarded with ideas, historical context and characters, but complex ideas and contextual items are inserted fleetingly, almost like Rai is name dropping ideas like racial dilution, non violent protest and the Rowlatt Act without providing any substance to contextualise the idea.

When I’m not enjoying a novel all sorts of little peculiarities begin to annoy me. Suddenly, I was noticing the over abundance of varied dialogue tags like 'Ram joked', 'Jeevan whispered' and thinking about what Raych would make of them. I started longing for nuanced villains as there didn’t seem to be any. I got annoyed that the novel expresses such clear ideas about which characters readers should be sympathetic towards and on what terms these characters can be defined as sympathetic. I wanted clarity on quite a few ambiguous details (who is the Chinaman, is he the devil?) and was unable to make sense of the significance of the reoccurring smell of rotting onions and sour milk.

It really is like a Yeti rolling down a snowy hill once I begin to get annoyed, all the little flaws accumulate and distract me from taking pleasure in the book. ‘City of Ghosts’ is written in robust prose and full of adventure, romance and interesting characters, it was just too crowded and felt like it wasn’t expanded as much as it should have been to provide the most interesting, informative story about the life and violence that took place in Amritsar in 1912.

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