The book caught my eye in the "little library" outside the school. Until our recent months in the US I was unfamiliar with these little shingled, glass-doored caches, housing a shelf or two of books inside a weatherproof box. Borrow a book, return it, or another - oh, the possibilities. The book I chose was richly textured and peopled with characters who won my sympathy. It moved languidly but inexorably, and I was drawn along in the same manner during the long weeks where we moved from house to house visiting family, winged our way back overseas, and went about the business of making this foreign land our home once again.
Besides the protagonist, the tale was peopled by several humane and interesting characters. At it's center was an enigmatic man, who won empires through art and set in motion the events that wooed the protagonist from his settled existence to explore the far corners of the earth and probe the deep recesses of his person. I, like the protagonist, wanted to trust him implicitly - if not for the love of his men and his storied bravery on behalf of the British Empire, at least for his successful pursuit of peace, art, and cultural understanding in the midst of war. But the book's final chapters began to cast doubt on his real loyalties, causing ripples in the mirage our protagonist had come to depend on in order to make sense of this wider world he had encountered, and his chosen place in it. It was an interesting twist in a wonderfully developed journey.
Yet rather than offering any attempt to reconcile his protagonist's expanded and suddenly altered visions of reality; rather than exploring how his newly discovered loves of people and place might color the reentry into his richly happy marriage and his fulfilling if unillustrious career; and without addressing even the questions the protagonist asks himself outright about what he is seeking from his adventure, the author pops the bubble of his tale: Having just learned of the desolation of the jungle home he has come to love, and having destroyed under compulsion and with his own hands the labor of love that had drawn him there in the first place, he is left to bleed out on the road as the book's other formative characters shrivel into the unknowable haze of the protagonist's annihilation.
I was left with the feeling that I missed something. Surely the author meant more by his beautiful novel than to illustrate at length that all the man's growth, his questions and strivings, came to naught with his death; that he no longer cared even how or whether his beloved Katherine learned of his fate. Surely he did, but the suddenness with which the tale was abandoned didn't suggest many other possibilities.
What is the appeal of this ending to writers, I wonder. Is it a commentary on the seeming absurdity that the world continues almost without a ripple when each one of its citizens departs; meant to allow us the luxury of stopping the world to mourn a single tragedy? Maybe we are lured carefully into the protagonists' ambitions and quandries only to be pressed into experiencing the torment of watching them vanish before our eyes; a reminder that we are mortal. Or is it simply that the story, full of characters and settings and scenes (here a deaf man with one story, a beautiful barren wife, a bamboo village clinging to the side of a cliff) is ripe and begging to be plucked and written down, before the author has lived long enough to make peace with the questions his premise raises? (I'm still fascinated that the same word in Nepali denotes picking a fruit and jotting down an idea.) Maybe this was the author's intent from the beginning, but I can't help feeling that he pulled his tale up short.
I also can't shake the feeling that I've encountered this ending before, and that each time a story ends this way, it's a stillborn tale: one the author loved, but not enough to carry it to term. It's why a non-fiction book is easier to write: even carelessly composed, it can still say something true. Not so a novel. I am weary of these books and movies I've come to call "annihilation fiction." I don't need art to make me grieve the fact of death, nor appreciate the mockery it makes of the plans, dreams, and wisdom of the living. I need art to help me make a mockery of death; to keep learning and laboring and participating and hoping under its very nose. I need it to help me believe that the influence of one life can reach beyond its short years, and to remember that death, in all its incomprehensible affrontery, is not the final word on the value of one life; that death too is bound under its own curse, and that the demise of death leaves not annihilation and nothingness, but life.
Babu, aija, chito aija!
