He starts his day by walking a few flights downstairs from his wives and children to his opium pipe, and although he survives mob violence and street wars, he is eventually broken by the futility of finding meaning in addicts and addictions. While bracketed by an apparently autobiographical first person narrator, most of the novel follows a small universe of characters whose center of gravity is an opium den run by Rashid, a harried businessman gradually falling prey to his own wares, including heroin.
And Bombay turns out to be a much more overwhelming setting than Lowry’s Quauhnahuac, Mexico, for better and for worse. While I did find a novel driven by the same delusions of addiction, Thayil’s work is more pulpy than poetic, more Murakami in its everyday myth-making. Like a monk seeking the next in the line of a particular lama, I placed the various relics of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano before first time novelist Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, hoping it would come down with the same beautiful, tragic fever. It’s dangerous to look for the reincarnation of a classic novel in contemporary literature.
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