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Literary Ambition Without Borders
With 'Sacred Games,' an Expansive Vikram Chandra Couldn't Contain Himself

By Bob Thompson


[/align]Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 22, 2007; Page C01

OAKLAND, Calif.
 
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Vikram Chandra's 900-page novel focuses on Mumbai but has the hallmarks of literary globalization, in which culture and commerce are interconnected. "We're living through this precarious time when great changes are happening," he says. (By Thor Swift For The Washington Post)


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Not long after he'd finally completed a draft of his massive new novel, "Sacred Games," Vikram Chandra found himself immersed in a painful literary task:
He had to try to make the thing shorter.

After all, it wasn't supposed to be 900 pages long.

When he started, Chandra thought he was writing "a small, local crime kind of story." It would confine itself to maybe 300 pages and one geographic locale, the Indian city of Mumbai. It would be the sort of tale where you begin with a couple of dead bodies "but the solution is straightforward and it works like a mystery."

Right. Seven years later, he and his wife, Melanie Abrams -- also a writer -- found themselves experimentally excising whole chapters, looking to reduce the weight of the Victorian-size literary thriller Chandra had produced instead.

"Sacred Games" relates, in alternating chapters, the life story of a legendary Indian gang lord and the efforts of a relatively low-level Mumbai police inspector to investigate his death. After retreating to a heavily fortified bunker, the gangster has shot himself, along with a female companion. The fate of the city formerly known as Bombay -- and perhaps the rest of the world -- rests on the inspector's ability to figure out why.

Not much to cut there. But what about the series of what Chandra has labeled "insets," lengthy chunks of back story intended to widen and deepen the central narrative? Might they be cuttable, Chandra and Abrams wondered?

No, they weren't. Without them, "it became to me a flat book," Chandra says.
So he gave up and sent it to his agent.

Who sent it on to a batch of New York publishers.

Who, instead of balking at the length, launched a bidding war that ended with the sale of North American rights for $1 million to HarperCollins.

Which gave "Sacred Games" the Full Marketing Monty. "AN EPIC NOVEL OF CRIME, FAITH, FAMILY AND DESTINY," shouted the outsize type on the advance reader's edition, which also promised that the publisher would spend $300,000 to promote the book.

Hype at this volume can sometimes backfire, distracting attention from the work itself. Veteran critic Sven Birkerts, for example, weighed in with a Boston Globe piece that devoted far more space to the marketing effort (which Birkerts viewed with cynicism) than to assessing "Sacred Games."

In this case, however, a bit of rhetorical excess may be appropriate. For Chandra's book is beyond the merely ambitious. It's the latest, fattest example of what might be called literary globalization -- a 900-page manifestation of the worldwide trend toward culture, commerce and seemingly everything else becoming interconnected.

When Birkerts finally settled in to read "Sacred Games," he wrote (approvingly) that it transported him to "some phantasmagoric, confusing, reeking, corrupt, overheated, overpopulated elsewhere, a Mumbai of the mind, with characters who surprise me with their look and sound, their twists of behavior." And it's true that Chandra offers sensory descriptions and dialect-laced dialogue that evoke a unique city.

Yet a crucial thing to understand about Chandra's Mumbai is that it is not entirely exotic to American readers anymore.

The basic nature of the Mumbai underworld, it turns out, parallels that of the Hollywood gangster movies that Indian mobsters sometimes like to watch. Mumbai's horrific bouts with terrorism resonate in ways that require no explanation. Chandra characters, like so many players in the real economy, slip easily in and out of ports of call such as Dubai, London and Singapore.

What's more, the fundamental theme of "Sacred Games," symbolized by the inspector's ever-expanding investigation, is the individual's struggle to make sense of a networked world where cultures blend and clash, money and politics respect no borders -- and a plot thread that begins amid the chaos of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan can end, half a century later, in an upstairs bedroom in a Maryland suburb.

But hey: If all this makes your head hurt, there's another, simpler way to approach Chandra's opus.

Just keep your eye on those two corpses he started out with.

[size=-1]'A Huge Cultural Meeting'[/size]

"It's been completely insane," Chandra is saying of the past year or so of his life. "Not just editing the book and trying to get it into shape, but also we got married -- and we actually did it twice. We had a Jewish ceremony in L.A., where her parents live, and then we all flew to India and did it again."
He laughs at the memory. Matrimonial globalization, on top of everything else.



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