A Mosaic of Murder, Fitted Together From Lots of Details

“Perfect order is impossible in charting the irregular side of nature.” This remark, made late in “Bombay Ice,” a first novel by Canadian-born journalist Leslie Forbes, is meant to apply equally to the behavior of a monsoon and to the psychological instability of the narrator’s mother, but it serves as an effective gloss on the book as a whole. Part thriller, part travelogue, part mural depicting the intricacies of contemporary Bombay, “Bombay Ice” is rich, garrulous and wildly disordered.

The novel that “Bombay Ice” inevitably brings to mind is Peter Hoeg’s “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” Both books are told in the first person by strong, knowledgeable women who chance upon crimes and whose compulsion to investigate these crimes shows them--and us--something about their inner lives. Both books offer plots so tangled that the reader gives up trying to keep them straight. Yet the true core of both books is less their plots than the vivid characters and fascinating, sometimes rarefied pieces of information their narrators present along the way.

As a freelance journalist, Rosalind “Roz” Bengal, Forbes’ narrator, quite naturally has a passion for facts, secrets and stories. The illegitimate daughter of a suicidal gilder and a historian with an interest in meteorology, both dead as the book opens, Roz is haunted by guilt and loss. She is especially attracted to outsiders, “trespassers, violators of boundaries” of which she, “[l]ike so many voyagers,” is one. The attraction serves Roz well as she arrives in Bombay from her home in London, drawn by a mysterious letter from her pregnant half-sister, Miranda, who writes that her husband, Prosper, is rumored to have murdered his first wife and that she is being followed by eunuchs and lepers.

Roz quickly begins investigating the murders of Prosper’s first wife and of Sami, a hijra, or eunuch, whose deaths may be connected. Likened at one point to “our very own Claus von Bulow,” Prosper is a prominent film director who is completing 20 years of work on an Indian version of “The Tempest.” Shakespeare’s elegiac farewell play supplies “Bombay Ice” with its running motif: Roz tells us that, as a city, Bombay is “seven islands emerging reluctantly from a tidal swamp”; the aptly named Prosper runs an equally aptly named Island Studios; Miranda is of course directly named for (and seems in places as passive as) Shakespeare’s heroine; and Caleb Mistry, Prosper’s disciple, is a kind of brainier Caliban, willful, savage and seductive.

Among the many figures who join the novel’s broad pageant (Forbes appends a “cast list” to keep them sorted out) are Ashok Tagore, an enigmatic and philosophical friend of Roz’s father who correctly perceives that the many losses Roz has experienced have made her isolate herself and “seek out those who are equally isolated,” thereby helping to explain Roz’s obsessive determination to avenge the murdered.

Roz herself observes at one point that families “provide a mirror in which we can adjust the makeup of our own identities.” The assertion is representative of Roz’s--and Forbes’--pithy style, and it hints at the origin of some of Roz’s less attractive qualities. Pugnacious and aggressive, “[a] sermonizer, like Dad,” Roz tends to speak in expository paragraphs (as do too many other characters) as though, in amassing information about Bombay, her family and the crimes her brother-in-law may have committed, she will somehow adjust--and grasp--the makeup of her own personality.

Although many aspects of Roz’s identity ultimately remain opaque, she does delight the reader with her omnivorous curiosity about coroners and coin collectors, art dealers and art forgers, prop makers who create credible corpses and sound men who keep a museum of pauses, secret agents, alchemists, poisoners, snake charmers, goondas and gangsters, and the myriad habitues of the world of Indian film known as Bollywood. Quoting one of its most gifted members, Satyajit Ray, Ashok tells Roz that Ray once said that “the presence of the essential in a minute detail, which you must catch in order to express the larger thing, is a very Indian tradition.” It is a tradition that, despite its unevenness, “Bombay Ice” joins with flair.