n England, about a decade ago, Arthur C. Clarke founded (and still funds)
an award, given annually to the best SF novel published the previous year.
In 1997 Amitav Ghosh won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the thousand
pounds which accompany it, for the 1996 U.K. release of The Calcutta Chromosome.
As he was unknown to the SF community, there was some muted disappointment when the award was announced, the several better-known writers in the primes of their careers had been passed by. This disappointment--it turns out--was misplaced in this instance. The Calcutta Chromosome is fast, subtle, funny, haunting; and there is just enough SF in the mix to make the whole thing work in genre terms.
It is the kind of book awards are meant for.
Avon has now published the book in the United States. The Arthur C. Clarke Award is mentioned nowhere. There are reasons for this, perhaps.
Almost certainly, Avon Books hopes to market The Calcutta Chromosome--whose author has written previous non-genre titles, and who is an esteemed contributor of non-fiction pieces to journals like The New Yorker--as a tale decent folk can buy without embarrassment. Dust jacket reference to the Arthur C. Clarke Award in this context, however insulting silence might be to the book's ultimate readership, would let the cat out of the bag.
Like Eco, Llosa and Marquez...sort of
Dignifyingly, Avon's dust jacket copy compares Ghosh to writers like Umberto Eco, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. None of these write in English (Ghosh of course does, elegantly); two out of the three mentioned are South Americans whose novels attempt to construct in magical terms True Histories of the nations of that rich ransacked continent (Ghosh is neither a magic realist nor the conscience of his race, though he does hint at a secret history of medicine). One of the authors mentioned--Eco--does write antiquarian fantasy, though without the fantasy (Ghosh writes antiquarian SF but retains the SF). Everyone mentioned is of course
foreign (Ghosh lives however in New York).
So we've not hit the mark yet.
The writer most evoked for me by Ghosh's fine tangled slingshot tale of
estrangement and comeuppance and epiphany is Robert Irwin, a man too little known in America, though his reputation as an intriguing confabulator of novels (and competent scholar in the literatures of the Middle East) is growing in his native United Kingdom.
Irwin's most famous novel remains his first, The Arabian Nightmare (1983), a tale whose title has come to represent (for me at least) a definable subgenre of the fantastic: the story whose protagonist tumbles downwards, through portals of haunted sleep, into labyrinths of reality/unreality, worlds caught within worlds, until he ends up unable to perceive whether he wakes or sleeps, whether the face in the mirror is his own or the Tambourine Man's.
Much of The Calcutta Chromosome reads like an Arabian Nightmare shared by a small passel of bewildered protagonists. The first of these--whose understanding of the whole story is all, in the end, that really counts--is Antar, a computer analyst in a mildly dystopian 21st century America. His job is to monitor the sorting activities of a pesky computer which throws up for inspection data that lead him--in memory and via a paper trail--back to 1995, to the last moment an eccentric colleague of his was visible on the world-map, bumbling through Calcutta.
A holy fool on a quest for the true story
Most of the story of The Calcutta Chromosome follows the last visible movements of this strange personage, L. Murugan, who is (not incidentally) a brilliant comic creation, one of the manic stumblebum gurus who populate the purlieus of Iris Murdoch novels, and the heartwood of much of world literature. He is a holy fool. His quest is for the true story behind the late 19th century discovery of the link between malaria transmission and the anapholes mosquito.
Ghosh (who has specialized in medical journalism) cannot be overpraised for the ingenuity of his presentation of "real" and "fictional" history at this point. Historical figures like Sir Ronald Ross are woven into a dreamlike tapestry which Murugan disturbs, and through which can be discerned the hints of a different history of the world.
In this history, the conquest of malaria is a side issue; what is central, and what causes the manipulation of Ross and others so that they do begin to understand malaria, is the need of a religious sect to understand and disseminate the Calcutta Chromosome, which is generated through malaria cures, and which has the effect of transferring aspects of personality from one individual to another.
As in an Arabian Nightmare (but one that ends in truth) figments of self flit from one dream to another; and ultimately, it may be, come to Oneness.
Realities flutter like decks of cards
By the point this has become clear, Antar has fallen deep into Murugan's infectious and infecting tale. Others have followed suit. Realities flutter like decks of cards. In the end, nothing is quite resolved but dawn is nigh.
We are back in the 21st century. All the members of the cast are somehow present, awaiting the true awakening of the story-dazed Antar into a new commensal world. The nightmare of his search for truth begins to end with the last sentences of the book, as he settles down to understand everything, as though the story itself were a Calcutta Chromosome.
Arabian Nightmare becomes a slingshot.
The face in the mirror is the Tambourine Man's.
Avon should be proud to publish this science fiction novel.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, was nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
