Fiction: A man, possibly still young, yet old enough to have turned to habit for comfort, finally makes a slow discovery about the past that has shaped him. Eric finds himself in Mexico, the birthplace of his father, who had been reared in England, but not because he has decided to seek answers.
Eric's arrival in Mexico has come about through his girlfriend's research work. So dependent has Eric become on a relationship rooted in ease rather than passion that when the detached Em announces she has a journey to make, it is easier for Eric to go part of the way with her than stay behind confronting his various apathies.
Part of any virtuoso's gift is making their art seem effortless and Anita Desai makes storytelling appear as natural as breathing. She is the author of Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) and Fasting, Feasting (1999). Entire lives are vividly described in a handful of sentences. Eric's story is not his; he is a passive individual, a follower. Events that happened to his grandparents and his own father shape his history. Never having fitted in with his family, a fishing clan in Maine into which Paul, Eric's English father, slowly settled, Eric is a self-acknowledged misfit for whom the world of books provided sanctuary. He drifted until Em's self-sufficiency appeared, extending enough comfort for both of them to live a routine existence that asks little of either.
Desai, a listener, a watcher, possesses a magician's touch, albeit one of subtle balance, not flamboyance. Her prose is elegant, efficient, well-observed and precise. Her tone is candid, direct and invariably softened by her innate sense of kindly curiosity. Although she stands back from her characters and allows them space to develop, she is sympathetic to them and understands exactly how difficult the business of living is. As she wrote in the dedication to Fasting, Feasting, "To Those Whose Stories I've Told". It takes her only a couple of sentences to outline the chill emptiness of Eric's comfortable life. Here is a man with a scholar's mind who wants to write yet is barely capable of thinking.
A number of reasons have brought him to a village in which there is only one inn:
Since the inn was directly across the square from where the bus had stopped, he could not have missed it even in the dusk. The wind that had scrapped and scoured the hills around till the stones gleamed white now struck the tin signboard against the wall of the inn with the sound of a bell striking the hours, drawing his attention to it.
From the outset an element of quest is evident. The skill in the writing lies in the way the quest almost creeps up on Eric.
The quiet strength of this thoughtful, unobtrusive narrative of mosaic episodes emerges from the physical sense of Mexico Desai creates. It is an ancient landscape at peace with a vicious past. Into the colour and chaos of everyday life enter a handful of strangers, some, like Eric, hoping to find the past, others like the bizarre Dona Vera, more inclined to conceal her previous self behind a more exciting construct.
The themes of nationality and identity intrigue Desai. The daughter of a Bengali father and a German mother, she was educated in Delhi and brings the same fascinating cross-cultural awareness to her work as does the Polish-German Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Both Desai and Jhabvala draw on a European-Indian artistry that makes their fictions special, textured and true. In The Zigzag Way, Eric, by following the footsteps of his father and grandfather, finds, by instinct, his way to the truth.
There are wonderful moments of slow enlightenment. In keeping with her practical and not very engaging personality, Em the bewildered girlfriend asks of Eric: "Well, if it's true that your grandfather was a miner in Mexico once, surely you couldn't have forgotten that, could you?" It seems strange and yet it doesn't. Remembering and forgetting are random, not scientific, processes. Eric's journey leads him to a Mexican village where he begins to find himself, but it also leads him to others.
It is at this point that Desai, the most disciplined of writers, decides to do the unexpected. Having retreated into the past, where she pieces together the respective histories of Eric's grandfather and grandmother (the latter a young girl whose romantic nature is ill-served by life), and in turn of his father, she also looks to the real story of Dona Vera. This is where chance yields to deliberate reinvention, and the creation of a bogus myth. The Vera who has become the terrifying old woman who patrols her kingdom on horseback began life rather differently in wartime Vienna:
In all her European years, she had never had solitude or space. No one in Roderigo's [the wealthy man she marries] family circle could know how she lived - the small, cramped apartment at the top of a building of stained and peeling stucco, its dripping walls, torn linoleum and its battered stove and pots, smells of lavatories down the hall and cabbage cooking in the kitchen, and the fear of losing even that.
Far from being a guru, Vera was a small-time showgirl whose luck was made by "catching the eye of one of the men newly arrived in their city". In contrast to the horrors of Vienna under the Nazis came Roderigo, "large, foolish and fumbling, but all fresh linen, gleaming leather and the smell of bay rum".
Parallel lives, with their respective sets of secrets and lies, combine to shape the narrative. In Vera, Desai has a protagonist of arch determination, a woman who wanted something different from what birth had given her. On being given something else, she reacts greedily, taking it all and more. So much so that she establishes her own world in " a graveyard of history", one of the fallen mansions owned by her husband's family. Eric, by contrast, is passive as was his father, and merely collides with history. The magic of the Mexican setting and the night of lost souls is not lost on Desai, who enlists some ghosts to fill in the story with a flourish worthy of Alice Hoffman.
This is a brief atmospheric, complex book with the presence of a far longer novel. It shows what fiction is capable of. Desai is one of the finest writers at work today, a craftsman with a feel for the right word. Fiction has become a lottery fuelled by hype and instant reputations. Small wonder that the best novels most of us read were written at least 100 years ago. There are exceptions. It is no coincidence that Desai and Jhabvala, both shaped by Chekhov and each deferring to William Trevor, have published two of the year's best novels. The three times Booker-shortlisted Desai, on this showing, could well, should she be shortlisted, make it fourth time lucky.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Zigzag Way By Anita Desai Chatto, 180pp. £12.99
