The First Bird: Episode 1 by Greig Beck

One word: Awesome. For a sort of modern version of The Lost World, this book is pretty creative. 

Somewhere in the deep jungles of Brazil, a social anthropologist discovers something extraordinary. The fame-hungry scientist brings back to LA a live specimen of an Archaeopteryx (the eponymous first bird) and with it, a deadly infection that flays its victims alive. So, while the disease spreads, a team of experts sets out to Gran Chaco to find a cure; a team which includes Professor Matt Kearns, an expert in archaeology, old languages and more out of necessity than choice, adventure. While the plot is kind of formulaic, the world created is entirely original.

As with Black Mountain, the thing that really makes this book work is the pace. The plot speeds on and before you even realize it, you're completely hooked. And for someone who manages to keep things moving so quickly, the authors gives a lot of attention to details. Very few authors can describe an intense action packed scene in such a way that you can picture every single move, as if in slow motion. The vivid descriptions make the scenes come to life, making all the bad things ten times more horrific. There are few information dumps, but since this is a thin book (and only the first part in a series), I had to wish there were. Episode 1 is almost just a teaser and ends with that pesky cliffhanger. I can't wait to read the second part.

The team is made up of quite a variety of characters, with rather obvious good and bads, so you're bound to find someone to relate to. There's swift, funny dialogue and very cool inputs from the entomologist and the linguist. The native legends, and customs, described mostly by Moema, the local guide of sorts make the whole book very interesting and very real. It also gives you the vaguest idea of what's about to come and how deep the author's capable of digging into a topic. Which is the thing I loved the most: while it's just a novella, it's massive in scope.

There is still time to read Episode 1 of The First Bird before Episode 2 comes out in July, followed by the final episode in August. If you like action, adventure, history, fantasy and thrillers, this is an author you don't want to miss.

Jacob Hills by Ismita Tandon Dhankher

I'm glad this wasn't a review copy, because now I can just rant, without having to bother about a review structure or ratings. Those who do care about the review structure and ratings would be happy to know that I though it was a pretty good book! It's fast paced, but you should know, there's little action (not the fighting and killing kind, anyway) and there are not many clues or detectives, either. 

Here's the blurb, which gives a pretty good idea about the book, without giving away any details (as must have been intended and saves me the trouble of writing a summary)

"It’s just another evening at the Tiller’s Club. 

Near the bar, Capt. Rana, the Young Officer undergoing training at the War College stands among his course mates, consciously avoiding his pregnant, Muslim wife, Heena. Rumour has it she had forced him to marry her because of the baby. 

Saryu, village belle turned modern babe, drink in hand, chats up a YO. Her husband, Maj. Vikram Singh, shoots angry glances at her. She isn’t bothered; the question is, who will she go home with tonight? 

Pam and Gary, the flamboyant Sikh couple, chat merrily with the senior officers, charming as ever. Who’d ever guess that they lead the infamous Key Club, an underground swinger couples’ club. 

And in one corner stands the Anglo-Indian wife of Maj. George Chandy, Eva, who finds herself at the heart of a murder mystery when a woman’s bleeding body is discovered at the old church under the black cross. The murdered woman’s body is covered with cigarette burns. A six-year-old girl’s wrist is similarly marked. Another little girl shows signs of severe abuse.

Jacob Hills: an army station that houses the War College where young officers receive training. A world of army officers and genteel conversation, of smart men and graceful women. Set in the 1980s – in an India that was at the cusp of tradition and Westernized modernity – this is the story of the ugliness that lies beneath the garb of Jacob Hills’s beauty and sophistication. An ugliness the Chandys find themselves confronted with. Will they uncover the truth behind the woman’s murder? Will their love survive Jacob Hills?"

