The story takes place in India, and throughout the book, the author emphasizes the corruption pervasive at all levels of Indian society. He must be exaggerating, I tell myself. No society could be that blatantly corrupt. And, after all, it's supposed to be "a rollocking good read," according to the London Times. But when every character will do anything to gain an advantage for himself, I not only lose interest in the story, I lose interest in India.
Is this the response the author is aiming for with this book? I'm not sure. Maybe he expects us to know what the truth is and laugh at his exaggerations. But if we don't know the truth, well . . . how can we tell what's exaggerated?
Another aspect of the book that leaves me wondering what the author is trying to accomplish is the writing style. Sometimes Swarup has very nice descriptions that allow me to visualize the landscape of India and its people. But other times he is trying too hard to be clever, it seems, especially with dialogue that often comes out sounding a bit wooden. Do people in India really talk that way? I could excuse the unnatural sounding speech if there were a translator, but no, Mr. Swarup is writing in English for British readers.
One of the six suspects is an American from Texas. He is particularly annoying. Not only is his supposed naivete completely implausible, his speech is a hodge-podge of cliches, country-bumpkin witticisms and well-phrased, educated sounding observations. The last is especially distracting, since these are the moments when the writer seems to be speaking in his own voice rather than the character's. Is he deliberately doing that to destroy the reader's involvement in the character's story? I find that hard to believe and I'm left to wonder if he's trying to do something different or if he's just a bad writer.
So what's Vikas Swarup's goal? I can only guess that he's writing a farce. Here's the definition, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica eb.com:
farce, a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots, but it has been sustained by its popularity in performance and has persisted throughout the Western world to the present.Six Suspects does contain all the features of a farce, including stereotyped characters, so that must be what Swarup is after. But if so, he fails to deliver a successful farce, in my view.
For example, he spends six chapters of the book with first-person accounts of each of the six suspects in the murder. (Oh, yes, did you forget this is a murder mystery? I did too.) Such narratives are not helpful to the plot, since the information we get could be gotten more efficiently by other means. Moreover, first-person narration is for developing characters. We don't need to hear what's in the head of a type. Since he doesn't have an inner life, who cares what he thinks? He's only there to fill a role, so we only need to see him doing it, not know why he's doing it.
Even if Swarup wanted to give us more substantial types, he fails to do so since his characters reveal nothing illuminating in their narratives. They remain true to form; there are no nuances, no surprises, no hidden depths.
The problem with Swarup's attempt at farce is that farce really works better in drama (as the definition indicates)--it's a visual, three-dimensional form of entertainment. On the page it pretty much falls flat. Was Slum Dog Millionaire also farce? I don't know, but I won't be reading it to find out. I do plan to watch the movie, however. And perhaps that's what Swarup was truly trying to accomplish with this book--to write a novel that would be made into a movie.
I plan to finish Six Suspects, but I'll be fast forwarding through most of it, I think. And if I were you, I'd wait for the movie.
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