Supposedly a novel, The Sly Company
of People who Care, reads like a travelogue. The narrator is a
cricket journalist, who’s taken a year off to go live in Guyana, a
country he’s visited before, fleetingly, to report on a cricket
match. The ‘novel’ is broken into three diverse parts, his
exploration of Guyana’s interior with diamond-hunters, the travails
of life as an ‘Indian National’ in Georgetown, and the possibly
exciting, but mostly uncomfortable love(lust?) story. He has been
compared to Naipul but Naipul’s detached, dispassionate style is
very different from the lyrical, evocative prose this book is written
in. The narrator is tired of his set, uninspiring world and thus when
he reaches Guyana he sees in its melting pot of Indians( descendants
of indentured labourers who came in the 19th century),
Africans who were brought in as slaves and the indigenous Amerindians
a remarkable harmony, he loves the ‘epic indolence’ of the place.
The language in this book replicates Guyanese patois, and he makes
you learn it along the way.
It is the ultimate youthful
adventure, Guyana almost seems an ‘accidental place’ to him.
There are cracks though, the undercurrent of violence in the culture,
the rootlessness of the Indians there, the racial conflict. Guyana
was no accidental place, it was created by the wreckage of
colonialism creating a unique but fractured cultural identity. This
is a coming of age novel where a ‘coming of age’ happens because
of an abrupt disconnection with the author’s past, his experience
of a glorious world where one starts feeling nostalgia for the
present. The idyllic world slowly turns uncomfortable and he leaves
behind personal wounds for which he can just regret. The last part is
also a very interesting portrait of the awkwardness of a love affair.
I love the book because it gives you
a window into a different world, and is beautifully written. It has
inspired me to travel, to disconnect from everything around me( to go
somewhere else), and made me think about identity a lot. The journey
of self-discovery can be many things, and it is a beguiling idea that
the eschewal of home is a way to discover the self. The second way
this book inspires is the way it is written. It’s Huck Finn, and
Marquez at the same time. His words drip with the sense of the place,
there is poetry in his language, and they evoke sounds,
scents(especially scents) and colours. I will never write like that,
I know, but I can aspire to.
