Book Review: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

“Do you like detective movies?” The main character in the audacious and sprawling Sacred Games asks another. “Only Hollywood movies. Our Indian ones are so badly made,” comes the answer. “But sometimes the Indian ones get things right also.”

That goes for novels as well. While there may be no hurrays for Bollywood forthcoming in Vikram Chandra’s newest work of masterfully crafted fiction, and though it may resemble, on the surface and in sense, an outsourced American-style police procedural, there is much more going on. The multi-layered strata of characters and details are only hinted at in the first drop-in-the-bucket chapters of this gritty and grounded epic, reminiscent of voluminous and character-rich nineteenth-century serial literature as much as modern day hardboiled crime capers.

Still, this tale of modern-day gumshoes and gurus is, in some regards, a departure for Chandra from the magical realism of his heralded 1995 debut, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The A Thousand and One Nights-style storytelling—1997’s Love and Longing in Bombay collection of interconnected stories is framed by its own Scheherezade—is pervaded with an impressionistic fusion of Indian myth, Hindu gods, fantasy and the workaday world. But Chandra has cast off any phantasmagoric flights of fancy in Sacred Games, retaining the nuanced intricacies, wide-ranging plotlines and high-definition characters in a cohesive and down-to-earth realization of Sacred Games’ kaleidoscopic and episodic style and structure.

In the book’s intertwining accounts of a seemingly jaded Sikh police inspector and a notorious Hindu gangster, it’s an all-encompassing realization, too, with ambiguities and events centering on a multitude of sins and incidents from cat-and-mouse games to a potentially catastrophic cloak-and-dagger gambit with no clean breaks or exit strategies. After all, as one Intelligence officer says on his deathbed, "The game lasts, the game is eternal, the game cannot be stopped, the game gives birth to itself."

The central game, the core storyline of Sacred Games, is set in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and unfolds with our introduction to detective Sartaj Singh, alternately cynical and romantic, past forty, divorced and world-weary. Moreover, because “Justice had sometimes to be manipulated into being properly blind,” he is resigned but still ambivalent to the system of institutionalized bribery and police brutality.

With such pragmatism—or rationalization—in tow, Sartaj gets an anonymous tip that leads to the hide-out of the notorious underworld gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, a Hindu Bhai who "dallied with bejeweled starlets, bankrolled politicians" and whose "daily skim from Bombay's various criminal dhandas was said to be greater than annual corporate incomes."

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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