Francis Newton Xavier is the doomed, debauched genius at the centre of this elegiac novel. A brilliant visual artist who spent his early youth in 1940s Goa, he can not only turn out a fine landscape one moment and a provocative conceptual work the next, but also happens to be one of the mid century’s finest English-language poets. As such, he will be regarded as a typical postmodern canard by many readers. Yet, having learned from Borges and Nabokov that the preposterous is hugely more entertaining than mere absurdity, Jeet Thayil delights not just in pushing the bounds of possibility, but in smashing them to smithereens. The bizarre trajectory of this improbable creature is gradually revealed via a Citizen Kane-style inquiry, during which his biographer interviews many of the people who knew, or claimed to know, him at the height of his success with the Bombay poets (a real-life group formed around celebrated figures such as Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes in the 1950s).
The resulting portrait is unreliable, to say the least. But then, how could any account render a true likeness of someone whose very name combines the creaturely compassion of St Francis with the mathematical precision of Isaac Newton, the family name recalling Goa’s Jesuit inquisitor himself, the fanatical St Francis Xavier? Like Citizen Kane, this is much more than the biography of a single legend, however Rabelaisian. Thayil, a poet himself, is engaged with the shifting cultural and social values of an age, and with the absurd, self-serving and often unconsciously bigoted individuals who, though they are forgotten now, made that age, for better or worse.
These include the colonial schoolmaster whose disdain for stupidity and ugliness of spirit is matched only by his fear of great talent; the hangers-on who dine out on anecdotes about the gifted, the decadent and the diabolical; the bystanders who are never innocent and the friends who are only occasionally immune to resentment or the temptation to undermine. This is a world in which the closest place to heaven might be Berlin, where the weather is “so terrible that you could stay home and never feel like you were missing out on life”.
Absurdity, deceit and self-aggrandisement are the norms for a changing group of artist émigrés, who divide their time between London, Paris and New York, but are continually drawn back to India for reasons they do not fully understand. They are as embarrassed as they are proud to be writing and speaking in what is, or should have been, the enemy’s language. Thayil’s portrayal of the colonial and postcolonial world’s apparent escapees as would-be citizens of everywhere, for whom “return is not inevitable”, is most poignant. But it is always compromised, deliberately adulterated with the toxic powers of a ruling class that, if it cannot dismiss them outright, must absorb and so negate these wanderers. In the end, those who survive are doomed to live out their final years in dismal apartments with “an army of ghosts”; but then, most do not survive.
“What is the mark that distinguishes the good from the bad, in works as in men?” asks Eric Gill, in Thayil’s rather risky epigraph. Gill’s conclusion – that “holiness is the only word for it” – is highly unfashionable, and might be taken as purely ironic, but I cannot help feeling that this is exactly the question that The Book of Chocolate Saints unashamedly proposes. Naturally, Thayil keeps his emotions in check. Yet we also see glimpses of genuine anger and sadness that, in a time of “performance poets and spoken word poets and jazz poets and beat poets and street poets and stand-up poets and sit-down poets”, any honest practitioner of poetry for its own sake might end up as underappreciated and misunderstood as the genuine poètes maudits of 1950s Bombay. Several flit through the novel under pseudonyms and the book itself is dedicated to Moraes, whose parents’ names, like Xavier’s, were Beryl and Frank. There is, in short, a daringly poetic agenda to this novel, whose appreciation of the undertow of everyday life easily matches that of its brilliant predecessor, Narcopolis, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2012. What marks The Book of Chocolate Saints out as an unmissable read, however, is its concern not just with the more entertaining aspects of human behaviour – the sinful, the grotesque and the preposterous – but also with what is, or could be, holy in our works.
John Burnside’s latest novel is Ashland and Vine (Vintage). To buy The Book of Chocolate Saints for £15.29 go to guardianbookshop.com.
