‘Q & A’
By Vikas Swarup

‘And I wonder what it feels like to have no desires left because you have satisfied them all, smothered them with money...’

‘Q & A’ is Vikas Swarup’s debut novel, and has achieved international success through its making into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. It is the adventure of Ram Mohammed Thomas, a child abandoned to the slums of big city India, who goes on to win Who Wants To Be a Billionaire (rupees) ? Each chapter tells of his street experience which leads to him knowing the answers left wanting by a formal education.

That leads to his arrest and interrogation after the show, as he couldn’t possibly have known the answers to the twelve questions, each more difficult than the last.

The author, a former quizzer, was interested in the psychological processes that are at work in a contestant’s mind. ‘A quiz is not so much a test of knowledge as a test of memory’.

‘Q & A’ is the work of a hyperactive imagination that moves with a modern Indian beat, like Danny Boyle’s film. We enter on the journey with this slum boy, admiring all his ingenuity and integrity as he pursues his dream. Each episode is a discrete experience, while also making up the coherent whole of the novel. The goings on in the Quiz Show take place at the surface level. The influences of Bollywood are throughout, in both style and content.

There is plenty of bleakness, poverty and darkness, but there is always a sense of ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’. Research for the book was considerable, including: The India-Pakistan war of 1971; life in juvenile homes; betting on cricket matches; the practise of selling tribal girls into prostitution; the modus operandi of contract killers; voodoo, and the Taj Mahal.

In India, says the author, the lives of the rich and poor, the high and the low, intersect every day.

This novel is a very rich and colourful reflection of that world. And in this story, the underdog survives, beats the odds and wins!

‘Guantanamo Boy’
By Anna Perera (Puffin Books)

Described by the author as her first teenage novel, the ‘boy’ from the title is Khalid, fifteen years old, a normal teenager, growing up in Rochdale, surrounded by his family and friends. He uses the internet a lot to communicate with his best friend Tariq, who is designing a computer game for them to play, and uses his mobile to make arrangements....

This Easter, he must go to Karachi in Pakistan with his parents to see his relations. He complains a bit as he would rather stay with his friends. Karachi is a dangerous place, he has been warned, as the US Military are picking up visitors to the country and making false accusations about their involvement with Al Queda.

When his dad goes missing, Khalid goes searching for him and gets mixed up in a street demonstration, barely making his way back to his aunt’s house with the help of a complete stranger.

It is not long before he himself is picked up and brought to a place of interrogation. The arrest is senseless and carried out by heartless faceless strangers. He is at once subjected to brutality and transported to Guantanamo. The skill of the author makes it frightening.

Most prison-set novels and films, such as ‘Papillon’ and ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ contain glimmers of hope and recovery. Usually, the prison term is a metaphorical proving ground for the resilience of the human spirit and ultimate survival of the hero. But, I don’t know, here it could be because the detainee is so young, or because there was no crime, or it has to do with a conflict I don’t fully understand. Mainly, it is the inhumanity of his captors, and the place. There is hardly a chink of redemptive light apparent here.

This one gave me the horrors. I do not know what happens to Khalid, as I wasn’t able to finish it. The author’s note is an indication of what’s inside, saying “Although ‘Guantanamo Boy’ is a work of fiction, it is inspired by real events,” she says. “It remains a fact that children have been abducted and abused and held without charge in the name of justice in Guantanamo Bay and many secret prisons around the world.”

‘Lush Life’
By Richard Price

Born in the Bronx, New York in 1949, Richard Price is famous for his gritty urban novels ‘Clockers’ and ‘Freedomland’, as well screenplays like ‘The Color of Money’ and award-winning episodes of ‘The Wire’,
‘Lush Life’, Price’s eighth novel, is set in the teeming streets of New York’s lower east side. A once working-class neighbourhood undergoing regeneration and gentrification, where laptop-toting yuppies rub shoulders with the original inhabitants and luxury apartment blocks are built next to run-down social housing estates, or ‘projects’ as the Americans call them.

The central theme of the book is the effect urban regeneration has on the neighbourhoods undergoing it; and how the people of an area can be bypassed and forgotten about by city planners building shiny new playgrounds for the young and affluent.

On the face of it, ‘Lush Life’ is a straight crime novel dealing with the story of a murder and its ensuing investigation. 35 year old bar manager Eric Cash and two friends are on their way home from a night of drinking, when they are held up by two young robbers from the projects.

One of the victims gets mouthy, saying “Not tonight my man” and gets shot dead by the nervous assailant. The alleged shooters are from the projects and the victims are newcomers to the area.

What follows is the story of a long and frustrating police investigation. The story is told from all angles as the author traces the repercussions of the shooting on the victims, the police, the attackers and the neighbourhood as a whole. Price has a keen ear for dialogue, lovingly reproducing the slang used by the young black and Latino street kids as well as the jargon-heavy speech of the police.

The book is a first-rate police procedural. We know who pulled the trigger. So the suspense comes from finding out whether he will be caught, and how, and what other casualties will ensue. The police have to spend almost as much effort tending to the victim’s father, unhinged by his son’s death, as they do to running down leads on the killer.

Inner-city streets are, in Price’s view, the stage for a play that often ends as tragedy but is at its base a farce.