The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you “can only really see a building … once the building becomes a ruin” runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India’s former capital. There’s no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that “what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow”.
Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as “an undertaking”. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book opens in 1941, instead of today’s sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours.
The book revolves around young communist revolutionary Nirupama, whose ill-fated romance with an African American soldier leaves her with a semi-orphan son, Saki (named after the freshly Oppenheimered city). He is our future narrator, assembling history out of scraps of memories, inventions and outright fabrications. The narrative combines the story of her political and emotional development in the chaos of the Japanese yomp through south-east Asia, filtered through that of her son in the years after Indian independence as he struggles to find his voice as an artist, stuck between the two worlds of his parental inheritance. There are a host of other characters – confused apple-cheeked young bluestocking Imogen, gin-soaked upper-crust intellectual artist Kedar, pickpocket turned hidden market impresario Gopal and many other Indians, British, Americans and French of varying political and alcoholic affiliations.
The communists did end up winning, of course, for a while, ruling West Bengal as the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They even ran the titular hotel as a state enterprise for 30 long, mouldy, complaint-stacked, orgiastically corrupt years, before it was mercilessly or mercifully privatised to resounding success, sold off in the 2000s by the last stuttering communists, lacking fluency in India’s modern electoral language of multi-ethnic sectarian clientelism. They were the ones who changed the city’s name to Kolkata, a wan attempt to appeal to Bengali linguistic nationalism, but it wasn’t enough – it never is.
The hotel isn’t as central to the plot as it was to that other great novel about Calcutta hotel intrigues, Sankar’s Chowringhee, with its glamour, gossip and Grand Hotel rococo raffishness, and there’s none of the densely plotted balletic regimentation of Amor Towles’s hotel-bound A Gentleman in Moscow. What we have instead is a panoramic view of second world war-era Calcutta, with alcoholic artists, rambunctious chefs, wily servants, plotting communists, smoky jazz bars, rattan chairs and indolent ceiling fans. The Bengal famine lurks in the background, rural peasants slowly stumbling into the big city, “skeletons whispering in dialects we rarely heard in Calcutta”, first a trickle, then a flood. The hotel isn’t just a model of the city by the end, it is “alive and constantly moving across the planet, sliding from Bengal to Biafra to Cambodia and then back to Bengal, and then going god knows where else” – a metaphor for the horrible glamour of life and death, feast and famine, stalking the 20th and 21st centuries.
Joshi has a vast canvas to play with here, and it’s heady, sensually described, deeply felt stuff. He has a gift for evocative, Technicolor phrases. Doors are “like two lovers parting in a puppet opera”, the British are “dried‑up rinds of lime in the evaporated gin and tonic of your Empire”, a character’s eyebrows are Molotov and Ribbentrop. There’s a slight relentlessness to the English and Banglish wordplay – a “be-mansioned and be-knighted” character and his employee are “Sir and Sir-vant” – with nicknames and political in-jokes aplenty.
Despite its panoramic approach, the novel does often stray into the hotel genre’s greatest pitfall, familiar to anyone who ever opened a doorstopper from its 70s maximalist heyday, wherein characters become types, mere bits of stage scenery to take us places and deliver lines: the naive young British woman, the outrageously plucky street thief, the unscrupulous proto-Greene American eyeing the rotting carcass of empire. There’s a sometimes cloying tendency by the protagonist-narrator to announce themselves as “an architect-engineer” constructing a “story-hotel” “room by room”, and that there is “no way that I … could have forged a proper narrative, but it was useful to try”. These retrospective passages, narrated by Saki from his abortive career as an architectural historian in 1970s Paris, are the novel’s weakest – too knowing, too wry, too pat.
But Joshi’s ability to render place and time is truly first-rate. I’ve not read a book by an author this year who so clearly loves what he’s writing about. There’s an absurd combination of fun and wonder and horror on every page. We can only hope that having taken 25 years to write his second novel, he’ll be back sooner with his next.
• Rahul Raina is the author of How to Kidnap the Rich (Little Brown). Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
