Maria Borland
posted 23 October 2007

‘On December 3rd 1984 the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal India caught fire and exploded. The chemicals that were released into the atmosphere by the fire and the smoke caused horrific physical damage to all who were exposed to the fallout as well as the initial explosion. But what remains unknown to this day is the full extent of the long-term damage to the city's environment.'

This tragic event forms the basis for Indra Sinha’s novel, a fictionalised fusion of personal and political narratives, with the city renamed Kaufpur and the factory owners only referred to as Kampani. Sinha explains, ‘I didn't want to call the city Bhopal because I would have been obliged to stick accurately to events, and they're simply too complicated. To make a novel with such a complex and convoluted background would have killed it’. But his semi-fictionalised alternative falls victim to a sort of botched hybridity. The characters in the novel are also partly based on real people, those who influenced the novelist in his long-term campaigning for the victims of the Bhopal tragedy. The protagonist is Animal, a twenty-year-old boy whose spine twisted and fused ‘that night’, to the point where he is now only able to walk on our fours; hence the name.

The overarching conceit through which the narrative is revealed is that the novel is directly transcribed from tapes taken from interviews with Animal. This device, whilst having informed some truly groundbreaking fiction, seems to work best if one is dealing with an unreliable, or morally ambiguous character. Through this narrative mechanism, the reader is constantly made aware of the conscious construction of the text by the narrator, and is therefore aware the story is shaped by the narrator’s own personal agenda. This lends an air of uncertainty to the proceedings that functions wonderfully if we do not, as a reader, necessarily trust what we are being told. Whilst the protagonist here could be seen at times as both unreliable and morally ambiguous, this conceit doesn’t serve Sinha’s narrative – Animal is an unsettling character, but what he is telling is essentially a highly sentimentalised tale of redemption, rendering all moral ambiguity or unreliability conclusively irrelevant. Sinha’s use of this device seems almost exclusively for its novelty value – a suspicion seemingly confirmed by the inclusion of a Khaufpuri ‘glossary’ and a complementary website purporting to be a factual depiction of a fictional town.

The novel suffers from a lack of narrative momentum, at least in part because of its apparent arbitrariness of form, but also a lack of consistency of tone, arising from the mentally unstable and inconsistent workings of Animal’s perspective.

For example, during a rare moment of narrative tension, where Animal is being carried across a bed of burning coals as part of a religious festival, Sinha inexplicably floats off into tangential vignettes tied loosely together under the theme of festivals, departing completely from Animal’s established crude lexical idiom (most frequently affirmed by his repetition of the word ‘cunt’) and destroying a moment of what could have been heightened narrative interest. This departure, as with so much of the writing that is otherwise apparently redundant to the text, is lamentably excused under the pretext that Animal is ‘slightly mad’ and ‘hears voices’. (He, for example, has conversations with two-headed fetuses. I rest my case.)

Animal’s ‘Madness’ appears at odds with his often refreshingly simplistic outlook, which includes the appreciation of simple pleasures (eating, masturbating, etc) and a stoical instinct for self-preservation. He is an outcast; he lives in extreme poverty and can only walk around on all fours. However, there’s no cohesion within the articulation of him as a character – his madness isn’t linked to his personal suffering. Consequently, it is easy almost to disbelieve this side of his character, or else conclude that his madness is an arbitrary characteristic given to him in order to excuse the writer’s self indulgence, and cover up what, for want of a better term, is simply bad writing.

One really positive aspect to the novel is where Sinha actually succumbs to narrative momentum within the last quarter of the book. At this point the Kampani lawyers come to town, which leads to espionage, hunger strikes and ultimately violent insurrection. Here the momentum builds and builds; we see the literal conflict of a town at war with itself, and feel the injustice of the lawyers’ actions as they fail to face up to their responsibility and evade appearing in court. Amidst the ensuing chaos the factory catches fire, and we see a night similar to the tragedy on which this novel is based – a nicely symmetrical idea. Sinha beautifully captures the moral reprehensibility of the lawyers, and when the fire begins, an unsettlingly cathartic display of violence unfolds; I as a reader really wanted the lawyers to be punished, the violence to be enacted upon them and the villagers to take their revenge. This is where Sinha’s penchant for apocalyptic imagery enhances the narrative, and becomes an appropriate symbolic representation of the hellish circumstances the inhabitants find themselves in. When the allusions to hell start to emerge, interwoven in the text, I readily accepted them; the previous articulations of anger and tension justified the dramatic comparisons as stemming organically from the narrative.

Unfortunately Sinha then leads us off on another departure, and we are subjected to a long biblical tale of madness and redemption, where Animal believes he has died and gone to heaven, but in actuality discovers that two people of the town died to save the others, and the hero of the town who was thought to have died actually survived – blah blah messiah allusions blah. Finally, the story reverts to individual tales of redemption, forsaking the political agenda somewhere along the way, as we are dragged back to Animal’s side.

For an author who professes to want to avoid making pitiful victims of his subjects, and whose protagonist’s often crude and disinterested outlook is designed to unsettle the reader, Sinha displays unfortunate sentimentalist tendencies. This includes the almost biblical conclusion, complete with resurrection, martyrdom and Animal’s self-acceptance: ‘I’m the one and only Animal’. Also, the character of Elli is a misunderstood American (another outsider – subtle) philanthropist, who only wants to help the people of Khaufpur who in the end spurn her. Later, of course, her benevolence is appreciated, and they are suitably repentant. She also gains the affections of Somraj, an ex-singer, well respected pillar-of-the-community who lost his voice on that fateful night. So that’s alright.

Ultimately, Animal’s People is frustratingly two novels, one text attempting to be two different stories. One is the unflinching portrayal of the inhabitants of a town dealing with the daily frustrations of poverty and their involvement in a larger political conflict. The second is a magical realist tale of strange afflictions, prophetic nuns, talking foetuses and personal redemption. I, for one, believe that the talents of the author (not to mention the real life people of Bhopal) would have been better served had he stuck with the former.