Books discovered

This month’s discovery is Serious Men, a very funny, highly intelligent novel by Manu Joseph, who has been the features editor on The Times of India and is now the Mumbai bureau chief for Open magazine. As a top-flight journalist, he uses words with wit and precision, and this tale of a Dalit (Untouchable) with a massive IQ is irresistibly engaging. Ayyan Mani, who lives in an appalling ex-British block now inhabited by a scrambling mass of people, has managed to get himself a job as secretary to a leading scientist at the Institute of Theory and Research. He watches and privately smiles as leading physicists tangle in mutual loathing because of their conflicting opinions on how time, the universe and everything actually work.

Ayyan has a ten-year-old son, a bright boy who is complicit with his father in a plan to present him as a genius – a young prodigy who already understands sub-atomic theory and Einstein’s ideas. The head of the boy’s school, a woman more concerned with converting Indians to Christianity than with seeing sense, reluctantly falls for the deception, and the plot develops in parallel with a widening split between the serious men who lead the Institute. An unspeakable, grave-faced hilarity underlies every page of this book, and keeps the reader suspended between admiration and helpless laughter. In the hands of an adroit storyteller who moves easily between the worlds of high physics and the skills of slum survival, there is nothing to do but read and enjoy. I can’t wait for Manu Joseph’s next book, due out soon.

Serious Men is published by John Murray and is out in various paperback editions. Google it on Abe Books if you want to pick up a new or second-hand copy.

Alison Prince