Recent first novelsAt the heart of Indra Sinha's playfully sprawling novel, The Death of Mr Love (Scribner, L16.99, pp. 584, ISBN 0743206983), is a scandal from 1950s Bombay - the murder by Captain Nanavati of his English-born wife's Indian Lothario-like lover. But in a novel exploring the very nature of storytelling and myth-making an equally shocking fictional tale (of abortion, blackmail, revenge and mental disintegration) seeps out, begging to be told. That the task of giving it voice falls to Bhalu, naive adult son of talented scriptwriter Maya, raises questions about destiny and the importance, or feasibility, of fictional truth. As children, Bhalu and Phoebe (the coquettish daughter of Maya's English friend Sybil) are inseparable. Sadly, they are parted after the suspicious death of Phoebe's ayah, and do not meet for 40 years when, at the London funeral wake for Bhalu's mother, Phoebe embroils him in the hunt for a missing volume of Sybil's diaries (thought to contain the identity of the man who `ruined things for all of us'), an erratic quest which takes them from swanky London hotel bedrooms to the downtown opium dens of what is now called Mumbai. Anyone familiar with India will marvel at Sinha's skill in depicting the teeming, glorious, feculent city of Mumbai, and be amused to note how the Dickensian narrative mimics the larger-than-life plots of many Bollywood 'fillims'. By alluding to interracial conflicts (1857 Mutiny, Partition, the 1993 Mumbai riots), Sinha also examines the notion of truth; as fantasies and echoes from Bhalu's childhood surface in the narrative, his possible unreliability as a narrator adds a post-modern twist to this exploration.
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