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From England and India

Isobel Shirlaw
In Whatever Makes You Happy
(London: Bloomsury;
2008) William Sutcliffe
explores the inter-relationships between three middle-aged women and their three sons, all in their thirties. An anxiety of growing apart from their sons combined with a loss of direction after occupying such a pivotal role in the young men's lives prompts them to embark on a collective experiment that terrifies them all.
The premise is simple: Three women, terrified of growing apart from their sons and indignant at being left out in the cold after sacrificing the best part of thirty years to their families’ happiness, they decide to spring a surprise visit on their sons, and refuse to leave until they have spent a week in each others' company and have managed to help them move forward.
Matt's mother is horrified when she discovers the smutty content of the magazine Balls! for which her son has decided to devote his journalistic career and, combined with a terror that he is pursuing the wrong type of women, covertly accompanies him to Leicester Square aftershave launch parties, realising that it is now her duty as a mother to reinstate some of the values that she sought to instill in him in childhood. Upon learning that her son, Paul, is gay and is now living in what
appears, at first glance, to be a gay commune, Helen begins to rebuild their relationship and come to terms with the obstacles in her own past. And Gillian embarks on a journey from London to Edinburgh to rescue her son Daniel from himself after a painful and isolating breakup from his girlfriend.
Sutcliffe's comic portrayal of the three inter-woven stories is surprisingly touching without resorting to sentimentality. He manages to capture the enormity of the maternal instinct. And the poignant boredom with which children respond to that boundless love.
"They had watched one another’s babies grow through childhood into adolescence and adulthood, while slowly seeing each other getting old. They had cajoled, advised and comforted one another through the cement mixer of parenthood. Proximity and shared experience, year by year, had knitted their lives together."
• • •
In his new novel The Bioscope Man (Delhi: Penguinlndia: 2008) Indrajit Hazra charts the talc of Abani Chatterjee, whose birth in the early twentieth century, coincides with the birth of the bioscope, the forerunner of cinema.
Starting out as a lowly projectioner's assistant in Calcutta's Alochaya bioscope company, Abani becomes intoxicated by the extraordinary potential for bioscope “for spectacle, for seduction, for honest nuanced trickery."Before long, almost by accident, he finds himself propelled into the lead role of
his first silent movie, and in time grows into India's first silent movie star.
Throughout the novel, India is changing; the capital is gradually being relocated from Calcutta to Delhi, and nationalism is on the rise, and yet the real action takes a backseat, allowing the fantastic illusions on screen to dominate. In some ways, the bioscope is an escape from the humdrum reality of everyday life, and in others, Abani can cope with the world inside the frame of the bioscope in a way that he cannot when confronted by reality: ' the figures inhabiting this flickering heavy black and white world were not of this world But this was a place that the world should have been, rather than the apologetic version we inhabited."
Looking back on his life decades later from a rather more obscure vantage point, it is his life inside all his different roles that he recalls reinhabits while narrating his story, all the time interspersed with fragments from the cutting floor. Thoughtfully wrought throughout. The Bioscope Man has moments of real beauty but it is Hazra's enthusiasm for the "intelligent mischief" of the bioscope that is truly infectious. He stylishly recreates the exotic noisiness of the old silent movie halls and reminds us that the experience was "anything but silent." His evocation of the whirring reels and the chatter of the audience above the orchestra, all witnessed through a child's excited eyes through the fog of cigarette smoke is exhilarating.
Isobel Shirlaw Is a freelance writer in Dhaka