‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist, his childhood nickname (after Dostoevsky’s protagonist in The Idiot) remains. It is the first sign that this is a novel about people out of sync with their times and their surroundings.
Abandoned by his mother as a child, Myshkin has received a letter ‘pulsing with the energy every unopened letter in the world has’. It involves his mother but he cannot bear to open it. Instead he narrates her life, and his own, one of tending trees with commendable diligence, and waiting for her return.
As with Roy’s previous work, the prose is intensely visual. The novel is a vista of ‘bulbous slate-grey clouds’; it’s filled with characters who ‘ladle out advice’. And in the style is the meaning: ‘The day my mother left was like any other.
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