I really wanted to read Jacob Hills, because Ismita's debut book (Love on the Rocks) was special to me. It was the first review copy I ever received. The blog and I have come a long way since and after devouring her book in just a day, I can say with confidence, so has the author. When it comes to the writing style and the narration (alternating first person views of many characters), the books are quite similar. Not to mention, the characteristic cute little title sketches for every chapter and the bits of fine poetry have comfortably snaked their way into the story, like in the first book. Both the books are murder mysteries, and at the same time, a series of character sketches that tell a lot more than the story. And despite all the glaring, uncanny similarities, Jacob Hills ends up being a much better book than Love on the Rocks. That's a good thing, because that was a debut and this shouldn't and doesn't seem like one. Jacob Hills is more refined, more structured and you get a feeling that it's not written to please someone. Love on the Rocks had a bit of that clumsy, trying-to-impress vibe to it that shouted "Debut!" and being the debut reviewer that I was, my review definitely screamed that too (it probably had phrases like "character development" and "plot arc" shoved in there.) Jacob Hills was mature and showed experience.

The difference in the plot arcs (for lack of a better term) is that while Love on the Rocks ended up with a rushed, unexpected bang, Jacob Hills has a sort of slow waltzing finish. That makes it a lot less about solving the mystery and lot more about what's bubbling underneath it all. Ray Bradbury said that a good story is a metaphor, or something to that effect, and this one is. You have the chance to take things at face value and then dig deeper with some of the characters (the more sensible ones like George or the oddly naive ones like Eva) and then you can dig even deeper all on your own. When in Jacob Hills, the author makes a point, racy and bold though the book is, the point made is subtle and unbiased (although I am not even sure if that's intentional.) You are not told what to think, you are only told that, maybe, it's time to think for a bit. The mystery, who killed the woman, who abused the child, those are pieces of a puzzle that gradually fall into place. The helpless "that's it?", the shocked "really?" and the hopeful "what now?" that follow are left for us to chew on. 

Here comes the reviewer in me: The prose is spirited and fun and keeps you entertained. All the different perspectives give you an insight into the world that a lone narrator could not have managed. It is a delicate topic, especially with all that's been in the news lately and it has been handled carefully and I guess, correctly. Along with giving a serious message, the book is also humorous, which keeps it from becoming a complete drab. The book could have used some finishing touches, a little smoothing out of the plot at places, but those are things I found only when I really went looking for faults. My only huge problem with the book is, I suppose, that it's short. I would have loved it if the author had dug deeper into the world. The book had the potential to be a big fat novel and I was disappointed with what was just a little glimpse of what could have been. Since Jacob Hills is already over, I wish the author decides to write one of those longer, deeper stories soon. I'd certainly read it.

I didn't initially like the book cover, by the way. Now I kind of do. The contrasting colours represent a sad and desolate background with something ludicrous and dramatic emblazoned on it, trying and failing to hide what's underneath. It's tragic, pretty much like the book, and also very up-front, almost provocative, like a chall.. wow, I'm reading too much into it, aren't I? I should get some sleep, I have been buried in this book all day.
Meanwhile, why don't you go buy it?

There May Be An Asterisk Involved by Vedashree Khambete

Note: I'm sorry if this 'book review' is little more than a gushing rant, that happens sometimes with books that surprise me.

Very few people appreciate a well-written footnote. Most of my favourite parts of the Discworld books lie right in those wittily worded footnotes. They're also where the narrator's voice really comes out, and in any book by Terry Pratchett, that is most welcome. (Also a book with funny, comfortable, page-long footnotes: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.) Vedashree Khambete has managed to sneak into her book some truly wry, mocking commentary through the regular footnote asides. They top the list of reasons I adored There May Be An Asterisk Involved.

