Book Review | Whimsical mindbenders that disturb and delight

When I started reading Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World by Gigi Ganguly, I knew I couldn’t be objective in my review. A collection of short stories in the realm of speculative fiction, the book hits two major pain points in my reading life. One: It’s short stories and I much prefer the heft of a novel. And two: It’s speculative fiction, a category I avoid because I prefer character building to world building and it’s rare to find the former in books that make an emphatic theme of the latter.

Yet I accepted the book to review not only because the books page editor of The Asian Age never accepts no for an answer, but also because I am incurably optimistic when it comes to books. Unless I have read at least three books by any author, I can’t write her or him off my read list and in this case, Ganguly is a first-time author. Since I had her book in my hands, I owed both her and my reading habit a chance to be impressed.

At first though, both of my prejudices relevant to the book were confirmed again and again. Each story felt wispy and insubstantial and left me mostly indifferent or annoyed. It wasn’t until I read the story titled ‘Corvid Inspector’ that I realised that my indifference and annoyance to the collection had had nothing to do with the stories themselves. These negative emotions had stemmed from the fact that it’s been a long, long time since I’ve used my imagination in any substantial way. No wonder the stories I’d previously read in the book had been meaningless to me.

In ‘Corvid Inspector’, the story that inspired this revelation, Bram, a raven, is a police inspector tasked with investigating the murder of a crow. The dead crow had been an assassin for hire, contracted by Mayur, the peacock mayor of the non-human world, to ensure that elections always ran smoothly in a certain direction. Bram isn’t functioning well — he’s been driven to the avian equivalent of alcoholism, having lost his partner and their eggs to a bunch of marauding owls. As the whodunit unfolds, every creature in the vicinity is revealed to have something to do with either Bram or the murdered crow.

I read ‘Corvid Inspector’ with the same breathless need for the denouement as I do with any cri-fi novel that’s caught my attention. Then I reread all the stories I had previously dismissed as meaningless. Each one of them spoke to me in one way or another. In the manner of all short story collections, not all of them are great or revelatory. Some, in fact, inspired the same indifference on the second read as on the first. But many had me revelling in the author’s imagination and the freeing of my own. That’s enough for me to look forward to Gigi Ganguly’s next book. And also to restore my faith in the books page editor of The Asian Age.

 

Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World

By Gigi Ganguly

Westland

pp. 186; Rs 399