ADAB ARCHIVES

Leaving college, the narcissistic Kavi falls in with a group of young literary radicals, featuring the glamorous and sexually 'liberated' playwright Sharmila Sharma, Binoy with his unusual cigarettes, the lesbian Urvashi, and the group's mentor Seth, the 'Asian Shakespeare.' The latter is in fact a bullying womaniser in whose long shadow Kavi Naidu is to travel to London, as a Commonwealth Poetry Prize hopeful.

Leaving behind his government job in the Education Ministry and a marital mismatch with the religiously devout Kamala, Kavi finds himself an unwilling sexual partner to the nymphomaniac wife of the High Commissioner.

Thus begins the poet's awakening to the realities of English life. Alcohol and sex disorient him, and a disastrous weekend at the crumbling country seat of the dysfunctional Lord and Lady Weinberg sees his own ideal of the English gentry collapse. Further excursions into the urban wastes of London and Manchester complete Kavi's disillusionment. All is set against a background of Seth's relentless one-upmanship and punctuated by a parade of grotesque characters.

In Something Black in the Lentil Soup (BlackAmber Books, 2003), debutante novelist Reshma S. Ruia has clearly drawn on her own experiences as a writer born in India and settled in England. More than that, she has brought a vivid imagination to bear on her characters in this wicked satire on the social mores and literary lives of both countries.

Kavi Naidu is wholly believable as the deadpan first person narrator. We have all met this earnest young man with his rose-tinted love of Shakespeare and the BBC World Service. Fragments of Kavi's third rate poetry scattered through the novel add a touch of authenticity to Reshma's spoof autobiography. You sense that she feels some affection for her foolish hero, even as she drags him into increasingly humiliating social scrapes. The novelist's real achievement here is in creating and sustaining this character who somehow toils indefatigably on, in the belief that his work is actually any good. There are few real belly laughs. Kavi Naidu is the joke.

The usual suspects are assembled as the targets for Reshma's satire. She has taken the easy option in depicting England as a land of free love and uninhibited alcohol consumption. No doubt needing to contrast the two countries for comic effect, Reshma's stereotyping is unhelpful and wildy inaccurate. To romanticise India, which in fact has got its own share of prostitution, AIDS and alcoholism, by over-emphasising the dissolution of a foreign country is to perform a disservice to both. Lecture over.

Reshma's sympathy for her male characters is refreshingly unselfish. We have become used to the feminist perspective, where the author enjoys a literal embodiment. Reshma's men may bluster, but they are ultimately passive playthings to the women in their lives. This exposes another weakness in this novel, inasmuch as Reshma's women are often her targets, using sexual attraction to manipulate and advance their own interests. The character of Naina Mistry, wife of the High Commissioner, is the ultimate example of the type.

A final and lesser criticism is merited for the factual inaccuracies in this book. India's Bajaj scooters and Premier Padmini cars revert to their Italian identities here, while in England the errors are geographical. Westminster Abbey becomes a Cathedral, Liverpool Street is 'Liverpool Station' and the former Saxon kingdom of Northumbria is a 'principality'.

But this is a light-hearted and absorbing novel. At its best, Something Black combines the dry social observation of Anita Desai with the hilarious anarchy of Tom Sharpe. This is a very promising debut.