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Gurnaik Johal’s first book, 2022’s We Move, demonstrated how rewarding it can be for a gifted young writer to ignore conventional wisdom. Writers who land in agents’ inboxes with collections of stories are invariably told to come back when they have a novel, and to write about what they know. Johal’s stories were set in a world he knows intimately – the immigrant communities of west London – but they moved between professions and generations with thrilling confidence.
Saraswati is also populated by a large cast of diaspora Punjabis. But where Johal’s collection stood apart from the landscape it was published into, his first novel is a representative example of a ubiquitous 21st-century genre. That genre lacks a name – in 2012, Douglas Coupland proposed “translit”, which didn’t catch on then and certainly won’t now – but its features are all too recognisable. These novels contain multiple narratives, each set in a different country if not continent, often in a different century. Although long by modern standards, they are packed – with events, themes, facts. They address themselves to the big questions of the day, not by the traditional means of examining urban society but through a kind of bourgeois exotic. The characters are paleontologists, mixed media artists, every flavour of activist, but never dentists or electricians. The settings are often remote: tropical islands or frigid deserts.
The reader puts these novels together, like jigsaw puzzles. This term won’t catch on either, but one could call them “connection novels”; not in the Forsterian sense of human hearts, but rather the ecological, cultural and financial structures that link the globe. In that sense, they have an ancestor in the post-Vietnam systems novels of DeLillo and Pynchon, except without the playfulness or the genuine paranoia. Connection novels might be the only area of contemporary literary fiction that is dominated by male writers: Richard Powers, Hari Kunzru, David Mitchell. Not coincidentally, they owe a lot to science fiction.
Saraswati’s characters are connected, although they don’t know it at first, by DNA. They are the descendants of a proscribed intercaste marriage in 19th-century Punjab. Sejal and Jugaad have seven children, each of whom they name for a river. A century and a half later, their descendants include a Canadian rock musician, a Kenyan archaeology professor and a Mauritian entomologist who specialises in yellow crazy ant removal. The role of connector is played by an Indian journalist who eventually takes over from Johal’s omniscient third-person. Beginning and ending in a near-future version of India, the narrative takes us to Svalbard, Tibet, rural British Columbia and the Chagos Islands. Brief interludes after each section tell the family origin story through a series of “qisse” – Punjabi folktales, passed on orally.
“Saraswati” was the name of Sejal and Jugaad’s seventh child. It is also the name of a mythical river that, as any Indian will tell you, meets – in a sacred rather than geographical sense – the Ganga and Yamuna at the Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad). Saraswati derives its title, and its plot, from a theory that claims that the Saraswati was a real river that originated at Mount Kailash in Tibet and flowed to the Arabian Sea.
The novel opens with water returning to a dry well on the Hakra farm: once Sejal and Jugaad’s home, now inherited by a young Londoner called Satnam. The water is a sign not of the workings of heaven but of the melting of Himalayan glaciers. But it is soon seized upon as the former – by frauds as well as true believers, and then by India’s newly elected Hindu nationalist government, which embarks upon a nationwide scheme to revive the ancient Saraswati, in part by abrogating the Indus Waters Treaty (a magnificent bit of novelistic prescience; after the book went to press, India did in fact revoke the treaty in response to a terror attack in Kashmir).
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Saraswati has so thoroughly assimilated the features and values of its genre that, to some extent, its appeal to readers will be a function of how much they like connection novels in general. But there is also the more particular business of the suitability of writer and form – of whether Johal is playing to his strengths.
There are sections of Saraswati that take the abilities displayed in We Move and extend them. Johal is a brilliant observer of romance: of uncertain beginnings and awkward endings. His heartbreaking account of a sexless but totally real marriage between two Kenyans, one Punjabi, one Black, is a worthy successor to Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage. Equally surprising and affecting is the story of Mussafir, a teenager in small-town Sindh with a Swiftie-like passion for an Indian singer.
These are not short stories manqué; each could have been its own novel. But the narrative of Saraswati insists on containing them; on moving away from, rather than towards, the writer’s gifts. Johal’s imaginative sympathy is undercut by the homogenising evenness of his prose – every character speaks and thinks in the same register, that of London journalism – and by the heavy-handedness of his attempts at symbolism and satire.
Saraswati’s unstable blend of realism and allegory ultimately breaks down in the face of its central theme: modern Hindu nationalism. Like other connection novels, it is full of thorough research: into stubble burning, rinderpest and fringe archaeological theories. When it comes to Hindutva, however, reality recedes, and the allegory is less Kafka than it is Marvel Comics. Johal’s India is led by a man called “Narayan Indra” (Indra is the Hindu rain god), whose actions and rhetoric are so cartoonish as to drain away all menace and seriousness. His millenarian ravings are a world away from actually existing Hindutva, which might gesture at past golden ages but is always laser-focused on its present-day target: India’s Muslims.
The very best writers have had difficulty following up a debut collection with a novel. One reviewer of Philip Roth’s first novel, Letting Go, suggested that writers “should solve the second book problem the way architects solve the 13th floor problem”, namely by going straight from the first book to the third. The disappointments of Saraswati, if anything, reassure for their indication of a willingness to try but fail. Gurnaik Johal is just getting started.
