If you only read one novel set in India immediately after independence

... make it [b:Midnight's Children|14836|Midnight's Children|Salman Rushdie|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166661748s/14836.jpg|1024288]. Rushdie’s book is dazzling, surreal, inventive, witty. Vikram Seth’s book is none of those things.

Clearly I am in a tiny minority here, and life would be boring if we all agreed. So I'll just give a couple of reasons why I was disappointed with this book. I gave it two stars, because I did finish it, and I abandon books I truly loathe. Plus the last 200 pages almost made me forgive him for the previous 1300. Almost.

1) He sets the tone with the epigraph: “the secret of being a bore is to say everything,” according to Voltaire, who apparently also though that the superfluous was “a necessary thing”. You have been warned! I suppose it's predictable that as a fan of [a:Alice Munro|6410|Alice Munro|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1245100102p2/6410.jpg], who can fit enough substance for a novel into a short story, I am not going to enjoy a novel with enough substance for a short story stretched out to 1500 pages. Although I can and do enjoy the right long novels: [b:Middlemarch|19089|Middlemarch (Signet Classics)|George Eliot|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255790409s/19089.jpg|1461747] is my favourite novel of all time, and I like both [b:War and Peace|656|War and Peace|Leo Tolstoy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1222897284s/656.jpg|4912783] and [b:Anna Karenina|152|Anna Karenina|Leo Tolstoy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1221762041s/152.jpg|2507928] enough to have read them twice.

At times Seth is clearly just taking the piss, as his epigraphs hint. Page 1241: some of the characters go to a cricket match. We are told exactly what time they get up, who goes in which car, what time they arrive, where they sit.

India’s opening batsmen were still at the crease. Since India had scored 418 and 485 in two previous innings in the series, and since England were all out for 342 in their first innings, there was a good chance that the hosts would be able to make something of the match [snip:] Leadbeater opened the bowling to Roy with a maiden, and Ridgway supported the attack from the other end, bowling to Munkad. Then...

No, I can't go on. There are pages and pages of dull, irrelevant detail that don't advance the plot or illuminate the characters. Pages and pages where Seth describes the characters’ motives, psychology, and history, instead of letting them reveal them by their actions and thoughts. Pages and pages about the political situation in India, which could have been lifted from a history textbook (I have to say I was again glad I'd read Alex von Tunzelmann's excellent book on partition, [b:Indian Summer|859046|Indian Summer|Alex von Tunzelmann|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RZEdX-XEL._SL75_.jpg|844488], so I had some idea of the background to the story). Word-for-word accounts of parliamentary debates. Extracts from court yearbooks. I longed for an editor with a big red pen, visualising whole sentences, paragraphs, and chapters being crossed through and superfluous adjectives struck out.

I spluttered with rage on page 1370 when the Seth-like character Amit, criticised for writing a long novel, says “I hate long books. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, they turn me into a social moron for days ... Proust makes me weep, weep, weep with boredom.”

I kept putting it down and leaving it for days or weeks at a time while I read something I liked better. Yet curiously I kept picking it up again, just because so many people have raved about it. I decided to treat it like a serial, picking it up every couple of weeks and reading till I got bored again. I learned to flip over scores of pages without reading them at all. And actually in the last 200 pages a good story suddenly appears, that builds on what went before and becomes briefly interesting. There are some entertaining satirical scenes, and some that are touching, or would have been if they hadn't been so over-written. This would have made a good 500-page novel.

Of course, Seth is making a point with this long novel, with its many mingling tributaries which I think are supposed to recall the Ganges. He clearly wants to be compared to someone like Tolstoy, or George Eliot, combining the personal and political/philosophical in one overarching narrative. I will grant that he must have done a massive amount of research, and his depiction of the stresses and strains of Indian society in the 1950s is convincing. I give him credit too for Lata's non-obvious choice at the end, which makes the Lata storyline more than a mere (Western-style) romance. I've seen comparisons to Austen too, which annoyed me at first, but yes, there are obvious similarities – the inevitable wedding bells at the end, the mordant social satire (especially the Chatterjis and Haresh’s various encounters) -- and the fact that just as with [b:Emma|6969|Emma|Jane Austen|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41aRcnMLOdL._SL75_.jpg|3360164], you have to wonder how well the marriage between these two characters is going to work!

2) “Vivid, evocative and beautifully written,” says the Literary Review, and a lot of other people. Where is this beautiful writing? To me, beautiful writing is writing that makes me stop, return to read a sentence or paragraph again for sheer pleasure. It's [a:Alice Munro|6410|Alice Munro|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1245100102p2/6410.jpg] or [a:Jonathan Raban|140886|Jonathan Raban|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg], communicating emotion with an economy of words and a gift for choosing the right ones. This novel is verbal diarrhoea. The writing seems stilted and pedestrian, conveying (too much) information and little else. The quotations above are not untypical, though I did pick one of the most boring parts for the first quote. And I have spared you the poetic doggerel that litters the pages.

