Paul Bryant's Reviews > Clear Light of Day

Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing after that was going to be even half as good, probably. Anita Desai drew the short straw and she won’t be happy about that. Sorry, Anita. Your novel is okay-ish, that is, it’s not terrible, but er… well… hmmm….

Actually, between you and me, I didn’t think it was up to much. It gets a lot of Goodreads love but I could have done without it. I can’t think I would ever bitterly regret not having read this novel. Four middle-class kids grow up in Delhi, the parents are distant bridge-playing don’t bother me I’m busy types. The kids are frankly kind of cliched – arrogant son who expects sisters to obey his every whim, older plain Jane sister at war with everybody & taking all responsibility, younger pretty sister something of an airhead, youngest brother mentally impaired. He is obsessed with an old wind-up gramophone. He plays the same bunch of 78s over and over. That would get on your nerves. I like “Lili Marlene” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as much as the next guy but I couldn’t take them every day of the week. And I thought the number of times Anita Desai detailed this obsessive behaviour was verging on the obsessive itself.

Half the book is set in the present where the family has disintegrated – cue much moping and maundering about the past, the past oh the past and how the house needs repainting now and wasn’t it sad when the cow fell in the well; and the other half is in 1947 just before Partition when fortunately for this family they avoid all the mayhem.

One of the major conflicts in the story is when Bim (older sister) is trying to decide whether to sell the shares in their father’s insurance company. I mean, it’s not Dostoyevsky, is it.

2.5 stars