Book Review: Tabish Khair’s New Book Cannot Be Boxed Into A Genre

“Outside, you had cars playing loud music; inside, there were old men hanging around and talking almost in whispers to one another, women in all kinds of attire. If you listened, you heard other languages, though mostly Danish is what dominated, for there were quite a few Danes around, feeling like tourists in Bazar Vest, and in any case the only language in common between most of these people from different nations, and their children who had grown up in Denmark, was Danish. Jens Erik had never been able to make up his mind about this place.”

Tabish Khair has long been known for his refusal to fit into established diasporic, subalternist, post-colonial or other slots. As a writer, he has pushed the envelope so often that it is hard to pin him down, the opposite of someone like Charles Bukowski, with the recurring themes of his books: alcoholism, women and depiction of the depravity of urban life. They do have one thing in common: they both set great store by the importance of humour and use it to address  complicated questions in their writing, their beliefs and their engagement with larger society.

To illustrate Khair’s genre-dodging art, his first book, The Bus Stopped, centred around a very angry bus driver going nowhere and a lyrical journey through small-town India. His next work, The Thing About Thugs, delved into the world of thugs and compared the men of the Raj and the Indian thugees. If in the first, you would nail Khair down for his reflective and lyrical writing, this is upturned by the mystery and suspense of the second.

It is hard to pin the man to a genre.

Khair will be the first to admit it. He admits freely that he does not recognise genre divides and stubbornly refuses to be categorised into a certain type of writer, although most literary soldiers would happily love to categorise him as a ‘diasporic’ writer. In keeping with his non-conformist, genre-pushing style, Khair’s latest novel, The Body By the Shore, is a futuristic piece of science-fiction, set in the post-pandemic world of 2030. But the book moves back and forth in time, another addition to the multifarious literature for which the witty and affable author is known.

Although Khair has been redefining genres for quite some time, he is beginning to master the skill of pacing, suspense and world-building, all hallmarks of good dystopian mystery thrillers. The first three chapters of The Body By the Shore set out the map, which the rest of the novel follows through the three main protagonists. The first is a young Caribbean woman who, enthralled by a mysterious dashing man, follows him into the swirling waters of the North Sea, where Khair begins to weave the atmosphere masterfully, through his descriptions of the oil rig on which they are set. The reader begins to feel the closedness and the sense of mechanical life on the oil rig.

The second is Jens Erik, a retired Danish police officer, who honours the sentiments of the ‘old country’; preferring that ‘people’ remain in their own countries. He is at loggerheads with his college-age daughter, who sees her father as one of the old guard, proven by a photograph she saw of him on the job beating students. She thinks she has his hatred and old-world sensibility pinned down. Yet even this is a grey area, for Erik does not explain to her that it was not hatred in his eyes in that picture but fear. He does not bother to explain the context and situation of a different, politically charged environment to her. Immediately, the reader is invested in the unassuming Dane, wanting to know what more he has to offer. Erik is also a nod towards the Scandi-noir vibe that has long been popular. The third is a former covert operations missionary and, as covert operatives need to be, his story is revealed in bits and pieces.

All three characters approach the central mystery of the novel from different angles and it is Khair’s skill in weaving in-between narratives, jumping from one to another, all the while maintaining a brisk pace that keeps the reader’s excitement going, which is perhaps the most alluring aspect of the novel. It is obvious that it is difficult to peg a genre to this novel: Is it science fiction, is it a mystery or is it a thriller? Khair, long adept at refusing to be defined by a genre, seems to be having a humorous go at his critics here, pushing the envelope. Sure, he seems to say, I can write in different genres. But here, take this one, where I write about three in the same book.

Although artful at dodging definition in his body of work, Khair is consistent with the themes with which he works and continues to provide insights that provoke the reader to think about a range of topics that he constantly likes to work with. In an interview with Cha, the Asian literary journal, Khair remarked that it would be impossible to write without addressing the mixture of cultures and delving into human feelings and thoughts, especially addressing issues of racism and xenophobia. The Body By the Shore is another step by him in this direction. The academic in him resurfaces here.

Khair’s previous novels have challenged history and its impact but this one deals with the more real, the present. It takes its place amongst the newly growing pantheon of post-pandemic literature, with its frequent references and sharp insights into the Covid-19 pandemic. The reflections and observations about the issues of today are well-addressed throughout, from the sharp descriptions of how trees communicate through their neural pathways to space-borne symbiotic microbes, as the author expertly deals with the layers of climate issues and the questions of technology that confront us today.

One of the few criticisms that can be levelled at Khair’s latest offering is that it contains a far too heavy dose of science for a mystery thriller. But what else is to be expected from a cerebral, mystery thriller? Khair claimed earlier that no particular school or writer influences him but the book is reminiscent of H.G. Wells’ scientific explorations through his works as well as Michael Crichton’s tropes of suspense.

Sometimes, the intermingling of the narratives can be hard to follow as well but the novel rests on solid ground, rooted in Denmark, where the writer uses the country’s  homogeneous and clean reputation to both lend the atmospheric feel to it, which is its real strength, and offer his views on the themes he likes to grapple with.

It is cerebral, scientific to an extreme perhaps, thoughtful and now and then does give in to Khair’s tendency to delve into the questions of human nature and society. However, the characters are well-drawn and, like any good penman who aims to obscure, he ties up the hazy threads neatly in the end, while providing the reader with a dollop of real-world questions to think about. The more involved reader might note the references and leitmotifs that clearly allude to our present times, especially from an Indian perspective.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Insightful And PROVOCATIVE")

Kushagra Srivastava is a delhi-based writer