I know several people for whom a novel is just a story -- something to be distilled to its barest essentials and then ingested summarily. To me, though, a novel is much more than the sum of all its parts -- the plot, the characters, the language, the ambience. A novel is something that you need to savor at leisure, rolling the words around in your tongue until you get all the last nuances of the prose, while still enjoying the storyline and empathizing with the characters.Glen Duncan's The Bloodstone Papers offers all of the above. The novel is written in the first person and we hear the voice of the protagonist, a lecturer moonlighting as a porn novel writer and a bartender, in his late thirties who makes incisive observations on everything about life, including death. The Bloodstone Papers follows the story of two main characters, Owen, an Anglo-Indian in contemporary London who struggles with his identity, his one true love and his search for a direction in life and his father whose beginnings trace back to pre-independence and newly independent India/Pakistan. The novel switches back and forth between Owen and his novel about his father as it tracks the loneliness of Owen and the bloodstone ring that his father lost to a con-artist in India. The contemporary part of the novel is the most resonating as that is where the author is in his elements. Witness his commentary on aging and the tortured relationship that some children have with this fact about their parentsI shoulder my bag and begin to walk away, carrying the guilt of every grown-up son from the beginning of time, the guilt of knowing it's my world, now, not theirs. If they'd been younger when they had me, there would have been a period - me in my twenties, say, them in their mid-forties -- when the world was ours, together.He distinguishes the voices of the past from the voices in the present with a single entity - God. While everything the principal characters in the past do is in some way related to their intense relationship with God, everything that the principal characters in the present do is influenced by their ambivalence towards, or denial of the existence of God.Although there is the underlying plot of finding the bloodstone ring and confronting the con-artist, the novel is much more than a whodunit. It is about the fragmented lives of the protagonist and his family and friends. It lingers on their feelings as much as it lingers on their actions. Identity is a big issue across the generations in The Bloodstone Papers. Ross Monroe in India is often cautioned by Anglo-Indians as well as some Englishmen that once the English up and leave, they (Anglo-Indians) will be in grave danger. Owen in contemporary London denies ever wanting to be tagged as an Anglo-Indian I don't know what it means to be Anglo-Indian. I don't care what it means to be an Anglo-Indian.He insists. But he does care. He cares that they are too small a race to matter. He cares that no one will believe them. He cares enough to mention it as part of his personal ad in the Guardian. Of all the identities that Owen Monroe takes on, his role as a porn writer seems to have the most influence on the entire narrative. For this reason, the book may not be for everyone. However, there is something about his prose that makes even the more hard-to-take parts of the novel less repulsive.If there is anything that strikes a discordant note in the work it is that Glen Duncan's pre-independence India simply does not ring true. It is rife with western generalizations about India, and anachronistically, it is rife with contemporary western generalizations about India. This is a bit of a let down, especially when you consider the level of understanding of, and empathy for, the human condition that you get to see throughout the book. That said, it does not detract significantly from the experience that is this book. India after all is not easy, even sometimes for Indians.The Bloodstone Papers is definitely something I would recommend -- for the prose, for its compassion towards people who are not exactly society's idea of success and for, strangely, its sadness! However, this is probably not a book for the easily offended.
I picked out this book on the recommendation of the librarian when I asked for something "different." I'm really not sure whether or not I liked this author's style or not. He uses a lot of parentheticals and very long sentences, and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of what is going on. But he does write very ... intelligently, so it's an interesting read.The story is two-fold, of the alternating chapters variety. The narrator is Owen, an "Anglo-Indian" (half English, half Indian.. from India) living in London. He is barely scraping by, writing pornographic novels under a pseudonym and teaching high school English to survive while working on his book, "The Cheechee Papers". His sections tell his story, that of love and lust, times spent with his promisciously homosexual roommate, his depression over losing the love of his life, and helping his father in the quest to find the man Skinner who screwed him over many, many years ago."The Cheechee Papers" (Cheechee, it is explained, is a negative term for the Anglo-Indians used back in India) makes up the remaining chapters, and is the story of his father and mother growing up in India, his father's boxing career that was supposed to get them out of India when he went to the Olympics, and the tale of the aforementioned Skinner and how he screwed over the father. It is the tale of his mother's abuse by her uncle and her secret plot to murder him. It is the tale of how destiny brought his parents together in the strangest of circumstances, and the tale of how Skinner kept coming back and why the father kept believing him.The two tales intertwine at the end of the novel, when Owen finds the long-lost Skinner, and deceives his daughter into allowing him to meet the old man. He brings his father to the meeting, and the two old men talk about India and what happened, and... well, obviously I'm not telling you the rest. But, at the end, even the reader is left unsure as to what really happened. Very tricky interesting ending.What did I think of it? Not entirely sure - as I said, I haven't decided about whether or not I liked the author's style. The story itself was interesting, I really felt like I got to know the characters, especially the father and son. I certainly learned about India, and the era when they gained Independence from England in the 1940s. I knew nothing about the country or the things that happened there, or the problems encountered by those people who were half-English. It was interesting, but... I dunno. As you can see by my rating, it was certainly not the best book I ever read.
What do You think about The Bloodstone Papers (2007)?
The Bloodstone Papers is the first book by Glen Duncan that I've read without the extra draw of the supernatural, but it was no less compelling once I'd given it a chance. A teacher approaching middle age, making ends meet with bar-tending and writing cheap romances, nurses a broken-heart and is trying to write the book, the story of his parents' courtship and life in India just before and after its independence. Their story is told in alternating chapters, covering how they grew up and giving an important picture of India under the British Empire than I've ever read in fiction before. Burmese Days and A Passage to India don't give much attention to those permanent products of 'the Raj': the Anglo-Indians. Duncan's writing can be densely descriptive and sometimes be a bit much, but he's so honest and willing to dig into the more uncomfortable and uncertain facts and emotions head-on - it didn't take me long to get pulled into the story even if some of the surface elements: sadsack failure of one protagonist, boxer for another, etc. didn't seem like my cup of tea. But I got involved, Duncan is a sophisticated storyteller. Duncan uses his author-protagonist to consciously draw parallels between himself and his father and on the importance of storytelling and the idea of destiny. This is a great piece of modern fiction.
—Myles
I can't really figure out how much I liked this book, nor am I sure if it's worth recommending. I typically enjoy literature with a post-colonial slant, so that is initially why I picked this up at the bookstore. I thought that the concept/story in its entirety was interesting enough, and certainly unique, but at many points I found that the execution was tiring or cumbersome. Basically, the plot flips back and forth between the central character, who lives in current-time London, and the story of his father and mother, who lived in (what is now) Pakistan and India pre-independence. His parents in the present time also live in England, so they mix into the plot in that time frame as well. At the final resolution, all of this disjointed chronology resolves itself, but it was a little disappointing to have to keep reading through 400 pages to get to an eventual "shocker" that you knew would be coming from the very beginning, more or less.In addition, one of the central aspects of the India narrative was boxing, which struggled to hold my interest. I found myself almost scanning through the "olden days" sections of the novel to get back to the more interesting, current story arc. Duncan's ability to create deep and likeable characters was pretty much the only reason I kept going, and I wish he had devoted less space to plot, and more to the cast.Overall, I don't feel like this was a total waste (time spent reading it was mostly at airports or while sitting on the beach), but I cannot say that I will be racing to read another one of his novels any time soon.
—Jason
