Flapping Eagle, a native Indian, attains the gift of immortality when he and his sister, Bird Dog, both drink the elixir of eternal life. When Bird Dog disappears, Flapping Eagle is exiled from the Axona tribe, and spends more than seven hundred years travelling around the world to find his sister.
Finally, growing tired of his immortality he attempts suicide, and falls through the Mediterranean Sea to arrive at Calf Mountain, a world inhabited by other immortals who have also consumed the elixir and live in perpetual stasis. With the help of his obese new companion Virgil Jones, Flapping Eagle makes his way to the town of K, where residents live in a permanent state of denial, and from there he sets off on a quest to find and destroy Grimus, the fearful and mysterious ruler of this new world.
Alu, the orphan boy, who derives his nickname from a lumpy potato head, comes to live with his uncle, Balaram, in the village of Lalpukur, close to India’s border with Bangladesh. Alu’s uncle apprentices him to a weaver, from whom the boy learns and masters his craft.
Meanwhile, Balaram, who has long been fascinated by rationalism, becomes obsessed with the idea of disinfecting the entire village with carbolic acid, a substance that terrifies his arch enemy, Bhudeb Roy. The feud finally leads to a tragedy that forces Alu to flee. Suspected by the police of being a terrorist, he goes first to Calcutta, then to West Asia, and ultimately to North Africa, all the while pursued by the bird-loving inspector Jyoti Das.
These are not any two books. They happen to mark the literary debuts of two of India’s most productive and accomplished fiction writers. The first is Grimus, published in 1975, Salman Rushdie's first book, and the second is The Circle of Reason, published in 1986, which marked the debut of Amitav Ghosh, and won the Prix Médicis étranger, one of France's top literary awards.
Not all of Rushdie or Ghosh’s fans may have read these two books because they are not as well known as the ones that have followed. Grimus in particular was largely ignored when it was first published and has since been overshadowed by the fame of his later work.
Interestingly, a review in The Independent a few years ago claimed that Ghosh’s first book was more like Dickens than Rushdie. This comparison is both true and false. Certainly Circle is more mired in reality – depicting the details of real locations with the accuracy that Ghosh is known for – than the fantastical world of Calf Mountain, but it is not devoid of magic realism elements. And a closer look reveals some interesting similarities between the two first novels.
Each is divided into three parts – Grimus into “Times Present,” “Times Past,” and “Grimus”; and Circle into “Satwa: Reason,” “Raja: Passion,” and “Tamas: Death.” Both books rely on myth and folklore and the tradition of oral storytelling as they weave stories within stories. The result is an almost bewildering array of characters and subplots.
Both books have a young male protagonist who must leave home and travel great distances. In one, Eagle is forced into exile by his tribe, but then decides, of his own volition, to embark upon a quest. In the other, Alu is driven out by the people in his village, and has little choice but to keep running as he is pursued by the law. As they leave familiar locations and find themselves in foreign lands with new rules to live by, theirs become stories of exile and displacement.
Similar journeys
The books also qualify as bildungsromans, as we follow the evolution and coming of age of the two men. Both Alu and Flapping Eagle grow up, lose their virginity, gain knowledge and understanding, all in front of us. Both protagonists are innocent when they begin their journeys, a fact that allows us to relate to them. Both novels contain elements of the picaresque as well, with the travellers encountering many adventures and a myriad of fascinating characters.
When he first arrives on Calf Mountain, Eagle meets the portly and short-sighted Virgil Jones, who seems to know a lot more than he is willing to divulge. The hunchbacked, toothless woman he lives with, Dolores O’Toole, is a lapsed Catholic who stimulates herself with candles and sings cracked songs. Both of them are “extremely ugly.”
In K, Eagle falls in love with two women, the freewheeling Irina and the childlike Elfrida, both of whom are married to important men, the garrulous philosopher Ignatius Gribb, and Count Cherkassov, a “weak, stultified, empty-headed fool.” Virgil’s former wife Liv is an enigmatic woman who shrouds herself entirely in black and lives alone in the woods, obsessing about Grimus. Then there is the ruler himself, who like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings and Voldemort in Harry Potter, is a powerful and dark force who holds sway over the world of the novel.
As for Alu, his first home, the village of Lalpukur, is a collection of diverse people such as the toddy-loving weaver Shombhu Debnath and his feisty daughter Maya, the withered, old, and muttering widow Nonder-Ma (Nondo’s mother,) and of course Balaram, the amateur phrenologist whose obsessions bring doom to his family. Later, in al-Ghazira, we meet others who are just as idiosyncratic as their epithets, such as Frowning Abusa and Zaghloul the Pigeon.
