Purple prose fails to offset the banality
F I C T I O N
By Neil Bissoondath
Cormorant Books
350 pp., $32.95
In a typically subtle exchange
from Neil Bissoondath’s overdone new novel,
one character
asks another
what he thinks
Joseph Conrad “ would make of all this,” meaning the half-truths and hypocrisies, half-lights and darkness, complications and confusions that govern their patch of earth. The answer is unintentionally accurate: “ Who knows what he’d say. But I’m pretty damn sure he’d recognize us.” Indeed, Conrad would likely recognize them, as will most contemporary readers.
But this is not to say that the novel features intelligently reworked 21st-century descendants of Kurtz, Marlow, et al. Rather, Bissoondath’s characters possess a cardboard complexity that renders them too immediately and easily comprehensible by the dictates of Terror Fiction, that harsh new genre defined of late by writers like Orhan Pamuk and Ian McEwan.
Unfortunately, The Unyielding Clamour of the Night will not join the accomplished ranks of and Saturday, let alone Darkness
Nostromo, the other Conrad masterpiece that bears upon it. While displaying occasional flashes of Bissoondath’s steely intelligence, Clamour is at base a loud and windy morality tale, collaged together from the international section of the daily news, thickly drawn and ardent where it could have been sharpedged and dispassionate.
Bissoondath sets his work in a fictional island-nation floating between Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Scarred by colonial rule, busted up by political mismanagement and racist social engineering, the country is corrosively split between an affluent, peaceful north, where a fixed 2% of the island’s indigenous blacks are given the opportunity for advancement alongside the ruling population, and an impoverished, war-ravaged south, where the army and insurgents battle for control over the hearts and minds and land of the remaining 98%.
We gain our view of this Third World Everynation through the experiences of 21-year-old Arun, a well-meaning son of northern privilege who courageously rejects his inheritance for a teaching job in a depressed southern village where the previous five instructors have had their throats cut for their efforts.
In time, Arun finds himself caught up amid much powerbroking, secret sharing and violence as he shuttles back and forth between the locals and the army. His earnest idealism predictably gives way to much confusion and young-man brooding, and then to despair, rage and revenge when he realizes that everyone in his orbit is always at once a potential ally, suspect, victim, hero and martyr.
Arun also falls for Anjani, the rebellious daughter of a powerful townsman who has already lost a son to the nation’s troubles; he tries to come to terms with his parents’ untimely deaths in a related plane bombing, and he or
Snow Heart of does his best attempt at a oneroom schoolhouse version of Dead Poets Society. Incidentally, he’s also missing a leg, as is one of his students.
Freighted with obvious parallels, the novel overdetermines even its most affecting moments. To borrow a phrase from one of Bissoondath’s considerably better works, the novel brilliantly registers the casual brutality of a terrorist bombing. Arun, a newly purchased shirt tucked under one arm, and Kumarsingh, his entrepreneurial, chatty friend, stroll off from a departing bus just as it explodes. Masterfully unannounced, Bissoondath’s rendering of indiscriminate terrorism manages to overwhelm reader and character alike, and the author’s eye here is hard and clear: “The bus looked as if it had been seared from the inside, its frame intact except for a panel of metal siding that had been peeled back in the middle, exposing metal struts. Every window had been blown out.”
But rather than leave us to struggle with this grim but understated evocation, Bissoondath goes on, and on. An epic list of butcher-block carnage accompanies Arun as he picks his way through the aftermath of the bombing. Eventually, he comes upon “a human heart, still beating” and with “his heart pounding in his throat, [Arun] knelt beside the orphaned heart … [and] unwrapped the shirt and, when the heart no longer pulsed, draped it over its lustrous stillness.” Leaving aside the iffy biology, such pulpy symbolism transforms a harrowing scene into a teary watercolour.
Indeed, Bissoondath drenches the novel’s series of reversals and revelations with weepy feeling, while also weaving a cat’s cradle of character connections that is unduly melodramatic.
This combination renders the explosive denouement as banal as it is predictable. The laden prose doesn’t help. Perhaps in an attempt to justify his blaring title, Bissoondath stuffs his pages with sensory evocations: We find Arun “among the nocturnal racket,” “in the renewed totality of the night” and lost in “the unyielding night”; he hears not just “the clatter of night insects” but also “the clamour of the mountains” and the “cadenced communal growl” of soldiers. At one point, he even feels “an obstreperous gushing into the nostrils.” On its own terms, Bissoondath’s Unyielding Clamour of the Night is “a brilliant cacophony.” That seems about half right.
Randy Boyagoda is a postdoctoral fellow with the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He writes frequently for publications including The Walrus and The Weekly Standard.