I did like Generation 14, despite being somewhat bored with it. Do read this Tehelka review. It’s a nice review, that I pretty much agree with.
A few stray thoughts…
The book follows a Clone who is “mutating”, recollecting memories. Future, sci-fi, 1984-esque community. I found much of it pleasant to read, but never compelling enough to hold my interest for long. There’s nothing especially new here in terms of what it warns us against. However, what is new is the deliberate and seamless injection of India into this “Global community”. For example, when the main character (a Clone) wishes to not eat food anymore, the computer suggests an austere meal of rice, lentils and snake gourd modeled after ones eaten by “Hindu widows in the 20th century”. I have never read a sci-fi novel that places India within its landscape quite so thoroughly, without being exotifying and dull.
The novel takes a sudden sharp structural change about halfway through—it becomes essentially a series of short stories (it returns to the original story eventually). Unlike the reviewer above, I thought the stories were an enjoyable distraction from a larger novel that I wasn’t entirely engaged with to begin with. The short stories or “visitations” are first-person narratives from various characters from ancient India. One of my favorites was the fascinating account of a love-obsessed parrot in a nawabi Lucknow household. It has a couple of scenes that especially stand out—one when the parrot is forced to watch her mistress making love to her husband. And another where the mistress reacts angrily to finding out that the parrot is really a female alongside the parrot’s view of its gender. Totally great. I found it intriguing and powerful in its own right and the only time I was really caught up in the novel.
I have a theory that as I spend more time hanging around Earth, I find reading less and less compelling. I have reached a point where I have read that message, that theme or that character before and it no longer delivers that same thrill it used to. This is a dismaying thought. Not to mention cynical and arrogant. Sigh. It’s not true, actually. Maybe. Well, no. It’s not true. Definitely not.
