PURE FICTIONS: Rohinton Mistry has established himself as one of the world's finest living novelists, and he weighs his words as carefully in his reluctant interviews as he does on the page, writes Eileen Battersby
Without linguistic trickery, without games, without the use of fantastical devices or caricature, Indian writer Rohinton Mistry has, with three strong novels, established himself as one of the world's finest living novelists.
His art is sustained by a belief in story. Although there is more to it than that. His fiction is immensely human, his prose graciously formal and his vision realistic, not romantic.
No one could accuse Mistry of idealising his native Bombay. For him, it is "a dying city, rotting with pollution and garbage and corruption". His characters don't love it; they endure it. He sees Bombay, with its population of 14 million, as a noisy place cursed by traffic, smells and screaming voices.
"It is a tough city of people; it is hard to live there." Yet it remains his inspiration, despite the fact having left there in 1975, at the age of 23, he has now lived more of his life in Canada, the country he now considers home.
Polite dread best describes his attitude to interviews. He suffers them as part of an author's pact with his publishers and, to some extent, his public. Having said that, Mistry the storyteller, far more than many writers, has moved far beyond the business of talking about either himself or his books. The novels, Such A Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) - both Booker-shortlisted - and his new book, Family Matters, a definite Booker contender and possible winner, stand by themselves. He is a careful, deliberate, detached individual; kindly but remote and curiously sorrowful. Mistry, now 50, looks you straight in the eye with the sympathetic despair of a doctor about to pass on bad news.
Yet there is also a robust, often dark humour. He laughs suddenly, almost abruptly, with real pleasure at the mention of the comic killing off of two of his characters - the selfish stepdaughter and a hapless handyman in Family Matters - at the scene of a repair job. He loves self-contained, comic set-pieces and his novels are rich with them.
An irony similar to that which runs through his fiction is evident in the man himself. He is quick and alert, but certainly thinks longer and harder than most of us would before answering any question. It is as if the only satisfaction to be won in an interview is that of speaking in complete, structured sentences - as he does. There are many pauses; he likes to think about his work and the process through which it grows. Speaking about it, though, is rather different. Mistry does not waste words.
Nor is he an autobiographical writer. He is more like a medium through which his vibrant, complex stories filter - or, as he says, "find me". Easy to like, impossible to know, he speaks about his work but not about his life. His conversation, unlike his fiction, is never anecdotal. Although he does speak about India and the brutal politics that govern his country. "I am not political writer and I have never let politics dictate a story but it \ has appeared in my work as you know."
Family is his theme, or perhaps it is not. His preoccupation is life in general rather than in particular - change, the passing of time and the things people not so much do to themselves as permit to happen to them. He has a feel for characterisation, and his fiction is driven by character, not plot - "Plot is not so important for me; it is hardly there. Yes, there is not so much plot in my novels" - yet for all the concentration on character, Mistry succeeds in creating the illusion that he does not manipulate his characters, but is merely reporting on the circumstances they find themselves in. This is a clever, subtle device; his authorial presence is far more intrusive than his gentle art might suggest.
Born into a lower middle-class Bombay family in 1952, he has three brothers and one sister.
"I studied mathematics and economics, but I always enjoyed reading, though it was not the 19th-century English writers. I read Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Updike. Bellow's Humboldt's Gift is one of my favourite novels," he says.
Mistry is aware of reviewers constantly comparing him with Dickens. He shrugs. "I don't see it. Dickens wrote in black and white; it is a cultural, social, political sprawl. Not the shade of grey I write in," he says.
Nor does he seem at ease with references to Tolstoy - "I have not read many 19th-century novels". He says this as if he is beginning to consider those comparisons with 19th-century novelists as a problem. Yet the one with Tolstoy is valid, especially in Mistry's handling of the dynamics of family and the tension between love and duty.
As time passes, Mistry is becoming increasingly distanced from India. Is he worried about this, does he fear his India may itself become a fiction? "No, it is my culture," he says. "It is the place where I was born, where I grew up and lived for 23 years of my life. It is the place that shaped my imagination."
Memory, he says, has provided him with a great database of details, which reside there to be, in time, drawn upon. He has two worlds - one is Bombay, the other is the rest of India. "There is a life outside Bombay. Seventy-five per cent of the Indian population live in rural villages. There is a very real rural life."
It was this greater India that provided much of the setting for his second novel, A Fine Balance, published in 1995 and set against the turmoil of the 1975 State of Internal Emergency. It is a portrait of a country experiencing traumatic change. In it, family is not given - it is created when a number of individuals come together through hardship.
That novel made him famous. It won many prizes, including The Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book; a major Canadian literary award, the Giller Prize; and the Los Angeles Times Books Prize for fiction. It was Booker-shortlisted and was also a contender for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
At 614 pages in the first British edition (1996) - or 748 pages in the larger print of the earlier Canadian edition published in 1995 - it is the longest of his books to date, and is more loosely constructed, moving between several locales. The central character, the lovely Dina Dalal, a seamstress, is tenacious and engaging, if not quite as profoundly drawn as Nariman Vakeel, the tragic old father of Family Matters. Nor does Dina approach the magnificent characterisation Mistry achieves in Gustad Noble, the marvellous Everyman hero of Such A Long Journey.
Any examination of Mistry as a major novelist today must begin with the genius evident in his first novel, Such a Long Journey, published quietly in February 1991. I remember reviewing it the night before I took a dawn flight on a Concern supply plane to Liberia to report on the aftermath of the civil war and famine there. I was conscious it might be the last novel I would ever read. Seven months later it was Booker shortlisted.
It is a novel about loss. Originally from a well-off family, Gustad is now quite poor and works in a bank. He is middle-aged, still loves his wife and has come to see his adored eldest son's chances of academic success as vital to the harmony of the household. Mistry makes it clear that Gustad is intent on salvaging or, perhaps, justifying his own modest life through the boy's bright future as an engineer. Yet at no time does Mistry risk losing our sympathy for his likeable, very human central character.
FOR ALL the comedy and the tragedy, it is a philosophical novel, as are his other books - and that philosophy is about acknowledging that people are not in control of their lives. His realism, even at its most stark, is never fully pessimistic. Somehow the energy and life of his narratives counters the potential melodrama of his stories.
Story is the key. "Story is life and life is story," he says, and goes on to talk about writing short stories before ever thinking of attempting a novel. Tales From Firozsha Baag, 11 intersecting stories set largely inside a Bombay apartment building, was published by Penguin Books Canada in 1987, followed by US publication two years later under the title Swimming Lessons.
His writing began after he left India, so did Canada make him a writer? "Would I have become one if I had stayed?" he asks, with a shrug. Why did he leave India? "It was always accepted that there was no future in India. In the past we \ always went to England, it was a tradition. Later this became the US, but the US lost its shine. So for my generation, it was Canada. It is a good place to live, a good place to write."
The rise and rise of contemporary Indian fiction in English, with its expressive, comic exasperation, is not a recent development. Indian writers have been dominant since the emergence of the majestic R. K. Narayan, but the current generation, including writers such as Mistry, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Manil Suri, Ardashir Vakil and Vikram Seth, are a formidable group. Yet for a country in which 22 languages are spoken, does it not seem strange that so much emphasis is placed internationally on work written in English?
Mistry, a Parsi, very much a racial minority, speaks some Hindi but says English is his main language. "I see English as an Indian language," he says.
For all the poverty, violence, smells and sheer loudness of life in India, what it is that Mistry sees as central to his country? "The humour." Indians, he says, are quick, witty and funny - "we see the comedy in life".
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry is published by Faber (£16.99 sterling)