The sixth and the penultimate book, Cometh The Hour, in the Clifton Chronicles by one of India’s favourite English authors, Jeffrey Archer, is here. And as promised during an earlier book tour, eight of the chapters in the book are set in India.
The 75-year-old author, who has captured the imaginations of his readers with his simplistic yet gripping writing style, claims to have a special relationship with this country. But he has gone to great lengths on several occasions to state that he will never write an entire novel set in India.
However, while on tour in March 2015 to promote his book Mightier Than The Sword, the fifth in the Clifton Chronicles, a series which follows the life of Irish poet Harry Clifton, Archer had let slip that the next book would have a section which would take the protagonist to an Indian city.
So, in the new book Sebastian Clifton (Harry’s son) falls in love with a beautiful Indian woman, Priya Ghuman, and makes his way to India in search of his lady love when she is brutally taken away from him.
In a sequence that could well have been lifted straight from a Rohit Shetty-directed film (Chennai Express, maybe?), Priya is dragged out of her apartment in London, thrown in the back of a car and forced to leave the country. It’s 1970 and the Hindu girl cannot be allowed to marry a white Christian boy. So she must return and fulfill her daughterly duties by marrying within her religion and caste.
Archer has said he doesn’t consider himself knowledgeable enough about India’s complex culture, religion and people to write a book. It shows.
In the past he hasn’t been able to resist slipping in a few Indian characters here and there. His short story And Thereby Hangs A Tale is set in Mumbai, and it too has shades of Bollywood. There, the boy, a Rajput, goes against his royal family’s wishes to be with the woman his parents clearly do not approve of.
Not forcing Archer to stray out of his comfort zone, in Cometh The Hour his protagonist lands in Mumbai, a city that Archer has said he is most familiar with. The usual tropes greet us – stray cows dominating the middle lanes of roads, seemingly unending traffic jams, street children selling knick-knacks, the heat, and slums.
But Jeffrey Archer’s India in Cometh The Hour seems to be a reflection of India and Mumbai as we know it now. You have to wonder what the state of roads and traffic jams were in the Mumbai of 1970s. Unending traffic jams don’t quite fit into the picture.
His well-known frustration over piracy practices in India too finds mention in the book. In Cometh The Hour, a little boy approaches Sebastian’s taxi and offers him a book written by Sebastian’s father for half the price. After having made the sale, the boy tells him “We all love William Warwick”, referring to a character created by Harry Clifton.
This inspiration for this scene was clearly taken from Archer's own experience of someone trying to sell him a pirated copy of "the latest Jeffrey Archer book" at a reduced price. But not only is it unlikely that pirated copies of books were being sold on the streets in the 1970s, the idea that that child would know of the characters in the English novel he is selling is even harder to digest.
The plot around how he manages to locate, and tries to run away with, Priya is Bollywoodesque in the worst possible way.
The India that emerges from Archer's writing is a bit of a yawn, with him depending too much on the tried clichés that many people in the world have actually moved on from. Still, the book is in no way a disappointing read.
It has all the Jeffrey Archer staples – speed, intrigue and a story full of twists. Readers who are emotionally invested in Sebastian will find themselves totally involved in the outcome of the mad chase through the streets of Mumbai as he tries to escape the clutches of the evil Mr Ghuman and take Priya to safety.
But these eight chapters essentially seem to be a medium for the author to vent his frustration with India in his own little ways.
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