So there! As I say, other people have enjoyed this book and even re-read it. I was just glad to heave it aside and vent my spleen here. If you have a great deal of time to spare and like your eyes to glaze over with boredom from time to time, or of course if you are interested in recent Indian history, this is the book for you. “Make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life,” said the Times. Sometimes I thought it would.

Footnote: I've just read an Amazon review comparing Seth to Trollope. YES! Exactly. If you love Trollope or Dickens (I don't), then you will enjoy this.

This is one of my all-time favorite books, which I first read about 20 years ago and have reread numerous times since, despite its 1400-page length. I picked it up again for the umpteenth time after a recent trip to India and was immediately absorbed once more.

A Suitable Boy is the story of four extended families -- the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, and the Khans -- whose lives intertwine in various ways. It's also a look at India a few years after independence, with all its challenges and opportunities. What I love about this book is that it is both intimate and epic, with richly drawn characters and scenes. Rereading it is like revisiting old friends and getting a glimpse into their lives -- their loves, hopes, dreams, feuds, struggles, triumphs, friendships, politics, and simple daily existence. If there's any criticism I could make, it's that some of the sections related to political life and maneuverings can occasionally get slightly tedious, but they are nevertheless essential to Seth's portrayal of post-independence India. Most of the time we quickly return to the personal lives of Seth's wonderful characters.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Don't be daunted by its great length! Once you're drawn into Seth's vivid world, the pages almost turn themselves.

It's a big one......curl up for the long haul

Not finished - gave up after about 50 pages. So muddled, banal and uninteresting.

Is this a tome, or what? Hoo boy. I'm hoping I can get this done in one gulp, I can't renew it at the library. It's a good thing TV is terrible.

I'm enjoying the level of detail in this story. This is the first time I've read a novel about India that devotes equal time to Hindu and Muslim characters. The slice-of-life bits are good stuff, but I do get bogged down in the political discussions.

This ultimately took me two renewals, and on my last renewal I had three hours to go when I dropped it in the library's slot (I admit I don't have as much time for reading as most of you). The ending was terrific - it made me want to keep reading about these characters for anothe 1000 pages, if it didn't break my wrists first.

I gave a month of my life to this book and sometimes I enjoyed it and sometimes it was a slog. The writing is really excellent and the characters do come to life. The political aspects were sometimes interesting to me and sometimes overwhelmingly difficult to comprehend. That is on me. I didn’t leave a rating because it was both wonderful and occasionally tedious to read. I think it is funny that he quotes Voltaire on the front page: “The secret to being a bore is to say everything.” and also “The superfluous, that very necessary thing….”

I got 7% of the way through and gave up and watched the tv adaptation. It said it would take over 50 hours to read and it just wasn’t gripping enough for me to make that kind of commitment. Too many characters, and the attention to minute detail just felt too laboured. Well done to anyone who finished it but it wasn’t for me.

I can't finish this... its too long and heavy to tote around traveling. Might be a good ebook.

Rating 4/5

Seth's novel is impressive in scope. It's reminiscent of the epics of Dickens or Tolstoy - a narrative about place as much as a narrative about people. If this is a love story, it's less a love story about Lata and her suitors and more a love story about India in the early years of independence. Seth takes a more realist approach to the story of India than Rushdie does in Midnight's Children, and I must say I prefer Seth's approach.

Seth has a lightness of touch with his narrative. It draws you in immediately. That's not to say that there aren't a few slower parts - in such a long novel, you might get bogged down a little. I found some of the parts about Maan dragged a little, and I didn't feel that that story wrapped up all that well for me. The final three hundred or so pages weren't as satisfactory as I would have wanted, but there was a realism about the climax that I appreciated.

I liked Lata very much. Her struggles to choose a suitable boy were realistic. I was happy with the choice she made in the end. I also enjoyed the lively Chatterjis, especially Amit, who might be a stand in for Seth himself. Seth even pokes fun at himself through Amit when he talks about writing long novels. I also liked the industrious, warm-hearted Haresh, the man who was so accommodating and solicitous, but also proud. I liked how each of Lata's suitors represented a different aspect of Indian culture and society.

I was less keen on Meenakshi and Arun Mehra, and I wasn't all that interested in Saeeda either. There's a plot point about her that's really easy to guess early on. I also felt there were characters introduced who didn't really have anything to do, who were sort of superfluous to the plot.

Rumour has it that Seth is working on a sequel. I think the test of whether a story is good or not is to ask yourself if you would read more about the characters. I certainly would read more about Lata and company, so hopefully Seth gets that sequel finished soon.