Book Review: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra - Page 2

In a rather bizarre scene, Sartaj confronts Gaitonde as the mob boss sits inside an odd shell-like bunker, presumably impenetrable - that is until Sartaj, tired of chewing the philosophic fat and the back-and-forth taunting, calls for a huge bulldozer that doesn’t have a lot of problem gaining access. Gaitonde barely has time to commit suicide, after also killing a mysterious woman who was also, unknowingly to Sartaj, inside the bunker.

The mystery of the woman's identity has possible links to and sets in motion a long and at times meandering series of events with twists and turns that have their own twists and turns, and that ebb and flow along with disparate and sometimes relevant subplots.  Meanwhile, Sartaj also juggles more mundane but personally profitable domestic disputes, blackmail, thievery, and other lesser crimes and misdemeanors.

But the actions of Gaitonde, detailed in interposed chapters, can’t remain too long on the back-burner - and the retelling of his power-grabbing ambitions and more benign and humanizing endeavors does more than fill in the narrative gaps. Gaitonde's rise within organized crime — his arms dealing, infiltration of Bollywood and relationship with a movie star, his confrontations with his Muslim rival and associaton with a crafty guru bent on an apocalyptic calling — all serve a larger purpose.

In addition to his bunker-mate’s feasible connection to “rabid extremists promising annihilation,” such undertakings also leave a trail that points to Gaitonde’s knowing, or unwitting, involvement with terrorist activity and big-scale bombing plans.

As Sartaj is pulled further into Indian Intelligence investigations of a portending disaster “that didn‘t announce itself and act in predictable ways,” so is the reader. Not only to the sequence of events and low-boil suspense — Sacred Games is too expansive to be an all-nighter page-turning potboiler — but also to the emotional and psychological toll taken on Sartaj as life, love, and career increasingly converge with a dead don’s plans that too slowly emerge at a rate outpaced by the race-against-time dread and apprehension.

“In this Gaitonde affair,” Chandra writes, “there would be no justice, no redemption. There was only a hope for some partial explanation of what had happened, and this creeping fear. Sartaj was afraid now, he truly was.”

And really, the attempts at solution and accounts of free-floating trepidation barely scratches the surface of a full-bodied and multifaceted story. With 900-pages (in need of some discerning editing), Sacred Games is a story with a lot of breathing room for the capaciousness of well-considered and deliberated delineations and subtleties, replete with uncertainty and doubt, happenstance and hope. Such breadth and depth allows Chandra to link the novel to a wide array of societal issues and philosophic observations, including the inextricable relationships to caste and religion, poverty, and the entrenched criminal element.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a 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.
…

Visit Gordon Hauptfleisch's author page — Gordon Hauptfleisch's Blog