Chaucerian Repast
GOPAL GANDHI
FOWL-FILCHER by Ranga Rao Penguin Books (India) Private Ltd., 1987, 183 pp., 550.00
Jan-Feb 1988, volume 12, No 1

Ranga Rao’s first novel Fowl-Filcher is a Chaucerian repast. Farce, accident, vio­lence, sex, pathos—all find place in this rapid-fire narrative. Shot after shot changes the scene, but keeps the tempo, in the manner of the famous author of The Canterbury Tales. To quote Theodore Morrison:

In Chaucer’s obscenity, if one wants to call it that, there is a vein of healthy vigor, of courage and truth toward the experience of the great human majority. Animal spirits and comic appetite are not a vice but a virtue, not a weakness but strength. They may be a limited virtue, and like all good qualities are subject to corruption and perversion. But the sense of the corrupt is nowhere to be found in Chaucer. He is simple, positive, robust, and his moral stomach is tough and healthy. Not obscenity but vulgarity in its best sense is the note of his bawdy tales; vulgarity not as coarseness of perception or absence of taste, but as heartiness of palate, as a spontaneous capacity to share in the common life of the world as it is.

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