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Coronation Talkies
Coronation Talkies abounds in Raj clich`E9s with a disquieting flourish. Everything that you would expect in a fiction on the Raj days is found in abundant supply here and by the time you have turned a few pages, the novel becomes disturbingly predictable and excruciatingly boring. Consider, for instance, how, Lydia Rushmore, the bemused wife of a weather-obsessed meteorologist, discovers the mystery and muddle of India as she collides with a beggar woman on the very first day of her arrival in Bombay. "The beggar woman had one eye. The empty socket was festooned with flies on what appeared to be congealed milk." Even her stay at the hill station of Chalaili, where her husband is posted, is unable to revive her dampening spirits. There is no escape from India and her visits to the ‘only-White’ club are made unbearable by memsahibs who have nothing better to do than dress well and kill reputations over innumerable cups of tea. Interspersed with Lydia’s story is that of Mrs Bannerji’s, the proprietor of Coronation Talkies , and the theatre opened by her to ‘celebrate the ascension of King George IV’ and to show hit Hollywood flicks. With a penchant for garish clothes, heavy jewellery and good food, Mrs Bannerji is the perfect foil to the flat-chested Lydia Rushmore. As Mrs Bannerji tries to revive her theatre, Lydia attempts to break the monotony of her eventless life and plans to write a novel. It is at this point that skeletons start tumbling out of closets as every character reveals a nasty past that resurfaces with a malevolent intensity. Lydia, unable to handle her indifferent husband, falls into a gin-fuelled depression. She tries to befriend Anil, her mysterious servant, who pushes her into the arms of Simon Fraser, a sinister but charming thug. Meanwhile, Mrs Bannerji is also harbouring a little secret in her heart. Lo and behold! She is having a passionate affair with Lydia’s husband, William. This tale of intrigues, trickery, and seduction could have been slightly better, if only the plot was less hackneyed, the prose a little more mature and the characters fully drawn rather than being sad caricatures of themselves. |
"THE work of a queasy undergraduate scratching
his pimples." What Virginia Woolf said about James Joyce’s first
novel, this reviewer is tempted to say about Susan Kurosawa’s novel Coronation
Talkies. As a form the long novel is inevitably flawed and only a
fecund imagination and a fine control over language can save it from
falling into irretrievable verbosity. Susan Kurosawa, unfortunately,
lacks both. All these years we have been inundated with fiction on the
days of the Raj, and one way to judge their literary worth on the scale
of good, bad and ugly is to look at the extent to which they avoid or
indulge in stereotyping the East.