Such a Long Journey

Greg Turko is a policy analyst at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

This novel is set in Bombay against the backdrop of the war that created
the state of Bangladesh and of the character’s vivid memories of the
Sino-Indian hostilities of the 1960s. In simple terms, Mistry follows
the lives and—sometimes cruel and conspiring, although frequently
humorous—fate of the Gustad Noble family.

Mistry has an excellent gift for character and scene development,
something that was also evident in his previous book Tales from Firozsha
Baag. He is also adept at building suspense. Major Bilimoria and his
cloak-and-dagger missions, for example, keep cropping up throughout the
book. Equally impressive is Mistry’s ability to integrate large and
significant historical and political events, such as wars, effectively
and smoothly into the decidedly day-to-day lives of his characters.
(Such events are often simply and crudely layered on a novel’s plot,
creating the impression of a book that was, by accident, bound with
random pages of a political science essay.)

Such a Long Journey is enjoyable and rewarding to read, whether or not
the reader knows much about India, Bangladesh, or the Sino-Indian Wars.
The story has an appealing universality, although a glossary would have
been useful, as he makes liberal use of transliterated Indian words and
phrases.

Recently, Mistry has been nominated for Britain’s prestigious Booker
prize, has received Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award, and
has been included in a Time magazine profile on the rapidly growing
group of influential and excellent Indian novelists. He richly deserves
all this recognition, and we eagerly await his next novel.