There was a breathless hush in the close two nights ago at the British Council Auditorium in the capital as we welcomed IndiaInk's second baby into the world. And there was deja vu: the pre-Booker buzz, the sense of discovery, the rhapsodies about the fabulous cover. Hadn't we been here before with Arundhati Roy?
The God of Small Things is still on the bestseller list. With I Allan Sealy's The Everest Hotel, whether it reaches the top of the charts or not is immaterial. There is enough to savour in the fact that he's written it at all.
The reclusive author has seen three books appear to faint acclaim, only to sink into the twilight world reserved for anything that's sold less than 10,000 copies. Twice at least _ with The Trotternama and From Yukon to Yukatan _ his books have received premature internment in the cemetery of dead literature.
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This time it may be different. The Everest Hotel has been summoned by the Booker judges, and that alone guarantees it a readership denied his earlier efforts. Few books have been more worthy of the spotlight.
The Everest Hotel spans a year of living dangerously for the residents of Drummondganj, a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas. Everest is a faded hotel, given over to nuns who run a home for the unwanted. The owner, Immanuel Jed, is a former mountaineer who alternately alleviates and flays the bitterness of being ninety by writing The Drummondganj Book of the Dead.
The demand for the creation of Varunachal, a separate state, has sent warning tremors through the town that's caught halfway between the hills and the plains. The arrival of Sister Ritu, a nun with an interest in botany, sends tremors of equal weight through the hotel as the balance between Jed and the nuns is tested. So is the fine balance between Jed and Brij, a pro-Varunachal activist and general fixer of small things.
But the centre holds until the advent of Inge, a jackbooted German girl there in search of her uncle's grave. Sealy calibrates each wave of violence and upheaval that follows with cold precision; when the winds of change finally drop, nothing is the same.
That inexorable skeleton of a plot is clothed by flesh whittled down till it's almost all muscle. There's nothing flaccid about Sealy's writing; the prose is so taut that it hums like an electrical cable. Where The Trotternama sprawled outwards with a lavish generosity, The Everest Hotel has the concentrated energy of a black hole, fuelled by a story that implodes on itself.
The book starts with summer and comes full circle to spring next year, following Kalidasa's division in the Ritusamhara. The sweep and ebb of the seasons does more than provide a structural framework _ each turn of the earth remorselessly forces change upon the characters.
Sealy's greatest achievement is to make his readers explore with him each terrible bump and hollow of the skull beneath the skin. Which is not to say that The Everest Hotel is perfect: it has its flaws, often large ones. Inge never comes alive. Her jackboots, punk hairstyle and mating call of latent sadism loom so large in the frame that they leave no space for her as a person. Grim arrows point to Brij's fate so far before it overtakes him that when the book finally catches up, it's anticlimactic.
There are also fleeting threads that unravel too soon; themes satisfying enough as minor chords, except that they could have been whole symphonies. Jed's inability to sleep, the shifting spaces between the nuns all hint at more stories to be told. But even these flaws point to Sealy's strength as a storyteller; you don't want him to stop, you'd like hypertext links to lead into a dozen other books.
In the final reckoning, the criticism is superfluous. Sealy has written a book guaranteed to hammer insistently at locked doors in the mind long after you thought you had put it down. The Everest Hotel has bleak messages to offer, its sense of the essential frailty of our world tempered only slightly by a half-promise of survival. It says much for Sealy's genius, both as a writer and as a thinker, that it is a message impossible to ignore.