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The Prayer
The novel is obviously influenced by the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe. In fact the prayer, which appears like a refrain in the novel, reflects the theme of ‘a dream within a dream’ where Poe asks Is all that we see or seem/ But a dream within a dream? The Prayer is a curse which works its way through the dreams of the protagonists, so much so that they are afraid to sleep as their dreams become real. The characters soon hope their prayers and dreams are not answered as they are no longer their own. The plot seems dense at first as the characters plod through circumstances beyond their control. The authors’ intention seems to be to write a horror novel, and so they try to set the tone through description, dialogue and events. It fails to achieve the desired effect due to its predictable use of the metaphors of horror, without an element of suspense. What the novel achieves however is to portray the dilemmas faced by human beings and our desperate need to sanitise our lives to comforting proportions, to make each day livable. There are some memorable passages however, like the words on walking... "Activists walked their talk. Fat old folks walked to shed the weight of their lives. Lovers walked out of love. Men with pink slips walked into debt. But most hurrying feet that walked....at six....were just walking home.’’ Al Raines is the pseudonym, we are informed, of two Indian writers, a writer-couple, perhaps. One wonders at these homegrown efforts at writing fiction. One’s instinct is to sympathise, even encourage, the small writer, the small publisher. May be some gems will emerge every once in a while. But this effort is definitely not one of them.
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FOR a book that comes with
a "money-back guarantee" that if you don’t find it the
"scariest/darkest book you have ever read," you can ask for
your money back, this volume creates not so much fear as melancholy;
leaving you not frightened, but depressed. The Prayer aims to
deal with the sadness of the human condition and its most poignant
expression – death. And it finds poetry in the death of a beautiful
woman, the desolation of the bereaved lover, the imagery of the raven
– the bird of ill-omen made famous by Edgar Allan Poe – and
literally, in the words of The Prayer. The prayer is a chain
letter, which has to be forwarded to seven people, with disastrous
consequences.