Airport fictions

Published on 19/02/2005 00:08

TOKYO CANCELLED

BY RANA DASGUPTA

Fourth Estate, 15.99

THIRTEEN ANONYMOUS individuals, stranded in an anonymous airport, pass the night by recounting 13 highly idiosyncratic stories. Dasgupta’s intriguing debut novel draws on a tradition older than the novel itself. It is a compendium of tales reminiscent in structure to Boccaccio’s Decameron or the Tales of 1001 Nights.

Although one might suspect that this is a canny trick to circumvent the notorious disinclination of publishers to accept or promote short story collections, the different tales are bound together through a complex weave of interconnected themes and concerns. This is not a short story collection pretending to be a novel, but a novel about the nature of stories themselves.

For the most part, the tales are quirky fables; although, unlike Aesop’s variety, the moral is shrouded and ambiguous. In one, Robert De Niro’s love child’s girlfriend finds a magic biscuit box, and transforms into a department store. Another features a Japanese businessman who creates an increasingly demanding female android. There are characters who edit memories and sell dreams, immortals who pine for mortality and cloned Indian heiresses who can engender life in inanimate objects. These are fairy tales in which the CEO replaces the king, celebrities stand in for deities and technology is an approximate magic. In the global village - the book recklessly and charmingly bounces from continent to continent like a satellite’s transmission - there is still room for the campfire. It is a sly irony that only the American contribution is mired in self-obsessed domestic misfortune.

These are all stories about the body; about how, despite the fact that we think of ourselves as prisoners in our own skin, tendrils and eddies inevitably impact into other lives. As one narrator says: "Love is always strange ... Always looks the same from the outside, always speaks in the same clichs. But behind everything, underneath it all, it is never as it seems." Dasgupta’s characters may be archetypal, but their experiences of joy, loss, betrayal and hope are rooted in the real. Their shapes may metamorphose, but their humanity is intact. They tell themselves who they are.

This is a very bold, very striking book. In an age when so many first fictions are thinly veiled autobiography, and every other creative writing tutor is peddling the "Write what you know" mantra, it is exceptionally refreshing to read a writer who is daring to imagine, rather than transcribe. Tokyo Cancelled is an unforgettable book, with its own peculiar charms. I shall be fascinated to see what happens next.