Alu shares his home with the likes of Professor Samuel, the bespectacled and pedantic lover of queues, the girlish Kulfi who gets her name from her pale, yellow complexion, and Karthamma who refuses to give birth until the baby’s birth certificate is signed. And all the while, in hot pursuit across three continents, goes the sensitive Inspector Jyoti Das, the young cop assigned the case of the Lalpukur bombing, whose story almost parallels that of Alu.
Flawed visions of the writers’ future
Both these first novels have been criticised for being too chaotic, with too many characters, plots and sub plots. It is true that reading them will likely immerse you in a whirlwind of experiences and a dizzying cast that are often hard to keep track of. But in several ways these books foreshadow what’s to come in the long and celebrated careers of their authors.
Grimus was initially entered in the Victor Gollancz Prize for Science Fiction, but later withdrawn instead of being marketed as a typical sci fi novel. The book is a mix of science fiction – inter-dimensional travel is an important element – mythology (Norse, Sufi, Hindu, Christian,) and folklore, as well as philosophy.
The somewhat chaotic structure of the novel – rapid interchange of first and third person, for example – has drawn critics’ disapproval. The intricate plot is indeed difficult to follow accurately. It also takes a long time to get going.
But like a lot of fantasy novels that take time to set things up, as Grimus continues, the story gets more and more entertaining, becoming somewhat of a traditional quest narrative and building up suspense. Who is Grimus? Will Flapping Eagle find his sister? Will he succeed in destroying the Stone Rose from which Grimus’s powers spring?
There are numerous twists and turns that are quite gripping. The characters are eccentric and often comical. It may have been more clumsy in its organisation than Rushdie’s later books but it does foreshadow what is to come – very dense narratives, packed with characters and incidents, plots and sub plots, stories within stories, a bit of philosophy, a bit of history, and a mix of real emotions with surreal locations and rules.
Arguably, the same “faults” can be found in The Circle too. Again, we have a vast range of characters, especially in the second part of the book, many of who have nothing to do with the first part. It’s almost like reading two separate books. Here again, the characters are difficult to keep track of and the point of view keeps shifting so that in the second half Jyoti Das and Zindi the madam seem more important than Alu.
The narrative switches back and forth in time constantly, interweaving subplots about minor characters, as well as flashbacks with present action, at a giddy pace. But in these stylistic choices, as well as in other important ways, Ghosh’s debut novel also foreshadows his later work – which is deeply historical and ethnographic, and includes an interest in West Asia and Northern Africa.
Thematic twins?
It is in the themes that these two novels echo each other the most. As mentioned earlier, travel is an important part of the plots. While Eagle travels in search of something, Alu travels to escape. But both traverse great distances and find themselves ostracised from their communities and far from home.
One of the most striking similarities is the fact that at the heart of these two stories, after the protagonists have become pariahs in the societies in which they lived, and find themselves in threat of their lives, both of them find refuge in brothels headed by strong, loyal, larger-than-life women and peopled by a variety of characters, many of whom are also outcasts.
Thus in K, Eagle finds his way to the House of the Rising Sun, where he is given shelter by Jocasta, the madam whose power and fury within the brothel are almost equal to Grimus’ elsewhere. When the angry people of K come to Jocasta’s door, looking for Flapping Eagle, she says to them, “You know what place this is. When anyone enters the House they leave the world behind. It is a place to escape to; no evil comes here.”
And in al-Ghazira, Alu is taken in by the large and large-hearted Zindi, who brings girls back from India and looks after them all. As she points out, “It’s not a business; it’s my family, my aila, my own house, and I look after them, all the boys and girls, and no one’s unhappy and they all love me.” Both women command respect and provide sanctuary. Both loom large over their small ménages of outcasts.
Grimus and The Circle of Reason can both be read as narratives about conformity or the lack of it. Flapping Eagle is expelled by the Axona Indians for his light skin and ominous birth name – Born-From-Dead – and, later, almost lynched by the people of K for disturbing their stasis. Ostriches to the end, they would prefer to live in denial of Grimus’ power over them, and are threatened by Eagle’s call to action.
In Circle, Balaram is an outsider at Presidency College where he is bullied and humiliated. Later, his interest in disinfectants and science make him a laughing stock in Lalpukur. As for Alu, he is an unattractive boy who stands out from the start because of his misshapen head. His uncle’s desire to bring reason to his community and his attempt to literally cleanse Lalpukur ultimately turns him into a fugitive. Both protagonists are outsiders and weary travellers who struggle and are ultimately unable to fit in.
I find these two first novels curiously interesting. These are by no means their authors’ best works, but they are great fun, so long as you have plenty of time and some patience. If you admire Rushdie or Ghosh’s work but haven’t read their debut novels yet, then maybe it’s time to do so. And if you have already read them separately, try them together. Like several of the couples in their pages, they might make strange but delightful bedfellows on your bottom shelf.
