29th October 2009
All present at the Devonshire Arms apart from Will for a discussion on Sacred Games. A generally positive response to the book, with one or two excpetions.
Not surprisingly, the length of the book was the subject to a number of comments, with views varying from far too long, through could have done to be about 200 pages shorter to 'what's the problem?' Once we got beyond that, the comments were overwhelmingly positive, encompassing elements such as:
Really nice, easy to read writing style
Good characters, most or all of whom evoked positive feelings from the reader (even if they were being gangsters) in terms of us wanting them to have a positive outcome in their life
Evocative descriptions of life in India, including the corruption that underpins elements of society, life in the large cities etc
The different stories intertwining throughout the novel, with their clever connections (though some felt that the gaps between revisiting each story were sometimes too long)
There were no real negative elements that had common agreement, with the possible exception that the guru element of the story got a bit laboured on occasions.
A number of facets did generate disagreement/different views, though with the exception of the frist bullet point below we didn't really explore any of them to any form of conclusion (see comment at the end of this email), For example:
The use of non-english for individual words, terms (e.g. money) and extracts from songs or poems. Some felt this unhelpful if not annoying without an explanation, whereas others took the view that this was part of creating the atmosphere and context and full understanding of every bit of meaning was not essential. (Linked to this were questions about who the book was written for - possibly English speaking Hindi and other people who are more used to interchange of language that the English are so who are we to complain?)
The use of literary devices such as killing people off and then having large sections written with them in the first person in order to 'paint a picture' and enable the reader to create their own understanding of the novel versus that (and other things) not being 'realistic'
Similarly the books leaving the reader to fill in the gaps themselves around the central elements of the story versus a non-explanation of the detail of how certain things happened being annoying
Was it a detective story, or a thriller (as claimed) or about something deeper such as individual loneliness?
However, generally a positive view of the book and it is up in the top quarter of our all time novels.
7.34
