The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee review: 'ripe for TV adaptation'
The latest Wyndham and Bannerjee adventure is elegant, undemanding and full of fascinating detail, writes Stuart Kelly
Abir Mukherjee is the winner of both the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year and the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year; but for his previous standalone work, Hunted, and not for this series, which seems an oversight in my opinion. This is the sixth of the Wyndham and Banerjee books, and I am sure readers will enjoy it more if they have already journeyed through the previous five. I haven’t read them all, and hadn’t read The Shadows of Men, the last instalment; so was moderately concerned that the jacket-flap had the phrase “Meanwhile, Surendranath Banerjee, recently returned from Europe after three years spent running from the fallout of his previous case…” The Burning Grounds does sketch in the backstory – and since Banerjee and Wyndham haven’t even corresponded during the hiatus, a certain degree of infodumping is excusable as well as necessary, and is done with a hand none too heavy or ponderous.
It did get me thinking, tangentially, about the serial crime novel. To be honest, it doesn’t matter too much if you read Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962, featuring Jane Marple) before you have read They Do It With Mirrors (1952, featuring Jane Marple). You might get slightly more from Rex Stout’s And Be A Villain (1948), The Second Confession (1949) and In The Best Families (1950) by reading them in order, as they chart Nero Wolfe’s entanglement with his Moriarty, Arnold Zeck (and by the way, kudos to Viking for publishing the omnibus as “Triple Zeck”); but to be honest you’d be better with the high camp of Too Many Cooks, Murder by the Book, Where There’s a Will or any of the other standalones.
Combining the discrete whodunit with the ongoing arc is a perilous endeavour, particularly if there is no end in sight. Quentin Jardine originally had a rather good “ongoing” about Skinner’s wife’s death; the solution rather hamstrung future novels. McDermid’s Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, Rankin’s Rebus novels and JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike all have developments but not obvious closures. As Marvell wrote “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”. I have often wondered what might have happened to Wallander (suffering from memory loss) after The Troubled Man, or Aurelio Zen after the eerily titled End Games or Bertie Gunter after A German Requiem – his last novel chronologically, Metropolis et al being prequels.
There are two possible and natural ends of the Mukherjee’s series: Jatindra Sengupta is now mayor of Kolkata, so we are creeping towards the Second World War, the first having loomed large in Wyndham’s backstory. But Bannerjee is becoming more and more convinced of the necessity of decolonisation, though pushing forward to the 1947 Partition might be a stretch (though having either Wyndham or Bannerjee lamp Mountbatten would be worth a stretch).
As with previous novels this has a quite constrained timeframe – five days – and chapters which do not alternate exactly but swing between the two narrators. There are two cases. For Wyndham, a local philanthropist and cultural funder has been found with his throat slit, dumped in the cremation grounds before the cremation could be done. He had been financing a film with an English actress whose agent would rather she was in Holywood than India. Despite this backdrop, there is little proto-Bollywood. For Banerjee, his family – always keen to keep up appearances and less than jubilant about his European reverse Grand Tour – are concerned that a female relative who had been trying to establish herself in the world of photography has gone missing. Absconded, kidnapped, complicit, afraid? All the cards are on the table, and an attempt on the lives of Wyndham and Banerjee confirms the kedgeree is whiffy.
The two narratives are, of course, connected, just as they have been in previous novels, and most episodes of Midsomer Murders. That is not reviewer’s facetiousness: the two are similar and similarly impressive. The formula has neat variations. The local colour, detail, lingo and ambience fascinate. Personally, I knew who was guilty, who was guilty but not chargeable and who was a distraction early on, but that’s not really the point. The social history aspects are placed neatly, with the speeches about Empire, entitlement, nostalgia, Indian castes and Oxbridge manners all gauzed through a hazy light.
Stylistically, the Wyndham sections are rather more Chandler than Waugh, as in this description of a room, “its walls decorated with plaques and portraits of the great and the good, and the stuffed and mounted heads of several large herbivores unfortunate enough to be minding their own business while in the vicinity of someone who considered it heroic and daring to shoot an unarmed creature from 250 yards with a .375 Holland & Holland magnum”. (Five ands! No wonder it oozes so).
This is a perfectly acceptable Edinburgh-London train journey book; elegant, undemanding, reinforcing the right liberal prejudices, and ripe for Sunday evening television adaptation. By the end, both Wyndham and Banerjee are compromised and indebted to very different powers. Dum-dum-DAH, and tune in next time.
The Burning Grounds, by Abir Mukherjee, Harvill Secker, £18.99
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.