A Second Audience

Since 1988 the Trotter-Nama has appeared in India in three avatars: the Viking (England) hardback, the Penguin India paperback and now a handsome India Ink reissue. Reviewing it a decade ago for The Hindustan Times, I assumed it would remain in print forever. It was a big, wonderful novel and if novels then didn't get the send-offs they do now, there were fewer of them on the ground and less competition for the reader's attention. When the Trotter-Nama was published you could count the good new Indian novelists writing in English on the fingers of one hand and have two fingers left over: not counting Rushdie, there was Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Upamanyu Chatterjee. All three had written one novel at the time: The Circle of Reason (Ghosh), English, August (Chatterjee) and The Golden Gate (Vikram Seth). Ghosh's The Shadow Lines was about to be published but second novels by Chatterjee and Seth were some years away. There was lots of room for even as large a literary vessel as the Trotter-Nama. But despite its enthusiastic admirers, it sank.

The reason it went under abroad isn't hard to find: The Satanic Verses was published by Viking the same year that it published Sealy's first novel. With two Indian runners in its stables, one a yearling and the other a Derby winner, Viking wasn't about to bet its promotional budget on the Trotter-Nama. Similarly, Ghosh's extraordinary second novel, The Shadow Lines, published at around the same time by Bloomsbury, went relatively unnoticed in England. But it found an enduring Indian readership: was consistently reprinted and now figures in the syllabuses of Indian universities. The Trotter-Nama, by contrast, was allowed to go out of print by Penguin India inside two years of paperback publication and after a brief period when you could buy it for Rs 15 from pavement stalls, the novel became unavailable. As a result while The Shadow Lines is on its way to becoming canonical, the Trotter-Nama is still a cult book.

The Trotter-Nama was never going to be a mass-market bestseller. It's a very funny novel but also allusive, self-conscious, baroque and grotesque in turn. The chronicle is constantly interrupted by recipes, asides and other conceits. It's not a difficult novel to readóit's hugely enjoyableóbut it's not one you're going to be able to read in a hurry. (A sensible way to read it is to skip the digressions whenever they slow you down; some books are expansive enough to allow you to make your own way through themóyou can be faithful to the author's intentions the second time round). Its emotional climate is temperate: one of the satisfactions it does not offer is a good cry.

Still, it is hard to believe that a book as good as this wasn't kept in print even if it meant modest print runs. All over the world publishers' catalogues offer books that don't necessarily recover their advances, simply because they're good books and they make back lists look better. Sealy's most recent novel, The Everest Hotel has sold nearly 8,000 copies in hard covers in less than a year, which spells profit in any language. Books that no one wants to read deserve to become extinct; equally, many good novels (and novelists) need time to find an audience and need, therefore, to be tended by editors who read more than balance sheets. Justin Aloysius Trotter, home from limbo, is back in our book shops. It's good to have an address for him again.