Pondering Some Shadowy Depths

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh (Viking: $17.95; 246 pages

Amitav Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines” is a gorgeous novel, the story of an Anglo-Indian friendship spanning three generations and two continents. Post-Raj (mostly) and avant-garde (slightly), it is in no way a saga. It is, in fact, a technical marvel.

Ghosh has invented an extraordinary fictional device--a spiral of time and memory that draws the reader into a vortex of the past. The device solves the most difficult problems of the form: how to present the passage of time and transitions in space; how to convey the density of experience on the two-dimensional page; how to handle exposition within the limited repertoire of narrative and dialogue; how to manage cognition.

This is a rare instance in which the form of a book expresses its content. The spiral helps Ghosh tell a story of matching complexity, which winds from Calcutta to London to Raibajar to Delhi to Dhaka and back.

The first-generation friends--inventor and industrialist Lionel Tresawsen (a frequenter of the Calcutta Theosophical Society) and Justice Chandrashekhar Datta-Chaudhuri of the Calcutta High Court--meet at a seance.

Practical, accomplished men, they are free and kindred spirits. Their direct and lateral descendants inherit their friendship.

The narrator of “The Shadow Lines,” great-great-nephew of the judge, is that rare creature of fiction, a storyteller whose comprehension grows. He is nameless, perhaps because his cousin Tridib has taught him too well an odd habit of mind: the detailed imagining of others’ lives. For them both it becomes “a longing for everything that was not in oneself. . . .” It is a dangerous habit.

There is, however, a sadder reason for his namelessness: Ila, his cousin and the girl he loves, does not love him. So “part of my life as a human being had ceased; . . . I no longer existed, but as a chronicle.”

He is kind; his sympathy is given even to Nick Price, Lionel Tresawsen’s unworthy grandson and Ila’s unworthy love, whom he had long and wrongly thought his counterpart, “the kindred spirit whom I had never been able to discover among my friends.”

Tridib, the judge’s grandson, son of a diplomat and himself an archeologist, ostensibly studies an ancient Bengali dynasty. The topic of the narrator’s doctoral thesis is Anglo-Indian textile trade of the 19th Century. Yet both Tridib and the narrator long for places far from India, and especially for England.

Tattered copies of “Bartholomew’s Atlas” and the “A to Z Atlas of London” are their texts; their spiritual home is 44 Lymington Road, London, where the Prices live; their artifacts, Tridib’s collection of letters and photographs; their period of choice, England’s “finest hour.”

Ila, who lives firmly in the present--although she too is studying history--is quite sure that in India “nothing really important ever happens. . . .” England seems keeper of India, still, London is full of Indian students, restaurants and shops; it is full also of Pakistanis (their Bengali dialects ironically new to our narrator from Calcutta, on the other side of the border); even the documents the narrator needs for research are there, among the colonial records in the India House Library.

So real is the London of the narrator’s imagination that he greets a startled Nick Price with, “I’m not meeting you for the first time; I’ve grown up with you. I’ve known the streets around here for a long time too,” he adds, heading right to the house on Lymington Road, where he has never been before.

He has never been there before--not in reality. But in imagination, informed by their memories, he has walked through the rooms, the garden and cellar of that hospitable household, where Tridib and later Ila stayed as children.

Tridib finds his hero in Lymington Road: Alan Tresawsen, Lionel’s son, a true heir of his father’s grace and nature, comes to his sister’s house with friends, his house mates, to meet the Datta-Chaudhuris.

The narrator, not to be born yet for a dozen years, will come to have “one final image of Tridib on that evening” in 1939. The 9-year-old stands by the parted curtains at the window of No. 44, watching Alan Tresawsen and his three friends walk down the road toward West Hampstead station, “laughing and singing on their way back to Brick Lane.” Tridib, the narrator tells us, “could see them quite clearly, years later.” Within the year, a bomb in Brick Lane kills Alan.

Ila finds Nick Price in Lymington Road. In the cellar, every evening, they play Houses. Nick first betrays her when she is a schoolgirl. Ila will always love Nick; Nick will always betray her. He is a womanizer: “It’s his way of traveling.”

In the cellar of a family house in Raibajar, on a visit home, under an enormous table brought from the Crystal Palace as trophy of the judge’s first visit to England in the 1890s, Ila teaches the narrator to play Houses. In the dust, she traces the rooms of 44 Lymington Road. In the rooms of that London house, the narrator learns about love.

May Price, Nick’s sister, our narrator’s true counterpart, is generous and good, and smells of lavender. Ghosh has done wonders with her--every word from her or about her is just right. (He also has caught Nick being callous, upper-class Indian women being strident, Mrs. Price fading with tiredness, and the slightly archaic, over-polite post-colonial English of foreigners in London.)

May sleeps on a thin mattress laid on the floor, because “after all, this is how most people in the world sleep. I merely thought I’d throw in my lot with the majority.” She fasts on Saturdays: “It occurred to me a few years ago that it might not be an entirely bad idea to go without something every once in a while. . . .” She thinks herself responsible for Tridib’s terrible death.