Book Review: "Pyre" by Perumal Murugan

‘Step down with your right foot first,’ Kumaresan had said to her. She was now unsure whether he had said this in jest or if he had meant it. By habit, anyway, she had descended from the bus with her right foot first, but she was not sure he had noticed that. The courage she had gathered until then suddenly vanished, leaving her feeling uneasy. When her feet touched the ground, she had prayed within her heart, ‘May everything go well.’ She could not think of a specific god. She only knew the name of Kumaresan’s family deity, Goddess Kali, but she would not have been able to confidently recognize the goddess’s idol in the temple. The only Kali she knew was a goddess with widened eyes, terrifying teeth and her tongue sticking out. She could not pray to that Kali, who only inspired fear.

As you know, I did not really get much of a chance to read most of the nominees of the 2023 International Booker Prize and so, I have chosen to go back on myself and read them. It is not uncommon for every year for me to read the English Language written nominees of the Booker Prize and, in some cases I am very clear about who is going to win. In other cases, I am not. For example: there was a year in which His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet was nominated alongside Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh and then, neither of them won. Instead the book The Sellout by Paul Beatty won and honestly, I did not think that it was nearly as good as the others. So there you have an example of which Booker Prizes may not be as well thought out as the others. It isn't always clear. I would say, around 75% of the time I guess correctly. I am very happy for the book Time Shelter, by the way, very well deserved.

Pyre is a book about a young couple who are scorned for being together because they are from different castes. In India, being from different castes is a big deal and the reactions of the other people around the couple make for quite a horrible subject matter which could have been filled with drama and tension if it was not for the naivety and dragging romance that littered the book. I was a bit upset that this book had the chance to do so much and ended up doing so little. I think the idealism of the male protagonist was a bit unrealistic followed by the repetitive nature of the kind of story we are being told. I mean, many of us already know this story by now - it does not add anything new to its realm.

The one good thing I will say about this book is that it uses flashbacks quite well. When we see how the two got together, how the female protagonist (Saroja) was raised and the way in which the past impacts the present, there is a clear motive by the writer to make us see that Saroja might be the one most in danger from all of this subversion.

Kumaresan had rehearsed his strategy several times in his head. He believed that everything would go according to plan; it had to. He had thought long, and hard about all possible contingencies and modified the plan accordingly. And though he was well aware that any scheme can unravel no matter how foolproof it might have seemed at first, a blind courage propelled him on.

Apart from the one good thing, I thought that the whole story was on the 'paper thin' side. There was a lot of politics involved but I think on the whole, this story has been told too many times in every way imaginable and so, when it is written again it has lost its magic. It is basically just Romeo and Juliet with some minor changes which I do not think do very much good actually. The translation could have been better and yet, I do not think very much could have been improved apart from the book's fluency and imagery. Without much of an atmosphere apart from the political one, what are we meant to do as readers?