At the risk of sounding like a judger-and-labeller, I don't generally read books by Indian authors, especially debuts. So I was mildly surprised when I read the blurb on the back of this book that my sister (who stays somewhere in the US - I'm bad with names) sent me to have it sent to her, because the book's not available on Amazon. It sounded too interesting. I was also mildly surprised and curious by the lengths she went to acquire this tiny book. So I did a little sleuthing (I asked my sister) and found out that the book was written by a blogger (and, clearly, a book nerd, which gives her brownie points) whom she regularly read. The blog was entertaining and I couldn't wait to get started on the book. For you, the blurb:

"Ira Bhat, copywriter by day, sleep-deprived copywriter by night, has only one goal: to not go utterly bonkers as she negotiates the perils and pitfalls of a career in advertising. These include, but are not limited to: comma-obsessed clients, award-obsessed bosses, obnoxious marketing executives, high-strung creative types, impossible deadlines, obscure briefs, fiercely competitive colleagues, the death of many a big idea...and the ever-present danger of falling in love with the new account planner. Sounds doable, but is it? Because, when it comes to advertising, somewhere, hidden in the fine print, there may be an asterisk involved..."

I don't believe I've read any book with good punctuation humour before. Now that I think about it, I haven't read a single book by an Indian author that was humorous to the core. I'm often wary of reading things people find extremely funny; they don't usually seem that way to me. I'm also not very fond of long-winded satire and don't like scathing sarcasm. This book was somewhere between the two (three?) and it was fun. The writing was breezy, lighthearted, the plot seemed aimless and precise at the same time and it was just corny enough to be good. That doesn't mean, of course, that there was nothing that bugged me. The simple truth is, the little things that could have been better, didn't really matter on the whole.

There was some almost pompous name-dropping that I would generally frown upon. The lead character had this Inkheart-ey air about reading: the assumption that no one else does it. Things like "Please, you're so dumb, I read Hemingway, Calvino, Rand" were slightly annoying. That I like (or once liked) every one of these authors made it okay. The characters were stereotypes, both the nice and the obnoxious ones. Not to mention, every character including the omniscient narrator (yes, that's the Lit student in me talking; no, I haven't glanced at the books in a while, so I may be wrong) sounded the same: however, they did all sound comfortably witty, you know, not too slapstick, they didn't drop Hindi words or cool urban slang in their talk and they were nothing like the LOLCats, which is to say, they didn't make deliberate disturbingly non-funny grammatical errors. So, yeah, the fact they were all alike was better than even one of them not being that way just to be 'realistic'.

This isn't going to be the best book you've ever read, nor make you think a lot. But the book is a good package. If not anything else, it will give you a delightfully good time. It has romance, glamour, some inevitable drama, just enough advertising know-how, a lot of creativity and a narrator who can make just about anything sound interesting. It's also short and reasonably priced. So, I don't see why you shouldn't just go grab yourself a copy. 

And before I forget, this is the author's blog.

Update: Turns out a Kindle edition is available here. 

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C. S. Lewis

I first started reading this book almost a year ago. I'm glad I didn't continue reading it back then, I'm sure I wouldn't have appreciated it as much then as I did now.

Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche and if you haven't the slightest clue what it is, it's a good idea to read up on it (that's what I did) before reading the book. The book is also the last novel C. S. Lewis ever wrote and the only thing I've read by him. The book has two parts. The first is the story, as narrated by Orual, Psyche's half-sister, a woman with a disfigured, unpleasant face, which she hides under a veil. Orual bitterly accuses the Gods of being unjust and writes her side of the story as a complaint against the Gods, even a challenge of sorts. 

Orual is the eldest daughter of the King of Glome, a city not far from Greece. The goddess of Ungit (whom the Greeks call Aphrodite) is jealous of the little Psyche's beauty and is infuriated by the godly status, which the people assign her. The King is convinced of the existence of a curse and is commanded to sacrifice Psyche to save his kingdom. She is sacrificed to the "God of the Mountain", Ungit's son (Cupid is only alluded to in this story), who is supposed to devour Psyche, but instead, falls in love with her. He meets her in secret, however and Psyche is not allowed to look at her 'husband'. In the original story, when Psyche's sisters visit her new palace, they get jealous and plan to destroy Psyche's happiness. They coax her into finding the identity of the God (or what they believe is a monster.) Cupid flees when Psyche sees him and she is put through a series of horrible tests to win back her love. In the retelling, Lewis shows us how it is impossible for the sisters to have seen the palace, when they simply didn't believe. Telling the story from Orual's point of view gives it a new... face, for lack of a better word. It poses all the questions that would come up in a mortal's head after reading a story like this one. The second part of the book does a wonderfully unexpected job of answering those questions, with what could be called a re-retelling. Anything more I say about the second part, would just spoil it. And no, all this did not spoil the book (hence no 'spoiler alert'.)

