Book Review: ‘The Light at the End of the World,’ by Siddhartha Deb

Sep 01, 2023

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"The Light at the End of the World," by Siddhartha Deb, follows truth seekers in a world of conspiracy, intrigue and violence.

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By Abraham Verghese

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THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD, by Siddhartha Deb

Siddhartha Deb's extraordinary new novel, "The Light at the End of the World," reads like four sequential novellas, each taking place in different locales in India and in different time periods, the connections between the parts not entirely clear till the concluding section.

In the first section, "City of Brume," we meet Bibi, a disillusioned former journalist working in Delhi for a company called Amidala, which produces reports "blitzed to media organizers and influential individuals." The titles "have a distinct pattern, a primary color usually paired with an abstract word: ‘Green Justice,’ ‘Blue Economy,’ ‘Red Planet.’" Her work, and Delhi itself, feel oppressive.

One Saturday, a man breaks into the headquarters of Vimana Energy Enterprises, one of Amidala's clients. He escapes from an upper-story window; witnesses see a "monkey man" leaping from ledge to ledge before disappearing. He leaves behind a USB stick on which are found some of Bibi's old articles on detention centers and pesticide factories as well as a "treasure trove of conspiracies" from a variety of sources.

Bibi's employers appear threatened by her past exposés and those of her former colleague Sanjit, whose pieces are also on the USB drive and pose potential headaches for Amidala and its clients. Sanjit's damning stories compelled him to go underground; Bibi is tasked with finding him, a journey complicated by mysterious text messages, events and encounters that she can't explain.

"Claustropolis: 1984," the second part, is narrated by a hit man in Bhopal. His target is a factory operator who is threatening to expose safety violations at an American-run chemical plant. (A real-life disaster, the world's worst industrial accident at the time, took place in 1984 at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal and killed thousands.)

The hit man's boss views the factory workers as "part of a Communist plot meant to discredit industry, creating a fiction intended to blacken the reputation of an American multinational company and the glory of the motherland," an assessment the assassin begins to doubt. Like Bibi, he experiences strange physical phenomena and hears peculiar tales; he worries the factory's chemicals are affecting him.

The novel's third section, "Paranoir: 1947" follows Das, a veterinary student in Calcutta, in the year of Indian independence, just as the city explodes with violence. Das believes he has been handpicked by a secret committee to pilot an ancient Vedic aircraft (while the reader wonders if he has lost his mind). Ultimately, Das finds his ship — or believes he does.

In the last section, "The Line of Faith: 1859," a British regiment chases a mutineer into the Himalayas in the year of the Sepoy Mutiny, a violent rebellion that threatened colonial rule. They encounter a white man who calls himself the White Mughal and lives in a "White Castle," a dilapidated mansion by a scummy lake. Within its walls is a museum where the White Mughal has amassed magical objects. During the regiment's stay, more perplexing phenomena threaten their sanity and their lives.

The four sections of the novel, though disparate, bleed into one another in the reader's mind, aided by the recycling of names like Bibi in more than one section and by recurring tropes like the "monkey man." In the book's epilogue, which has the same title as the novel, the Bibi we met in Part 1, who is on the trail of Sanjit, winds up in the Andaman Islands. (The Andaman Islands became a penal colony after the Sepoy Mutiny, and then housed Indian political prisoners until World War II.)

Bibi, like the reader, struggles to unravel the clues. She realizes that "the truth is sometimes everywhere. … It is in the stories you choose to read, the places you are drawn to." She wonders if cybernetics — the complex, self-regulating systems of communication in both machines and living things — could explain the cryptic text messages, the suggestive shapes in clouds and the many strange happenings. "A.I.s and otherworldly creatures know" that planetary destruction is afoot, and their "self-aware systems are aghast at the demonstration of superweapons, at the extraction of fossil fuels, at the ceaseless generation of profit and power while the oceans rise and Anwar the fish seller hangs himself."

When I put down the book, I felt I was waking after a vivid, portentous dream, but one whose edges were now rapidly crumbling. That feeling should have been dissatisfying but wasn't; instead, I was in awe of Deb's imagination and razor-sharp prose. The hallucinatory quality of his narrative reminded me of William Burroughs's "Naked Lunch," while its apocalyptic trajectory had echoes of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian."

But this novel defies easy categorization. The author dedicates the book to the man I’m guessing is his editor, "who asked me what I was smoking when I wrote this," and also to "ghuspetiyas everywhere." The term ghuspetiyas — which translates to "infiltrators" — has been used by certain Hindu nationalist politicians to refer to Muslims in states like Assam, threatening them with deportation. Tearing down the current brand of Indian jingoism is a leitmotif in "The Light at the End of the World," as in Bibi's description of Delhi fog:

A paintbrush, erasing the marks of an old, much-used canvas, erasing the streets, the cars … the malice of the glossy-haired anchor, the banal evil of the masklike prime minister, erasing the ruins from the 20th century, the ruins from the 16th century, the ruins from the 11th century and the ruins from the third century B.C.E., erasing a countryside already erased and erasing a nation that has failed by every measure.

In researching his acclaimed 2011 nonfiction book "The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India," Deb crisscrossed the subcontinent. On every page of his new novel, one senses the authority of a writer who has pounded urban concrete and rural cow paths, witnessed shocking political machinations, touched the seedy underbelly of industry‌ and experienced the extremes of the teeming, unruly nation that is India.

That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author's way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that. Deb seems to set his sights on other issues, too: When artificial intelligence can make our speech, text, appearance and existence better than it really is, then who are we? Meanwhile, the planet we have poisoned turns on us. Whatever the author's intent, I felt privileged to have been on an odyssey quite unlike any other.

Abraham Verghese is a professor and vice chair of the department of medicine at Stanford University. His most recent novel is "The Covenant of Water."

THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD | By Siddhartha Deb | 446 pp. | Soho Press | $27

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