eBook A NEW WORLD. ePub

The everyday lives of people are the same everywhere, even when there is little in common. Yet, the details of everyday life in India are so far removed from those in America that comparisons are nearly impossible.

If you have not read a book about India by an Indian author, this book would be a great choice for your first one. It is not the normal fare (which I love) of eight hundred pages and constant use of words from the various languages spoken in India.

Part of the difference is that Chaudhuri writes in English. Also, the main character, though born in India, has spent years in America. So, there is less of a cultural gap to be overcome in reading "A New World".

If you're looking for action, suspense or romance, then stay away from this one. If, however, you're looking for a well written story of real people doing real things and having real emotions, then grab this one. The Editorial Reviews above tell you more than you need to know about the plot.

The only reason I did not give this book five stars is that there wasn't enough of it. He could easily have written another hundred pages without changing the first or last chapters. I did enjoy it enough to buy three more of his books.

I feel quite mixed about this novel. It plots all right and the characters are fine but I didn't enjoy it at all. This was a forced read from page one, The reason is the style which I suppose, is supposed to be a pastiche of 19th century (or earlier) adventure novels. I have no idea why the author did this or perhaps this is just the way he writes normally. Whichever, but in the end, I found it abysmally turgid.

It lost me on about page one with some sort of dream or out of body experience which, told in the passive voice, made no sense to me at all. Then in the first bit of action, the female protagonist started ordering the male around demanding pointless activity which no ship wrecked person would think to do first. So it lost me and then it discarded me by first style and then reasonableness. I'll accept that a ship may be lost in a storm with most hands killed, but I won't buy that the first act a weary survivor would think to do upon washing ashore is to collect and then bury (with one's hands on a beach?) all the dead.

To return to the 19th century style for a minute, yes, Henry James wrote as if the act of writing pained him enormously but that style wasn't universal. Just as now, authors varied in their voices. A good example is the 1820 or so novel Ivanhoe which today is still an exciting well paced read. Mark Twain wrote in a manner that's been envied but never entirely duplicated by novelists who came after him.

Some may view the passive voices, the dreamy sequences, the long turgid speeches and so forth as poetic, but they just annoyed me. So for some, a good adventure read. Others, not so much.

Although this story can easily be read alone, I realize now that it is a sequel to Motion's SILVER, which is itself a sequel to TREASURE ISLAND. In that first book, Jim Hawkins, the same-named son of Stevenson's hero, goes back with Long John Silver's mulatto daughter Natty to recover the pirates' silver treasure, which apparently they manage to do. However, their ship, the Nightingale, is caught in a hurricane and wrecked on the coast of Texas. This volume opens with Jim and Natty cast ashore as the sole survivors, and almost immediately being captured by a tribe of Indians. The year is 1802.

Although Sir Andrew Motion was for ten years the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, there is nothing excessively literary about this adventure. Like Stevenson before him, Motion writes in an accessible style, not worrying too much about geography, but describing his imagined world with the brilliance of the poet that he is. I assume that he is aiming for young adult readers who can be drawn in by exciting action in exotic settings, yet who are mature enough to appreciate the deeper themes as they develop. A PG rating, perhaps. There is a death by torture early in the book that could give one nightmares, but the relationship between Jim and Natty, while very much loving, is appropriately chaste. In one respect, though, Sir Andrew departs from his predecessors in this genre: most often it is the girl, Natty, who tells Jim what to do, she who goes in for the kill, and she who takes the lead in the knowledge that he will follow. A big hurrah for feminism!

Jim and Natty manage to escape the bloodthirsty Indians who have captured them, in the process stealing a unique silver necklace belonging to the Chief, Black Cloud. At first, this seems merely part of the adventure; after all, the Indians had already taken all of the silver treasure they could salvage from the Nightingale. But it sets up a vengeance quest that will pursue them throughout the book, and raises significant moral issues that will not be fully settled even when the novel ends. For although the action precedes the Indian Removal Act in Andrew Jackson's presidency, the westward exodus has already begun. Natty and Jim spend a couple of years in a kind of paradise with a peaceful Indian tribe, but theirs is a borrowed Eden, a temporary respite on land not their own. Later, as they head eastwards once more, they will join up with an Indian man known only as the Rider, who is also trying to get back to his ancestral home. So let me end with Jim's thoughts as they reach the Mississippi and see their companion ride away. They are characteristic of Sir Andrew's fine writing and reflect the serious tone that has gradually settled over the novel, raising my estimate from a four-star young-adult adventure to a tragic elegy that comes close to five:

"I saw him with his eyes shining, his head cocked at a familiar angle, but of course traveling alone now. Riding on northward until the cane-brake ended and he came to a ferry and crossed the river, where he approached the country of his fathers. [...] As these scenes flashed through me I began to see other men trekking toward him, Indians like himself, some members of his own tribe, some from tribes who lived adjacent, and all passing him on their way west as he continued east. They came in ones and twos, in families and groups -- the children and the older squaws with bundles in their arms, the warriors with their weapons trailing and dogs panting at their heels. They came in silence, and they came chanting in time to the beat of a drum. They came when the sun rose and when the sun set. They filled the pathways under the trees, and the dry trails that crossed the scrubland. They came with the dust billowing around them in muddy clouds, and they came under clear blue skies."

The start of the Trail of Tears.