Book title: Touching the Trinity

Author: Manoj Barpujari

Publisher: Purbanchal Prakash

Pages: 110

Price: Rs 200

Journalist-cum-film critic of Assam, Manoj Barpujari, pays tribute to Trinidad and Tobago in the form of this travelogue after travelling to the twin island nation to avail of a fellowship.

Touching the Trinity is mainly a worldview and literary presentation by the writer where he has shared a vivid account of the two islands, often called Tribago.

Speaking loads about the ethnic beauty of the nation, the book reveals how people of different ethnicities have added to the country’s diverse culture. It is the land that was once the habitat of the Ameridians who were termed the “only peaceful Indians along the whole South American coast.”

Right from the Spanish invasion, French migration, British influence, African acclimatisation to East Indian settlement, this nation has tasted cultural diversity in every form. The traditional Christmas songs, Parang, sung in Spanish, the Indian Arrival Day of May 30, the Carnival, calypso music and the callaloo soup are a few signs of this great cultural assimilation.

The sweet and unforgettable experiences of the writer could be deeply felt in his words when he recounts that on his way back to New Delhi via London, he weighed his “bag of experiences and memories at the International Airport of Piarco and found it full and heavily laced with smiles and tears”.

Every word and sentence he says about the nation reflects how he has fallen in love with its open-minded, democratic and cosmopolitan society.

Going into the details and sharing his feelings and experiences of the day he was awarded his fellowship in the eastern hills of the Port of Spain, Barpujari gives a smooth and vivid account of the occasion in clear words.

Barpujari also gives a detailed view on the office of the HK Group and an account of the process of desalination of water step by step. Being the winner of the first Hafeez Karamath Journalism Fellowship, the writer has described Hafeez Karamath Limited in every good word possible.

The author, who feels mesmerised by the breathtaking views of the green trees and the sea, finishes with a vivid and touching account of the sea, quoting a few lines from a Derek Walcott poem.

With good editing and lucid and simple sentences, the book is a truly interesting and enjoyable travelogue.

Harry Potter revisited

Book title: The Casual Vacancy
Author: J.K. Rowling
Publisher: Little, Brown
Pages: 512
Price: Rs 850

Anusua Mukherjee

I must confess at the beginning that I have not read any of the Harry Potter novels. But, of course, it would require wizardry of the highest kind to save one’s skin from the radiations of J.K. Rowling. So from time to time I have found myself dozing over reports on how children stand in eager queues all night to buy new Potter books (do they also hold candlelight vigils?), marvelling at blissful youth that can go into a tizzy over Harry and iPhone 5, and wondering about the shabby-looking sets and heightened emotions, reminiscent of Bengali soaps, that seem to characterize the Potter movies. What I gathered from these unwitting exposures is that most of the Harry Potter series takes place in a school and so logically involves some growing up; the good fights against the evil, with some charming mix-up of the two in between; and, in short, is about as exciting as reality shows.

Surprisingly, The Casual Vacancy, Rowling’s first “adult” novel after the seven Harry Potter books, also seems to be about all these, and a little bit more — to create the special effects, as it were, now that magic has been dispensed with.

The novel is set in the “pretty little town of Pagford” somewhere in England. Since the town is pretty and little, life in Pagford must be claustrophobic and frightening, as anyone familiar with previous studies of English provincial life should know. But one need not take the trouble of revisiting Middlemarch or Cranford to understand Pagford. Even Agatha Christie had frequently made such small towns or villages the setting of her novels, and for a similar purpose. This is not to say that there are delightful murders in Pagford, although it could have done well with a few, but deaths are aplenty here. It begins with the sudden death of a member of the parish council, Barry Fairbrother, that creates the “casual vacancy” designed to bring out the best and the worst in all concerned. In the course of the novel, Barry becomes the MacGuffin, who is everything, in terms of his remembered virtues, and nothing, since he is not there.

Packed with deaths, illicit sex, crumbling marriages and cuss words, the novel might seem adult at an apparent level, but I found something disconcertingly regressive in all this. The characters are all wooden dolls, they jerk as per the author’s will, and never mature. This is strange given the fact that a considerable portion of the novel is set in a school, or involves schoolkids: the main action is set off by the adults, but from then on the children, all of whom are students of the local school, Winterdown Comprehensive, take over.

If adulthood chiefly entails the necessity to choose and to take responsibility for one’s choice, Rowling’s characters, young and old alike, are all babies or sleepwalkers.

It is here that The Casual Vacancy most strongly becomes a continuation of the Harry Potter series. Harry had been transformed into an angry adolescent from an unhappy child in the course of the seven books.

But in those books Rowling had at least some magic, although again of the lifeless, computer-generated sort, to offer. The Casual Vacancy, shorn even of that useful device, is as flat as a pancake. There is not much in it except relentless, gratuitous venom against English snobbery that seems purposely designed to portray Rowling as a champion of the working classes and the immigrants who make up the new England. Such excellent sympathies are surely laudable. Only one wishes that they had been less crudely expressed.