You have to be a reviewer to read this book to the end, and a conscientious one at that! David Davidar has come up with one of the more tedious Indian English novels, one that does not reward the reader with new insights or the pleasure of enjoying accomplished use of language but perhaps affords only with a sense of virtue that one has actually read a book from beginning to end even though it has only very very occasional sparks—it is only sometimes that the language works, only sometimes that you think that the book may contain anything at all (only to be disappointed).
Of course David Davidar is a good man, with his heart in the right place (left of centre). This is a book about secularism, about individuals caught in webs of action and reaction, about communal strife, about the seemingly small nature of most of our lives, about love, about violence, about self-fashioning, retreat, and corruption.
It is about escaping small town India and India itself. It is a novel about the essential solitude of our lives. It is a novel about important things, a novel full of good intentions. It is a novel that will prove to be a godsend to poco researchers. It is a novel that proves that it is only good writing skills that can redeem a work of literature, save it from its motivations.