It's a finely written book, which has a lot to say. I'm not sure I understand all of it, or if I ever will. But I do like how it made me really think; think for two days before I went ahead and wrote this post. The first part was interesting, in the way all mythology is, very crude and insanely fascinating; disturbing and beautiful at the same time. But it was in the second part (not Part II but the second half of the book) that it became smart, you know: that's when you realize the whole point of having a retelling. It's not a Peter Ackroyd retelling, the whole idea of which is pretty much to make things more 'accessible' or easier to read. The revised story here makes a point, the new perspective has a purpose and it's a good one. The book adds the human aspect to a myth, expands on feelings, thoughts and dialogues and makes the myth all the more real. You can hardly relate to mythology, I mean, come on. But here you really can put yourself in Orual's shoes and that's one of the things I liked (or understood... I think?) about the book.

Here are a few lines I liked from the book: (*some contain details, which may spoil the reading experience for some of you and those of you've now been duly alerted.*)

"I, King, have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”

"Now mark yet again the cruelty of the gods. There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy. The nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one."

"I was not a fool. I did not know then, however, as I do now, the strongest reason for distrust. The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us."

"A fat fly was crawling up the doorpost. I remember thinking that its sluggish crawling, seemingly without aim, was like my life, or even the life of the whole world."

"It was the hardest work I'd ever done, and, while it lasted, one could think of nothing else. I said not long before that work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three— far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts."

"“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

Have you read Till We Have Faces?

P. S. This is another read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge. My next book for the challenge is on its way: The Ocean at the End of the Lane. That's right: Gaiman's latest novel, I can't wait to start reading it.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Often, when I read a book, I end up noting things down along the way. It then turns into a sort of rant-review and I can think of nothing else to write later. This post doesn't have much of a beginning nor an end. Of course, if you've already read Never Let Me Go, this post would make a lot more sense to you than if you haven't. I have to say, though: it is definitely worth a read. From the two books I've read of his, I find the author rather talented, mostly for having produced two quite different books. (The other one I read was An Artist of the Floating World.)

Summary: The book is narrated by a thirty year old woman, Kathy, who has been a carer for twelve years now. She is looking back on her life in this post-war world. Kathy and her friends, Tommy and Ruth among others, were students of a special boarding school "Hailsham". They spent their childhoods there, with the teachers (guardians) being the only people they had in their lives apart from themselves; they had no families and weren't even allowed outside the school. The children were different from the people outside, you know, the "normal people", though none of them knew why. Kathy reminisces about her past and discusses with us the seemingly little incidents that build up to the moment when the students realize what fate has in store for them in the outside world. Kathy talks about meeting Tommy and Ruth years later, as their carer and helping them through their donations. Kathy is now about to quit being a carer and finally become a donor herself.

Never Let Me Go was so sad. Great, but very sad. It was depressing, it just got more depressing and more truthful with every page and the ending was so honest, it hurt. I liked it, of course and here's why.

