Fiction:On a February night in 2002 in Ahmedabad, western India, a mob visits a campaign of breathtaking cruelty upon its neighbours. As the city burns and the victims pile up, Mr Jay, an expectant father, anxiously awaits news in a maternity ward.
Mr Jay is presented with a baby who is "severely deformed". Were it not for his perfect eyes, the newborn, we are told, would have been diagnosed as a "growth", dropped into a container and incinerated, or left on the floor for a dog to find. Brutality is omnipresent in the world of Fireproof, which is a fictionalisation of a real tragedy, the Gujarat riots.
The disfigured, limbless newborn is given to Mr Jay to take home. The nurse handling the matter, it turns out, is dead, as are the doctors and many of the hospital staff, for Fireproof is a novel in which the murdered speak. When a mystery woman in the burns ward writes "Help Me" on a windowpane, Mr Jay finds himself embarking on an increasingly bizarre journey to save his son.
Raj Kamal Jha takes on frighteningly delicate subjects. His last novel, If You Are Afraid of Heights, was about a sexually abused child. It was narrated by a man flying through the city on the back of a crow, and the prose was so oblique, so elliptical, that the story of the child herself was lost.
In Fireproof, quite the opposite happens. The newborn at the centre of the novel, named Ithim by his father (a combination of It and Him - more casual brutality) is so helpless, so defenceless, that although he spends most of his time in a bag, Ithim's presence is commanding. The sense of foreboding surrounding him is fully realised and sustained throughout. The passages in which Mr Jay wraps his son in tissue paper in a futile attempt to protect what cannot be protected are amongst the most affecting of the novel. However, such intimacies are all too brief, and are consistently punctured by the intrusion of the narrator.
Fireproof is written in a voice that you want to swat away like a fly. Mr Jay is obsessed with his storytelling technique, and incessantly talks the reader through the writing process: "How do I describe it without sounding fictional?" "So how do I say this without straining credibility? Well, I will do two things . . ." "Please indulge me, if you will, I have a little request: let me slip into the third person", etc.
Many wonderful novels have been written about the complicated business of constructing a narrative, but the self-reflexive, metafictional prattle in Fireproof is at odds with the subject matter. A young boy, while watching his mother being gang-raped, makes a list of the things he sees being done to her: one, her sari being torn, two, the four men laughing at her, etc, but item eight on his list is "Two more things he needs to make it ten". This reflection on how to compile a list reads not like the voice of a terrorised child, but of a writer speculating on how best to construct his tale. Mr Jay's love of repetition and verbal embroidery is practically a nervous twitch. The cumulative impact of page after page of this is infuriating.
The writing aside, Fireproof offers no insight as to why a normal man should one day join a gang and massacre his neighbours. Scenes of abject horror are described - a foetus is ripped from its mother's womb and burned, grandparents are tortured and put to death in front of their families, but no context is provided; cultural, political, sectarian or otherwise. The perpetrators of the crimes are identified only as A, B, C and D. We do not know where they came from - they simply show up mid-novel. We are not told how they arrived at this consensus to group together and kill. Surely this is a crucial part of the Ahmedabad story?
Fireproof is a novel about the limits of representation. The figure of the baby, and all he has endured, is emotionally resonant in the extreme. However Ithim, and the unspeakable loss of those whom he symbolises, is short-changed by Jha's abstract, frustrating, solipsistic approach.
Claire Kilroy's second novel, Tenderwire, was last week shortlisted in the Irish Novel of the Year Award category of the Irish Book Awards. The winners of all the awards will be announced in Dublin on March 15th
Fireproof By Raj Kamal Jha Picador, 388pp. £12.99