Oindrila Mukherjee is a writer and an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can follow her on Twitter at @oinkness.
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Finally, growing tired of his immortality he attempts suicide, and falls through the Mediterranean Sea to arrive at Calf Mountain, a world inhabited by other immortals who have also consumed the elixir and live in perpetual stasis. With the help of his obese new companion Virgil Jones, Flapping Eagle makes his way to the town of K, where residents live in a permanent state of denial, and from there he sets off on a quest to find and destroy Grimus, the fearful and mysterious ruler of this new world.
Alu, the orphan boy, who derives his nickname from a lumpy potato head, comes to live with his uncle, Balaram, in the village of Lalpukur, close to India’s border with Bangladesh. Alu’s uncle apprentices him to a weaver, from whom the boy learns and masters his craft.
Meanwhile, Balaram, who has long been fascinated by rationalism, becomes obsessed with the idea of disinfecting the entire village with carbolic acid, a substance that terrifies his arch enemy, Bhudeb Roy. The feud finally leads to a tragedy that forces Alu to flee. Suspected by the police of being a terrorist, he goes first to Calcutta, then to West Asia, and ultimately to North Africa, all the while pursued by the bird-loving inspector Jyoti Das.
These are not any two books. They happen to mark the literary debuts of two of India’s most productive and accomplished fiction writers. The first is Grimus, published in 1975, Salman Rushdie's first book, and the second is The Circle of Reason, published in 1986, which marked the debut of Amitav Ghosh, and won the Prix Médicis étranger, one of France's top literary awards.
Not all of Rushdie or Ghosh’s fans may have read these two books because they are not as well known as the ones that have followed. Grimus in particular was largely ignored when it was first published and has since been overshadowed by the fame of his later work.
Interestingly, a review in The Independent a few years ago claimed that Ghosh’s first book was more like Dickens than Rushdie. This comparison is both true and false. Certainly Circle is more mired in reality – depicting the details of real locations with the accuracy that Ghosh is known for – than the fantastical world of Calf Mountain, but it is not devoid of magic realism elements. And a closer look reveals some interesting similarities between the two first novels.
Each is divided into three parts – Grimus into “Times Present,” “Times Past,” and “Grimus”; and Circle into “Satwa: Reason,” “Raja: Passion,” and “Tamas: Death.” Both books rely on myth and folklore and the tradition of oral storytelling as they weave stories within stories. The result is an almost bewildering array of characters and subplots.
Both books have a young male protagonist who must leave home and travel great distances. In one, Eagle is forced into exile by his tribe, but then decides, of his own volition, to embark upon a quest. In the other, Alu is driven out by the people in his village, and has little choice but to keep running as he is pursued by the law. As they leave familiar locations and find themselves in foreign lands with new rules to live by, theirs become stories of exile and displacement.
Similar journeys
The books also qualify as bildungsromans, as we follow the evolution and coming of age of the two men. Both Alu and Flapping Eagle grow up, lose their virginity, gain knowledge and understanding, all in front of us. Both protagonists are innocent when they begin their journeys, a fact that allows us to relate to them. Both novels contain elements of the picaresque as well, with the travellers encountering many adventures and a myriad of fascinating characters.
When he first arrives on Calf Mountain, Eagle meets the portly and short-sighted Virgil Jones, who seems to know a lot more than he is willing to divulge. The hunchbacked, toothless woman he lives with, Dolores O’Toole, is a lapsed Catholic who stimulates herself with candles and sings cracked songs. Both of them are “extremely ugly.”
In K, Eagle falls in love with two women, the freewheeling Irina and the childlike Elfrida, both of whom are married to important men, the garrulous philosopher Ignatius Gribb, and Count Cherkassov, a “weak, stultified, empty-headed fool.” Virgil’s former wife Liv is an enigmatic woman who shrouds herself entirely in black and lives alone in the woods, obsessing about Grimus. Then there is the ruler himself, who like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings and Voldemort in Harry Potter, is a powerful and dark force who holds sway over the world of the novel.
As for Alu, his first home, the village of Lalpukur, is a collection of diverse people such as the toddy-loving weaver Shombhu Debnath and his feisty daughter Maya, the withered, old, and muttering widow Nonder-Ma (Nondo’s mother,) and of course Balaram, the amateur phrenologist whose obsessions bring doom to his family. Later, in al-Ghazira, we meet others who are just as idiosyncratic as their epithets, such as Frowning Abusa and Zaghloul the Pigeon.
Alu shares his home with the likes of Professor Samuel, the bespectacled and pedantic lover of queues, the girlish Kulfi who gets her name from her pale, yellow complexion, and Karthamma who refuses to give birth until the baby’s birth certificate is signed. And all the while, in hot pursuit across three continents, goes the sensitive Inspector Jyoti Das, the young cop assigned the case of the Lalpukur bombing, whose story almost parallels that of Alu.
