The New Lifetime Reading Plan

As a novel Nineteen Eighty-Four hardly ranks with the greats. Yet some of its scenes—for example, the keystone Smith-CKBrien dialogue—are almost as telling as similar ones in Dostoyevsky [87]. The episode in which Winston Smith actually does begin to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 is a remarkable translation into imaginative terms of the terrifying power of propaganda backed by force.

Burmese Days is considered by many to be the most devas- tating fictional account we have of the evils of colonialism.

In addition to the three recommended books, you will find some of OrwelPs essays worth reading. One realizes, viewing his work as a whole, that the style is truly the man. It is plain, honest, without a hint of striving for effect. Now that we can survey his whole career, Orwell himself seems an admirable example of the nonconformist temperament at its best, inte- grated and unfoolable.

More than that of any other writer of his generation, his reputation has steadily risen since his death. It is often said that the engaged writer must pay for his engagement by becoming outmoded. In OrwelPs case this does not appear to be true.

C.F.

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R.K. NARAYAN

1906-

The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets

It is easy to overlook the fact that нndia is one of the workTs largest and most important English-speaking countries; after ali, it is famous for its numerous mutually unintelligible lan- guages, and English is not native to the subcontinent. But a consequence of three centuries of British commercial domina- tion and colonial rule was to create an English-speaking Indian elite, educated in English-style schools and conditioned to think of England as, in some sense, their true mother country. Cultural and political loyalties have changed in postindepen- dence нndia, of course, but English lives on—in part because it provides a prestigious and culturally neutral way of bridging the country's inherent linguistic chasms as a second language for everyone. (Most Tamil-speakers, for example, would rather converse with a Hindi-speaker in English than in Hindi.)

A further consequence is that the family tree of English lit­erature has grown a branch of works written in нndia in the English language. Indian English is as distinctive a dialect as American, or Australian, or West Indian; and Indian English literature has tended to take advantage of the distinctiveness of its linguistic voice to explore questions of identity and intercul- turality. Of the older generation of Indian English novelists, the grandest old man is R.K. Narayan, a patriarch who has paved the way for a vocal and highly talented younger genera­tion of writers like Vikram Seth and Bharati Mukerjee.

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan was born in Madras, the lively and cosmopolitan capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and received a thoroughly bicultural education in Tamil and English literature. He worked briefly as a teacher but always saw himself as destined to be a writer. In his first novel, Swami and Friends, published in 1935, he created the fictional milieu that was to sustain his literary career for the next sixty years.

Swami and Friends, like virtually ali of Narayan's novйis and stories, is set in the imaginary small south Indian city of Malgudi, which has taken on, in the minds of Narayan's read­ers, a reality of its own. Narayan is as identified with Malgudi as Faulkner [118] is with his fictional Yoknapatawpha County; but Narayan's imaginary landscape is altogether a more genial and pleasant place than Faulkner s—a closer parallel might be with Lake Wobegone in Garrison Keillors Prairie Home Companion radio programs, though with much greater sub- tlety and depth.

Narayan's method, in his numerous Malgudi novйis and stories, is to look with a gently ironic eye at one or another of his fictional town's citizens, someone who finds himself in a position of difficulty and who needs to muddle through with a little help from his friends. We see grand schemes yielding less than grand results through ineptitude and sloth; personal pref- erences thwarted by the overwhelming weight of family pres- sures; pride and pomposity punctured by demotic wit and pas- sive resistance to anything that smacks of grandiosity. Nothing in Malgudi turns out quite as well as people would want it to, but nothing ever turns out too badly either.

Narayan's work has been criticized as being too slight, or for lacking gravity and seriousness. Certainly one cannot find in it many of the hallmarks of modernist fiction; one looks in vain in his books for alienation, or anomie, or dysfunctional sexuality, or doomed antiheroes. Narayan's fiction is gentle, good- natured, subtle, ironic, simple, and graceful; he is not uncritical of his subjects, but his criticism is delivered with a smile, not with a bludgeon. He is perhaps not profound; he is merely delightful.