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`Slumdog' author's murder mystery a satirical portrait of India

Geoff Adams reviews Six Suspects.

SIX SUSPECTS
Vikas Swarup
Doubleday, $36.99, pbk

Six Suspects, the second novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, is a long and multi-layered story about crime and corruption in modern India.

Contract killing and fraud are shown alive and well in Delhi.

Swarup's first book, the bestseller Q & A, was turned into the recent very successful film Slumdog Millionaire.

This latest elaborate mystery could also appeal to screenwriters.

It is best appreciated not as a detective thriller but as a satirical portrait of India, using tons of wit and hyperbole.

Based apparently on some true events, it weaves a large, fantastic fabric to take the reader all over India while providing a series of flashbacks from the night of a murder.

Seven years earlier, Vicky Rai, playboy son of the home minister of Uttar Pradesh, murdered a woman at a trendy restaurant in New Delhi simply because she refused to serve him a drink.

Vicky, the spoiled brat is now shot at his farmhouse at a gala party to celebrate his engineered acquittal in a celebrity trial.

The police search all the guests.

Six discovered to have guns in their possession are arrested for investigation.

I was delighted at first with the early part of the book as it looked at the earlier lives of the six suspects.

Each is introduced in their own tour-de-force chapters that could easily have been novellas.

The group contains a retired corrupt bureaucrat and business mogul; a gullible American tourist hoping he is to marry a pen-friend; a Stone-Age tribesman trying to recover a stolen relic; a Bollywood sex symbol who quotes Sartre; a sneak thief specialising in mobile phones; and an ambitious politician (Vicky's father), who always stoops as low as needed to win.

Each, finally, is seen to have a motive and indeed plans to pull the trigger.

Swarup has a deft hand with dialogue, portraying the six suspects in quite different but believable voices.

However, along with the deft there is also a lot of daftness in the satire: like the American's penpal sending him a photo that was actually of the Bollywood superstar, and the American's name, Larry Page, being the same as the inventor of Google leads to terrorists capturing him at one stage, demanding a huge ransom.

Then there is the weird way the retired bureaucrat had a bad fright which now makes him think he is Gandhi, India's founding father, and to act accordingly from time to time. A Jekyll and Hyde situation.

The six comic but often facetious narrative strands are a kaleidoscopic confusion: maybe that is a brilliant portrayal of the contradictions of India.

The plot's pieces eventually interlock but by then I must confess I was getting rather tired of overspiced fictional curry, top-heavy with ingredients and perhaps a little overcooked.

Yet you just have to finish this sprawling yarn, to continue admiring some of the technical intricacies of the plot machinery and writing, and arrive at the novel's finale.

But don't read this as a normal whodunit - in the end the murder is pinned on an innocent suspect anyway.

It's not Agatha Christie. It's a big roller-coaster ride.

- Geoff Adams is a retired editor of the ODT.

 

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