In the Spirit of Mayhew

Frank Kermode

• Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry
  Faber, 487 pp, £16.99, April 2002, ISBN 0 571 19427 3

The Indian novel in English goes back a long way, at least to R.K. Narayan, who flourished from the Thirties to the Eighties of the last century. The achievements of Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and others now at work suggest that it still flourishes despite the opposition view that modern Indians should not write in English. India has a great many languages and English can be thought of as just one more of them, but that argument won’t wholly suffice, for the loyalty of these writers is not merely linguistic. Their allegiance is to the English novel of the 19th-century tradition, and their work has little in common with deviant strains, whether of Modernism or Postmodern magic realism, or of such mid-20th-century experimental styles as the nouveau roman. Indeed they testify to the power, or if you prefer, the inertia, of that great central tradition.