Most post-apocalyptic, dystopian books try to be suspenseful and fail. The plots follow a kind of formula: where there's this post-tragedy futuristic world that's supposedly working just fine, until our protagonist starts to not-fit-in and soon realizes that under the facade of a very well-functioning society lies this whole underground community of rebels. More often than not, the protagonist joins them and almost always, fails in overthrowing the system or loses something of himself in his attempt. Sure, dystopian fiction calls for this pessimistic, "Oh God, is this really how the world's going to end up?" and tragic "No, wait, the world already is kind of like this, isn't it?" flurry of reactions. But an author putting a lot of trouble into making the plot suspenseful, when we all know this is going to happen, gets tiring after a while. The thing that irritated me to no end in The Handmaid's Tale, for instance, was that very silly withholding of information. I couldn't focus on anything, but that aura of mystery the narrator kept trying to create. It was a very childish technique of keeping someone interested, which combined with the overly obvious "message", just didn't have much of an impression on me. Deliberately misleading the readers into thinking something else, while employing the formula anyway is not very creative (unless it's something like I am Legend, all the planning usually just gets in the way of actually sending across a message.)

What's creative is coming up with a whole new approach to the story, which is what I think Ishiguro has done here. He's never kept the pretense of "mystery". It's quite clear from the very beginning why the children are 'special', why they're at Hailsham and how they're going to end up. If you haven't already guessed, I won't say what, but I can promise you, you'll guess before you reach even the seventh page. The narrator, Kathy, assumes we know, since we're from such a school ourselves and focuses on her story, instead. Unlike The Handmaid's Tale, the point of Never Let Me Go, the message that the author was trying to get across, seemed rather subtle. The characters in this book, quite maudlin and immature in their ideas, told a lot more than an unlikely hero would have.

The book made me think about what 'doing good' means, about double standards and how people like to believe in the ultimate good, even though we're all just as confused as the next person. Do we try to believe our life makes sense only to gain some semblance of control, as we stand on the edge of an infinite pit of darkness, desperately trying to keep our balance. The book has no fairy tale ending. It just leaves a lingering feeling of helplessness that characterizes the lives of the people in the book, not to mention, our own lives. A loss of control that can only be dealt with by acceptance.

Little, Big by John Crowley

My third read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge is a fairy tale of sorts. Neil Gaiman called Little, Big his favourite book in the world and I do know why.

The book is massive, not in size but in scope and delightfully intricate, the kind of book that slowly makes its way into your thoughts, till it's all you can think of. It took me a little more than a month to reach the last few chapters of the book, and then, just a couple of hours to devour it completely! It's not a book full of action nor drama. It is quiet, almost lazy, but quite strong.

The book starts as Smoky Barnable journeys by foot to Edgewood to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater, whom he was prophesied to marry long before he knew her. What follows is a story spanning a hundred years, of the lives of four generations of Drinkwaters and their relations in a strange country house situated on the border of Fairyland. Daily Alice, her sister Sophie, her parents and aunts and children are all part of a Tale that is still unfolding and yet, is already written in the cards. Most of the family seem to sense the existence of the other land, and many, like Smoky, though unconvinced, go along with it. The odd creatures from the other world rarely make an appearance in the book, but they're always there, watching, manipulating. As the story unfolds, the inevitability of the fate which was written by a mere stack of cards only strengthens.

The book is massive, I said, but it's also small. Little, big, like the title. It's a small glimpse of something that keeps on spiralling into new things, it's a young story from an ancient world. It's Smoky and Alice's boy Auberon writing scripts for a soap opera and at the same time, it's His Majesty Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, being resurrected after an eternity to rule a minuscule land.

The book made me think a lot about people. About me, of course, and about loving someone or losing someone and how both the things are in a pathetic way, quite the same. "Love is a myth", the book tells us, like summer is a myth during a long winter; but it does come and just as surely summer goes away, becoming once again, just a rumour. The book gave me a different perspective on life and a whole new way of looking at destiny: the idea of living without letting the ultimate, total loss of control make you feel helpless. It made me wonder how we automatically assign wickedness to all things unknown, and how wickedness is just a crazy sense of humour. It made me realize how little we are. 

