ROAD TO PERDITION

In his new novel The Line of Mercy, Tarun Tejpal doesn’t just portray the grim reality of a prison, he dissects the very heart of crime and punishment

- Aman Nath

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WAS not plasticine when my generation read it at school. But, by college, we’d begun to play with it like clay, because it seemed less of an imported toy. The question of irreverence to the Queen’s English was catching on when I practised copywriting. But The Line of Mercy by Tarun Tejpal may well be the best bedside reading for the eternal Queen Elizabeth II. She’ll be fascinated with the writer’s facility with a language she must know better but hasn’t dared to make as malleable. Every other line of this opus fills the reader with wonder at the mind of a provincial Chandigarh boy who has married his Naipaul with Dostoevsky and Marquez with Ferlinghetti to create with his bewildering new vocabulary of images a rebellious new highway of e e cummings and goings. No writer I’ve read has been there in language and subject matter.

The story, or rather the cataract of stories, are pivoted inside a prison, weighted by first-hand research because destiny and posterity connived to lock up Tejpal to excavate out of him an epic of woe, spiked with a humour that laughs aloud at itself. Now that 527 pages acquit Tejpal, how will the world stand up in bed for a standing ovation when they read it?

Beyond its soaring scale and scope and its masterful prose, what may be most impressive about Tejpal’s novel is its utter originality. In a publishing landscape awash with crony-and-commerce-hyped books that are tediously banal and derivative,