Flawed visions of the writers’ future
Both these first novels have been criticised for being too chaotic, with too many characters, plots and sub plots. It is true that reading them will likely immerse you in a whirlwind of experiences and a dizzying cast that are often hard to keep track of. But in several ways these books foreshadow what’s to come in the long and celebrated careers of their authors.
Grimus was initially entered in the Victor Gollancz Prize for Science Fiction, but later withdrawn instead of being marketed as a typical sci fi novel. The book is a mix of science fiction – inter-dimensional travel is an important element – mythology (Norse, Sufi, Hindu, Christian,) and folklore, as well as philosophy.
The somewhat chaotic structure of the novel – rapid interchange of first and third person, for example – has drawn critics’ disapproval. The intricate plot is indeed difficult to follow accurately. It also takes a long time to get going.
But like a lot of fantasy novels that take time to set things up, as Grimus continues, the story gets more and more entertaining, becoming somewhat of a traditional quest narrative and building up suspense. Who is Grimus? Will Flapping Eagle find his sister? Will he succeed in destroying the Stone Rose from which Grimus’s powers spring?
There are numerous twists and turns that are quite gripping. The characters are eccentric and often comical. It may have been more clumsy in its organisation than Rushdie’s later books but it does foreshadow what is to come – very dense narratives, packed with characters and incidents, plots and sub plots, stories within stories, a bit of philosophy, a bit of history, and a mix of real emotions with surreal locations and rules.
Arguably, the same “faults” can be found in The Circle too. Again, we have a vast range of characters, especially in the second part of the book, many of who have nothing to do with the first part. It’s almost like reading two separate books. Here again, the characters are difficult to keep track of and the point of view keeps shifting so that in the second half Jyoti Das and Zindi the madam seem more important than Alu.
The narrative switches back and forth in time constantly, interweaving subplots about minor characters, as well as flashbacks with present action, at a giddy pace. But in these stylistic choices, as well as in other important ways, Ghosh’s debut novel also foreshadows his later work – which is deeply historical and ethnographic, and includes an interest in West Asia and Northern Africa.
Thematic twins?
It is in the themes that these two novels echo each other the most. As mentioned earlier, travel is an important part of the plots. While Eagle travels in search of something, Alu travels to escape. But both traverse great distances and find themselves ostracised from their communities and far from home.
One of the most striking similarities is the fact that at the heart of these two stories, after the protagonists have become pariahs in the societies in which they lived, and find themselves in threat of their lives, both of them find refuge in brothels headed by strong, loyal, larger-than-life women and peopled by a variety of characters, many of whom are also outcasts.
Thus in K, Eagle finds his way to the House of the Rising Sun, where he is given shelter by Jocasta, the madam whose power and fury within the brothel are almost equal to Grimus’ elsewhere. When the angry people of K come to Jocasta’s door, looking for Flapping Eagle, she says to them, “You know what place this is. When anyone enters the House they leave the world behind. It is a place to escape to; no evil comes here.”
And in al-Ghazira, Alu is taken in by the large and large-hearted Zindi, who brings girls back from India and looks after them all. As she points out, “It’s not a business; it’s my family, my aila, my own house, and I look after them, all the boys and girls, and no one’s unhappy and they all love me.” Both women command respect and provide sanctuary. Both loom large over their small ménages of outcasts.
Grimus and The Circle of Reason can both be read as narratives about conformity or the lack of it. Flapping Eagle is expelled by the Axona Indians for his light skin and ominous birth name – Born-From-Dead – and, later, almost lynched by the people of K for disturbing their stasis. Ostriches to the end, they would prefer to live in denial of Grimus’ power over them, and are threatened by Eagle’s call to action.
In Circle, Balaram is an outsider at Presidency College where he is bullied and humiliated. Later, his interest in disinfectants and science make him a laughing stock in Lalpukur. As for Alu, he is an unattractive boy who stands out from the start because of his misshapen head. His uncle’s desire to bring reason to his community and his attempt to literally cleanse Lalpukur ultimately turns him into a fugitive. Both protagonists are outsiders and weary travellers who struggle and are ultimately unable to fit in.
I find these two first novels curiously interesting. These are by no means their authors’ best works, but they are great fun, so long as you have plenty of time and some patience. If you admire Rushdie or Ghosh’s work but haven’t read their debut novels yet, then maybe it’s time to do so. And if you have already read them separately, try them together. Like several of the couples in their pages, they might make strange but delightful bedfellows on your bottom shelf.
Oindrila Mukherjee is a writer and an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can follow her on Twitter at @oinkness.