And so, it made me think about the supposed little things, things like the faces in the cracks of your ceiling and the imaginary friends all our parents have caught us talking to, the stories in our head about life, family, goals and jobs and the big secrets that we let rule our thoughts. Little things that make no big difference do make small differences, I guess. The real big things, big enough to be important in this old, wide world are far beyond our reach. And so the little things do matter, because while they may not change the wide world, they're the things that we control and that change us. We're all a part of something small and something unimaginably huge and balancing it out, often in vain, is what life's all about. Right? 

For the first few hundred pages, it felt like I was reading a dream until it occurred to me that I was, in fact, reading a life: the prose, with all its meandering nuances was life, rambling on as it does. The story felt so real, precisely because it was so boundless.

"In the good old days, when polls were as common as house-to-house searches were now, pollsters asked viewers why they liked the bizarre torments of the soap operas, what kept them watching. The commonest answer was that they liked soap operas because soap operas were like life.

Like life. Auberon thought "A World Elsewhere," under his hands, was coming to be like a lot of things: like truth, like dreams; like childhood, his own anyway; like a deck of cards or an old album of pictures. He didn't think it was like life--not anyway like his own. On "A World Elsewhere," when a character’s greatest hopes were dashed, or his task all accomplished, or his children or friends saved by his sacrifice, he was free to die or at least to pass away; or he changed utterly, and reappeared with a new task, new troubles, new children. Except for those whose embodying actors were on vacation or ill, none simply came to a stop, all their important actions over, haunting the edges of the plot with their final scripts (so to speak) still in their hands.

_That_ was like life, though: like Auberon's.

Not like a plot, but like a fable, a story with a point, which had already been made."

Oddly, the book bore an uncanny resemblance to another favourite: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. They are both so richly... magical. It's odd, because when it comes to the content, they're very different. The magic itself is vastly different. But both books carry that air of something initially mysterious and incomprehensible and at the end, honest and strikingly witty. Reading both the stories was like trudging through a long winding road, expecting a concrete destination, maybe a final showdown and realizing at the end just what the road was all about. It was when the pieces fell together, so to say, that I realized that they always were together; the picture was always complete, I just hadn't deciphered it. The experience, though fascinating and intriguing, left me feeling almost silly both times, like when you first notice the faces in Rubin's vase and wonder how you could have missed them. Perhaps the next time I read such a story, I won't be fooled. And so, it would, I imagine, be an altogether different journey to re-read either of these books. I am curious to know whether I'd discover, learn everything then, that I've overlooked  now.

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

"1828 - Brilliant young naval officer Robert FitzRoy is given the captaincy of HMS Beagle, surveying the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, aged just twenty-three. He takes a passenger: a young trainee cleric and amateur geologist named Charles Darwin. This is the story of a deep friendship between two men, and the twin obsessions that tore it apart, leading one to triumph and the other to disaster..."

The author could have ensured success for the book by making all about Darwin and The Origin of Species and it would have, indeed, sold. But as the book is about the expedition to Tierra del Fuego, the one that apparently changed the world, Captain FitzRoy is as much a hero (perhaps more) of the book as Charles Darwin. The expedition that seeded in Darwin's mind the idea of natural selection, of an alternative way of the creation of life, also lead to disastrous consequences for FitzRoy, whose ambitions combined with a manic depression (a disorder that wasn't even discovered back then, and was, hence misinterpreted by him as the voice of God) led to disastrous consequences for his career and life.

The book was beautiful, thrilling and tragic. The prominent underlying theme of the book, the shameful, outrageous and atrocious things that the British invaders did to the countries, which they decided it was their duty to "improve" gives the book its title. "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.": it is a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest, which ironically, the sailors themselves seem to have read (going so far as to call a native Caliban and not realizing that they were Prospero, or likewise, in the wrong.) The fact that FitzRoy thought he could bring three savages to London, teach them and release them into the wild (hoping they would then spread the learnings) was ridiculous at best. But he did it, because he thought he was doing God's work (he did later regret it, but the damage was already done by then.) But his behaviour  was also, and this is quite generous coming from a person who is from one of the supposedly primitive, savager-infested countries, in a way, justified. That, of course, doesn't mean it wasn't wrong, it was just not surprising that the sailors were disgusted by the uncivilized, un-London, cannibalistic customs of the Fuegians and considered they were doing the natives a favour by forcing Christianitiy upon them. It was bound to happen. We judge; whether we should or not. 

