Neel Mukherjee is ripe for a Man Booker

Nothing is as ripe for narrative pickings as the Indian joint family. Make it a sprawling saga set in troubled Bengal of the 1960s with the entire action centring on a single dysfunctional middle class Bengali family and you are in melodrama heaven. The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee’s excellent second novel, opens with the tale of a starving daily wager named Nitai Das who is driven to murder before he downs a can of pesticide. The narrative then switches to the Ghosh family, presided over by an ageing patriarch Prafullanath, who owns several paper mills. What follows is the stuff of countless prime-time Hindi TV serials - battling sisters-in-law, shrewd servants, secrets and lies and economics all entangled in a web of family politics so tricky that it would put an entire medieval court to shame.

However Mukherjee’s great achievement, besides bringing the colours, rhythms and textures of Calcutta perfectly to life, is to show us exactly how lives can be touched, shaped and sometimes twisted completely out of recognition in the furnace of time. Here is  desperate love, thwarted desire, the whole of Eros, loyalty, murder, honour and also divine, doomed idealism – as seen through the life of Prafullanath’s grandson, the Naxalite Supratik, hitting its head repeatedly against the wall of stolid reality. Inside the big house in Bhowanipore entire lives are lived out in claustrophobic proximity to one another and yet they remain complete emotional strangers. Mukherjee lays it all out like landscape. And one can only stand and stare.

It’s meaningless to argue whether the book deserves to win on October 14.  With every character and plot point fleshed out in such detail each chapter sometimes feels like a mini novella. Managing to keep this huge Babel-like cast alive in your imagination and then to get them down pitch-perfect on page requires, one would imagine, immense discipline, ambition and skill.  As one character tells another early on in the novel: You suffer, you win.