Gripping tales of strangeness

Thirteen Tokyo-bound passengers are left stranded at an airport for the night, their plane having been cancelled because of a snowstorm, and there being no available accommodation.

To pass the time they tell each other stories; this supplies the framing device for Rana Dasgupta's accomplished debut novel about how "other" places and people mustn't be categorised as strange. Inexplicable things happen everywhere, says the author, strangeness is all around us.

The first story, about a penurious tailor commissioned to make a robe for a young prince, provides the merest hint of what is to follow. It has the flavour of a folktale, something thought up by a modern-day Scheherezade (the prince travels by jeep and flings dollar bills out its window).

But the stories get much odder as they go along. In London, a young dreamer encounters an old woman who says mysterious things about "remembering what will happen in the future", and shortly afterwards finds himself editing other people's memories for a secret organisation.

In New York, magic cookies turn a woman into a departmental store. In a plague-struck Paris, a changeling tries to help a dying old man find a word.

The stories, set in different cities (presumably the ones the narrators come from), vary in size""the shortest, which carries echoes of Roald Dahl, is just two pages long.

There are little connections between them, hints at common themes: a notable one is that of two malcontents being unable to relate to anyone but each other (this applies to the protagonists of many of the tales, but the most explicit reference to this motif is a tangential one, about two old sisters in a rainforest who are the only people left who still speak the traditional language).

Nearly all the tales have doses of matter-of-fact surrealism (the most obvious being the last, "The Recycler of Dreams", which makes references to Luis Bunuel's films and could itself easily be the screenplay for a short directed by the master surrealist).

However, what the stories really share is an ability to get under your skin. Dasgupta knows a thing or two about keeping the reader's nerves on edge and it is, paradoxically, by his refusal to exoticise that he achieves his effect; he gives strangeness a commonplace treatment.

You won't find here any attempt, for instance, to supply a different tone for each narrative, or to accentuate the differences between the places the stories are set in.

The stories are all told in a fluent, easy-to-read style (there is the occasional tendency to Upper Case words for no real reason. But that's a malaise common to many of our novels, and easy enough to overlook).

The author is good at wry faux-profundity too: "If you can only find your own fluorescent light to sit on," thinks a character as he watches a lizard waiting for flies, "everything comes to you."

The best of the lot? My vote goes to the intense story of a Japanese businessman who, in his preoccupation with work, cuts off from the real people around him and becomes obsessed with a doll of his own making. (The story is engrossing enough on its own terms, but the fact that the doll gets most of its information about the outside world from a computer also makes it an allegory for the all-subsuming nature of the Internet""an invention that has, more than any other, made nonsense of conventional geographic boundaries and of the exoticising of "other" places.)

Tokyo Cancelled is reminiscent in some ways of David Mitchell's Booker-nominated Cloud Atlas, published a few months ago. The comparison mustn't be pushed too far""Mitchell's book is a vastly more ambitious work, written by a more seasoned novelist who plays with tones and genres""but there are commonalities.

"What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable?" says Mitchell's most memorable character, "to possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds".

Dasgupta is interested in maps and atlases too, constant as well as shifting, and one of his book's most distinct themes is a refusal to accept the world in conventional terms.

In one story, a cartographer works on a global map that is based on velocity""the speed at which things move across the planet""rather than on geography. In another, a character visits Manhattan for the first time and is surprised by the verticality of its skyline: "his map had only shown it on the horizontal".

The only real flaw in Tokyo Cancelled""and again, one it shares with Mitchell's novel""is that of a forced linking device. What is, at heart, a collection of intriguing stories, attempts""however half-heartedly"" to be otherwise.

The little interludes between chapters read awkwardly, the passengers relating the tales don't ever come into their own, and no real significance is invested in who tells what story.

The author doesn't seem too interested himself in his bookends""the "Arrivals" and "Departures" sections""and one senses here a compromise: debutante novelist isn't yet well-known enough to publish a book of short stories, so do a minor rewrite and package it differently.

Mercifully, the reader is under no compulsion to go along with this manner of branding. Treat Tokyo Cancelled as a book full of imaginative, creepy tales told in a distinct style, and you can't go wrong. Dasgupta has the storyteller's gift, which is a pretty good starting point for any writer. With time, expect his voice to get even more assured.

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TOKYO CANCELLED

Rana Dasgupta
HarperCollins India
Pages: 383; Price: Rs 395