Nirmala realized that her rhythm was off slightly and the students were uncertainly going through the steps. She wiped her eyes and nodded approvingly at the girl who was to play King Rama. She performed the hero's walk to perfection – graceful, dignified, measured. But the one who played Ravana, the demon king, was awkward and restrained. “Stamp harder,” she urged. “Remember you are also a great king, full of valour. But you are vain, and that is what sets you apart from the hero. Thrust out your chest, child. Twirl your moustache. Flex your muscles.”The Hero's Walk has a fairly straightforward plotline – and since that plotline is spelled out on the back of the book, I don't think of this as a spoiler, per se, but consider this a warning – to wit: just as Sripathi Rao is approaching retirement age, and buckling under the pressures of providing for his mother, wife, sister, and son in the mouldering Big House that serves as the ancestral family home on the Bay of Bengal, he receives word that his estranged daughter and son-in-law in Vancouver have died in a car accident, making him the guardian of their seven-year-old daughter, whom he has never met. Bringing Nandana to India is a shocking experience for both of them, and while it doesn't go well at first, when Sripathi (and all the other major characters) learn to assert themselves against the strictures and prejudices of their culture – when each of them begin to stamp their feet and flex their muscles, becoming more Ravana than Rama – they find more satisfying paths to follow through life. For me, this was just an okay read – there were neither surprises or deep meaning – but my biggest complaint would be that this is a 10lb book in a 5lb bag; bloated and boring to bursting.
I have read many books set in India, and while I usually enjoy learning new details about such a different culture, with The Hero's Walk, author Anita Rau Badami layers facts onto her plot without subtlety or finesse. The following is a typical passage:
Later that evening, after the dance students had dispersed, the family went to the temple. Nandana looked unfamiliar in a long, green cotton skirt and matching blouse instead of her usual jeans. Nirmala carried the fruit offerings in a silver platter – fresh bananas, a single apple (as apples were far too expensive now), a small bunch of grapes coated white with some pesticide that wouldn't wash off, a coconut with its fibre still intact (it was inauspicious to get rid of that tuft before the coconut was offered to God). A couple of garbatti sticks and a string of flowers to complete the picture. When Sripathi's father was alive, the offering was much grander and included out-of-season mangoes, pomegranates, even a silver coin or two.Maybe that kind of infodump works for another reader, but it doesn't for me (and especially the parenthetical asides: these intrusions are jarring to me; an intrusive message directly from an author who can't find an organic way to share what she wants the reader to know). There were also many passages like the following, where the reader is taken out of the storyline in order to learn something unrelated to the action:
A horn blasted insistently behind him. Sripathi looked into his mirror and saw a bus hot on his heels. It had a complicated license number on its head – a series of letters followed by an illegible route number. The letters were the initials of the current chief minister of the state; an astrologer had said they were so powerfully good that they would ward off all accidents, but since the chief minister had several initials to her name, there was barely room for anything else. As a result, the number was sometimes omitted altogether or else painted on the side. The fact that nobody ever knew where they were going when they got into a bus became a regular excuse for lateness at offices around the town.I did find that vignette interesting, but it goes on for another page before we cut back to Sripathi on his scooter, and that was annoying to me.
Empathy was created with Sripathi's burdensome role as sole provider and keeper of the caste ways, and his wife Nirmala was well drawn. I liked when the point-of-view would switch to young Nandana and the tone became appropriately juvenile. The sister, Putti, was less developed; the mother, Ammayya, is a ridiculous cartoon (as was Sripathi's dead father in flashback); the son, Arun, is pretty pointless; and the book is bulked out with a long cast of characters that add nothing to the story but length. I was completely unsurprised by anything that happened – even Ammayya's final curse was predictable – and that made the whole experience unsatisfactory. On the other hand, Badami has won acclaim and prizes for this book, so other readers must be finding value in it. Just not this reader.
Gah -- what's with this year's Canada Reads finalists? This leaves only The Illegal (the eventual winner of the "contest") for me to read, but since I was one of the few people, anywhere, to have disliked the writing in The Book of Negroes, I don't know if I want to spend more time on Lawrence Hill. Even without having read that last title, however, I still wish Birdie had won.
