When I read Vikas Swarup’s Q & A a year or so ago, I was intrigued and disappointed equally. I felt the author had focused all his energies on the tight and intricate plot, moving rapidly through it with no slip-ups, but this resulted in a grand plot outline rather than a novel. The prose is functional, characters inked in strongly but with little nuance, and when it all comes together with a click at the end, it is sort of morbidly satisfying, but one feels cheated nevertheless. All the more so because the story lingers stubbornly in memory.

I was interested enough keep track of Swarup, and found an interview in which he said that after writing four chapters he had to wind it up in a month since he was getting posted back to India and knew he would not have time for it back home.

“It was August 2003, and I had one more month in London. The plot was in my mind, so I took up the challenge and wrote down the remaining chapters in one month. Over one weekend I wrote 20,000 words.”

Well, that certainly explained the strange slightness and lack of density – the author’s hurry to reach the finish line shows drastically.

After seeing Slumdog Millionaire though, Q & A in retrospect appears serpentine in its complexity, so completely has Danny Boyle  extracted the simplest and most predictable story line out of it. Continue reading Reading Swarup, Watching Boyle →