A fiction robbed of narrative

What could have been a great historical fiction gets mired in writing flaws.

This year marks the 125th year of the birth of Subhas Chandra Bose. Freedom fighter, Congressman, rebel. In 1942, the tide turned against the Allies after German successes in the USSR and North Africa. With Axis support, Bose and his Indian Legion reached the western frontiers of British India, while the INA, having navigated through the East, threatened Calcutta. This didn’t happen, but Anshul Chaturvedi’s A Bird from Afar seeks to explore this scenario.

In a glowing endorsement, historian Mihir Bose compares Chaturvedi to that giant of historical fiction — Robert Harris, who also made his foray into the world of make-believe through alternate history. Like Harris, Chaturvedi has long been a journalist and has published non-fiction books.

That’s where the similarities end. Harris’ Fatherland was a breakout novel that turned World War II on its head, depicting a German victory in the West and a long-drawn conflict in the East, with peace to be guaranteed by the Berlin visit of the US President. This story of a detective who stumbles upon decades-old secrets in a routine murder inquiry sold like beer in an English watering hole, establishing Harris on the popular fiction scene, where he has stayed for several decades.

Six degrees of separation?

Through his protagonist, Harris mounted an investigation of history, but also maintained a distance between fictional characters and real figures. Chaturvedi blunders by making Bose, the most significant real figure in his novel, also the protagonist. Instead of exploring a “What if”, the novel is more of a treatise on Bose, with his philosophy, ideology and politics front and centre, themes his two autobiographies focus upon. The novel is thus robbed of a narrative, of storytelling of any kind.

Bose as a protagonist doesn’t allow for bold choices. Little can be done with him as a character, especially in today’s impassioned times, and this hobbles the story. Matters are not helped by Chaturvedi’s overwhelming admiration for the man. Forget six degrees of separation from his subject, there is barely a sliver. This clogs the narrative, making the novel an ode to Bose rather than an exploration of the counterfactual.

There are factual gaffes too: Chaturvedi can’t decide between historically-accurate and contemporary place names, so the colonial Calcutta co-exists with Mumbai and Chennai. Events of 1942 somehow involve the “Royal” Indian Air Force, and Chaturvedi leaves the prefix, actually bestowed in 1945, unexplained. An “English” (!) Empire is mentioned. These might seem like minor oversights but historical fiction/alternate history novels are made better by how well the rigour of research is reflected in the final work; that Chaturvedi is a journalist makes his missteps worse.

Dry prose

Furthermore, Chaturvedi attempts to, rather candidly and clumsily, illustrate that were it not for Bose, no Prisoner of War would’ve ever taken up arms alongside the Axis against the Raj. This is blatantly false, since Bose did not form the INA, and because there existed officers who demonstrated individual thought — Thimayya was conflicted over his loyalties and patriotism much before the war, and Harbakhsh, while in admiration of Bose, was unconvinced about the INA’s legitimacy at home. Chaturvedi seems to have retconned his research after picking a conclusion, a reckless faux pas.

The larger flaws lie in the writing itself. Lengthy Wikipedia-esque descriptions of events (a notable exception is the airborne invasion of Bengaluru) are tedious to keep pace with, and the dry prose seldom evokes images. The dialogue, in trying to mimic Bose’s writing, ends up devoid of any feeling or punch. It is almost impossible to zero in on one line to serve as the reason one has a particular opinion about a 400-page book, but Chaturvedi provides a suitable specimen for this too: ‘Von Trott, as we have observed earlier, was not very close to Subhas.’ — the italics are all Chaturvedi’s work, taken from the beginning of a paragraph and with all the punctuation marks. That such a line should exist in a novel is appalling. But then, having finished it, one does wonder whether A Bird from Afar qualifies as a novel at all.