The work of Jeet Thayil has often been marked by a preoccupation with the dangers and appeal of narcotic oblivion. His first novel, Narcopolis (2012), chronicled life in the opium dens of Mumbai in the 1970s and 80s. His second, The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017), was about a painter who had pursued a perilous life of hedonism to find a sense of creative purity.
His latest novel, Low, tells the story of Indian poet Dominic Ullis who, as the book begins, is about to attend the cremation of his wife, Aki, who has fulfilled her lifelong dream of killing herself. He subsequently makes a trip to Mumbai to scatter her ashes, and to find a way to extinguish the afflictions – insomnia, anxiety, hepatitis, heroin addiction – that have characterised his past. As Ullis puts it: “The only thing possible now was oblivion, with the aid of certain powdery or liquid substances.”
Soon, we find him enthusing over a cheap and unsafe new drug known as “meow meow”, which fills the user with a sense of profound disconnection. With his attachment to this drug in place, we follow Ullis around Mumbai for two days. During this time, “coming apart in slow motion”, he lurches around city slums, fretting about the impending destruction of the environment, obsessing over the incompetence of Donald Trump, and encountering an array of untrustworthy addicts who encourage him to navigate “the byways and highways of meow”.
The resulting story is often tender and moving, not least when Thayil’s characters reflect on the nature of suicide and grief. When Ullis recalls Aki talking of her wish for death, the “low” that gives the book its title and constitutes “the great constant” of her life, her words have a disarming simplicity: “As I grow older, I think about it more and more. I want to die.” And when Ullis reflects on the nature of bereavement, he does so in a way that registers the intimation of levitational otherworldliness that loss can engender (“He felt separated from his body… as if he’d been insufficiently anaesthetised”).
There also also moments of vibrancy and lyricism. When Ullis visits Aki’s corpse, for example, we are told of “the blood vessels that had burst on her cheeks and forehead and neck like scarlet-brown buds that would never bloom”.
Not everything about Thayil’s creation is successful. Ullis’s wit often comes across as tawdry sarcasm. And Thayil sometimes diminishes the intensity of his descriptions by slipping into cliche: things are made “abundantly clear”; characters have “nothing to lose”.
On the whole, however, this is a vigorous and enjoyable book that carries the reader along with pace and exuberance. The themes of Low might hail from the depths, but reading it elicits a peculiar high.
• Low by Jeet Thayil is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
