Category Sách & Tri thức

Driven by a whodunnit-ish plot, this state-of-the-nation sequel to The Party features a family at the centre of British political life

Elizabeth Day is the right person to write a state-of-the-nation novel about our society at a point when so many are convinced it’s failing. She herself has made a successful franchise out of failure with her How to Fail podcast. She understands failure and she understands that it may be too tempting to luxuriate in it, rather than seeing how quickly it can turn into success and back again.

Day began her career with thoughtful, intimate novels about the fault lines of family life. Scissors, Paper, Stone and Home Fires were old-fashioned, heartfelt works about how cruelty trickles down the generations and how lives can be tentatively remade. Then she more ambitiously embraced the thriller genre on the one hand and a larger social canvas on the other. This has presented dangers: her last novel, Magpie, risked sacrificing characterisation altogether for the sake of a grand midway reveal; before that, The Party was so plot-driven and backstory-laden that it lacked the fine-grained intimacy of her earlier works. One of Us is a sequel to The Party, but it’s a much stronger, more distinctive novel, better read as a standalone work. Here she has returned to the intimate family dynamics at which she excels, combined with a brilliantly propulsive, almost whodunnit-ish plot and an astute analysis of power. Because the family in question is now at the heart of British political life.

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A love affair between two men in Darjeeling comes to a violent end in this unfocused tale of heartbreak, secrecy – and the separate lives they return to in Mumbai

Mahesh Rao’s third novel tells the story of two young men, Neville and Pavan, as their paths cross and recross in the years preceding India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality. It is a rather melancholy tale, in which the sky is always grey and the mood is always despondent, where secrecy and shame are the prevailing emotions, and violence is never far away. As gay men in pre-2018 India, Neville and Pavan exist in an in-between world. There are dating apps and hookups galore, but there is also open hostility and the threat of prosecution. Tempering this bleakness is Rao’s pleasingly wry humour and sharply satirical eye, which he casts over this period of cultural flux. The narrative is split into two sections – Darjeeling in 2014 and Mumbai in 2018 – proceeding in short chapters that alternate between Neville’s and Pavan’s points of view.

The story begins as a landslide blocks the routes to and from the Golden Peaks Hotel, a subpar establishment in the hills of Darjeeling where Pavan works and where Neville, along with his haughty mother Audrey and servile family friend Lorna, is a guest. With little else to do, and emboldened by the novel circumstances, the two men strike up a furtive romance. “[Pavan’s] sense of the world being held in suspension had continued to grow. The hotel was cut off. Rations were low. Routines had changed. There seemed to be a fated quality about his encounter with Neville.”

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