And it is this inevitability of historical fiction that makes it most impactful. You can't say, "He shouldn't have said that." What he should have done is immaterial, the fact remains that he did it. What the book shows us is this: A long time ago, a brave, proud, smart young man made a mistake and was too stubborn to accept it - and here's why. FitzRoy, who turns out to be the real tragic hero of the book (and not Darwin) was not stupid to have argued with his friend nor crazy to have believed that he was a sort of messenger of God. He was just... born at the wrong time. The book made me realize how lucky we are to have been born in a world where it isn't outrageous to doubt or question something. We are lucky to experience both alternatives and get a choice: religion, rituals, creation of the world by some God (the story of Noah or Manu, here in India) versus science, evolution, natural selection. It is easy to choose a side. It is a lot more difficult to create a side as Darwin did, to create a whole new perspective thitherto unimaginable and while doing so, shatter an entire belief system. But it has to be the most difficult to accept a new side created by someone who doesn't even know in their entirety the meaning and implications of what he's claiming to be the 'ultimate truths'. Reading the book, I realized that it was no wonder FitzRoy considered Darwin a blasphemous madman. I would have too, and I am not nearly as strong or ahead-of-the-times as FitzRoy appears to have been. I wonder how many pugnacious atheists of today would have pugnacious atheists back in the day when atheism wasn't as accessible an option. The point I am trying to make is this: Darwin was unarguably brilliant, but so was FitzRoy, who was rather unfortunately completely overshadowed by his friend. With his daring command over HMS Beagle at the age of twenty-three (the way he handles the first storm they encounter goes to show a lot about him.), his unparalleled contributions to meteorology and weather forecasting, his attempts at compiling the natives' language and his humble, guilty acceptance of his own failures go against any image that an uninformed or misguided modern reader would build of a man like Captain FitzRoy  that he was some random sailor who was silly enough to oppose a great inventor, scientist like Darwin. If only things were as black and white; had Robert FitzRoy really been silly, he would have lived a much happier life and died, satisfied, at a much later age.

As their debates turned solely religious in nature only after the voyage, it was a pleasure to read the long conversations between the two Englishmen during the journey. The fictional elements, in that the dialogue, the nicknames and the italicized thoughts of all the characters make the book, ironically, more real. The one-dimensionality (let's assume that's a word) that would have been possessed by a history guide or a non-fiction study of the voyage is absent. Instead of looking at people as anonymous props defining an era or a way of thought, the characters are fleshed out - and what great characters they are, from Darwin and FitzRoy, to Midshipman King, Sullivan, and even the supposedly reformed savages, York Minster and Jemmy Button. The book ends up being not about Darwin as we know him, but Philos, the geologist / philosopher, who suffers from severe seasickness, which can be cured only by positioning oneself horizontally, preferably on top of a table and later, the man who took his kids bug-hunting in his own yard. FitzRoy, the Captain, is characterized not just by his strength of mind and bravery, but by his prudish quintessentially English manners that make him mortally embarrassed by the topless, flirtatious native women and by being the first to try and compile a massive dictionary, if very rudimentary, of the natives' language - in fact, by being the one sailor of this bunch who tried to communicate with the savages in their language (one word: Yammerschooner!)

And do I even have to mention the vivid descriptions of the most beautiful landscapes, the flora and fauna and the interesting conclusions both Darwin and FitzRoy drew from them?

It is an amazing book. Thompson has done something very few biographers manage: made details interesting, strangers personal and has managed, certainly, to engage me deeply in a sprawling history of just two lives.