What happens when good and evil commingle within a single person? If a character more or less accidentally gets sucked into an evil activity, can the character still be considered good? Three books I've recently read consider this question, with varying degrees of success.
The best and brightest is a first novel by Megha Majumdar titled A Burning, which explores how an evil act can create shock waves that eventually wash over characters quite distant from the center. A terrorist bombing at a train station in Kolkata, India, sends shrapnel into the lives of three characters: Jivan, a young woman struggling to escape from poverty; her friend Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress to whom Jivan has been teaching English; and PT Sir, Jivan's former phys ed teacher. While Jivan strives to become "an ordinary person in the world," Lovely longs to become extraordinary but fears she is "only a smashed insect under your shoes." Meanwhile, PT Sir seeks advancement "in the government office's special elevator" and finds his voice by denying others their own. Despite the horrific and disturbing events at the heart of the novel, the narrative voices paint a world where hope and joy remain possible, even when most improbable.
Improbability is the chief problem with Boy Swallows Universe by the Australian author Trent Dalton. Like Jivan, Eli and his mostly silent brother August are initially mired in an impossible situation involving drugs, poverty, and abysmal parenting, but there's a Dickensian touch to the method by which Eli escapes poverty by befriending a hardened criminal. In a world where charity serves as a mask for evil, Eli wonders whether anyone is truly good--including himself. It's a lively and enjoyable novel requiring some suspension of disbelief, and perhaps most annoying is young Eli's tendency to demonstrate wisdom far beyond his years; in one particularly dangerous moment, for instance, he pauses to reflect:
One face keeps me frozen. The flashlight finds it at the end of the shelf above me. And I know immediately that I am standing inside a moment of trauma. The trauma is in me and the trauma that will happen has already happened. But the face still makes me move. This face I love.Yes: just at the point when the adolescent character needs to stop thinking and start moving, he feels compelled to indulge in profound self-reflection. Good thing Trent Dalton has a deus ex machina at his disposal because poor Eli is going to need it.
Finally, Salman Rushdie's 2017 novel The Golden House needed a different kind of deus ex machina--an editor with the power to tell Rushdie to go back and try again. Like the Rushdie novels I love most, this one tries to tell a mythic tale sprawling over two continents and many characters, but in this case too many of the characters are cardboard cutouts and the structure simply doesn't work--although it might work as a film treatment, which it often mimics. The novel's greatest success is in reproducing a believable picture of life in Manhattan during the Obama era, and its occasional moments of wit enliven a plot that alternately plods and sprints toward a predictable point. The narrator is an aspiring film-maker obsessed with a neighboring family led Nero Golden, the patriarch who has jettisoned his past in Mumbai to reinvent himself in America but finds that evil has long arms and a vast memory. At one point the narrator's girlfriend tells him that "everyone in my story was an aspect of my own nature," which may explain why so many of the characters resemble cartoons.
In the end Rushdie's novel asks whether an observer can pursue an obsession with evil without getting his own hands dirty, a question Trent Dalton and Megha Majumdar explore in their own ways. It's not exactly light summer reading, but at a time when we're all considering our complicity with social evils while obsessively keeping our distance from anything that might pollute, these novels raise a question worth consideration.
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