Fiction: The Alchemy of Desire by Tarun J Tejpal; Q and A by Vikas Swarup
REVIEWED BY LUCY ATKINS

THE ALCHEMY OF DESIRE
By Tarun J Tejpal
Picador £12.99 pp518

Q AND A
By Vikas Swarup
Doubleday £12.99 pp302

The Alchemy of Desire, a bold and weighty first novel, tells the story of a passionate marriage that disintegrates. Set in India at the turn of the last century, it is also an exploration of the clamour, creativity and confusion at the heart of a nation in flux, a land that seems destined for “rule by lunacy”.

The narrator is a would-be novelist whose fevered love for his wife dominates his life. When they marry (against their families’ wishes) they are young, penniless idealists. He gives up his journalistic job to write a great novel that will encapsulate his intellectual ideas of India. But he simply loses interest halfway through. In contrast, his relationship with his wife — rich, convincing and insatiable — seems endlessly fertile. They come into some cash and buy their dream house in the mountains.

Hidden in a cavity in the wall he finds explicit notebooks written by Catherine, the American who built the house in the early 1900s. Soon he is deciphering the books, consumed with dark fantasies about Catherine and, for the first time ever, losing all desire for his wife.

First novels about novelists can make the heart sink, but Tejpal goes beyond navel-gazing. He is a hormonally-fuelled writer obsessed with the act of creation in its widest sense, delighted to flout the “never write about sex” maxim that his character unwisely sets himself. Indeed, sex is practically a character in its own right here, endlessly examined in all its luscious, experimental glory. At times this can get a bit much (can they not just have a cup of tea?), but overall the prose works. Largely avoiding cliché or off-putting gynaecological detail, Tejpal beats an erotic path through the depths of human desire: sexual, artistic, political.

The story is briefly less convincing when we head back in time to the fleshpots of early 20th-century Paris for the debauched sexual awakenings of the young Catherine at the hands of “rakish” men with names such as Rudyard. But this is a temporary lapse. Overall, the tale of marital crisis feeds into (and from) India itself, a scary combination of testosterone, superstition and chaos that has fallen into the hands of a power-hungry “Confederacy of Gleaming Glansmen”. Though overwhelming at times, this is certainly a memorable and impressive debut.

Q and A is an equally lively though undeniably lighter first novel from India, with a neat if rather gimmicky structure. Ram Mohammad Thomas, a penniless waiter from Bombay, wins a billion rupees on a quiz show billed as India’s answer to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. He is instantly arrested as a cheat: how, demand the potentially bankrupt producers, could an uneducated youngster who cannot name the currency of France or the man who first stepped on the moon, win the “biggest prize ever offered on earth”? His only defence is to talk his lawyer through 12 episodes of his life in order to explain how he simply “(got) lucky” with a dozen questions to which he freakishly happened to know the answers.

Each of the events from his life makes a chapter: for instance, he knew the meaning of “persona non grata” because he once worked for an Australian diplomat, ordered to leave India within 48 hours for “activities incompatible with his diplomatic status”. India is equally chaotic, enchanting and corrupt in this spirited novel, but ultimately it is hard to work up much sympathy for the deadpan narrator.

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