Turmoil in India and the Bumbling American at the Heart of It

Edie Meidav’s first novel, “The Far Field,” opens with an untitled poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “You who never arrived / in my arms, Beloved, who were lost / from the start,” it begins. “You, Beloved, who are all / the gardens I have ever gazed at, / longing. . . .”

It is an exquisite expression of restive desire that sets the tone for this complex and imaginative story, a story at whose center lies a similar longing, a longing too deep ever to be satisfied.

When an American, Henry Fyre Gould, abandons wife, child, career and faith to travel from New York to the turbulent Ceylon of the 1930s, a country chafing to overthrow British rule, he hopes to create a model Buddhist society in a remote village and redeem his failed and unhappy life.

Stubborn, arrogant, filled with a desire to do good and possessing a misguided vision of manifest destiny, Gould is a dangerous character--perhaps more so because of his devout naivete about the society in which he finds himself. It is a society made up of unspoken complexities based on caste and class, which he is temperamentally unable to understand. (“Henry is nauseous from privilege.”) One by one, he offends all the people whose lives he longs to improve--from priests and landowners to the lowest castes--and causes resentful confusion with his impatient ideas, his model school, his Buddhist catechism and his general store.

To Meidav’s credit, she is able to portray this ugly American with sympathy as well as irony--and even to make him lovable. There are flashes of unexpected humor as well--for example, when Henry stocks the store’s shelves with tins of hominy and condensed milk and the finest American cornmeal, believing that he is thus freeing the local people of “drudgery and dependence on colonial imports.” Or when, forced by a villager to perform a ritual chant for his sick family’s cure, he sings, “My country ‘tis of thee.”

The novel moves slowly and awkwardly in the beginning--much like the bullock-drawn cart that takes Henry to Rajottama--through the consciousness of Henry and his enthusiastic guide Johnny, a boy who, we discover later, is not what he seems. Against the backdrop of an exotic island landscape, Meidav takes us in long digressions back to the spiritualist cult Henry abandoned in New York, and its leader, Madame (fashioned after Madame Blavatsky). There are spots of luminous, perceptive description, language that strikes us with its originality. A woman wears “a pouty blouse,” a man’s torso is burly and “efficient as a muskrat’s,” the dancers’ necks are “brown scimitars.”

Still, it takes us a long time to be introduced to the other dramatis personae--the Buddhist monk, Pandit, with his obsession for Shriver’s Potted Ham; the Pilimas, who are the most influential family in the village; the low-caste drummer Regi; his first son, a misshapen boy trapped in illness and a child’s body; his second son, Manu, who will later join a secret nationalist movement; Chris, the annoyingly charming leader of the British troops who set up camp in the village; and Nani, the beautiful and enigmatic housemaid with whom--not unpredictably--Henry will fall in love.

Nani is the most intriguing of the book’s characters--perhaps because we are given only glimpses of her mind--and the parts of the novel that are in her voice are the most lyrical and realized. The brief scenes of her early marriage and widowhood, resulting in her ostracism by her sisters, are poignant, as is the section where, against her will, she finds herself falling in love with the pink and bumbling Henry, nicknamed “cockroach” by the rest of the village. At once his mistress and his guardian deity, she protects him from the ridicule and suspicion of the village. It is when Henry, blinded by jealousy and his zeal to promote “true” Buddhism, smashes the altar where she prays to Vishnu that his unraveling begins in earnest.

The ending of the novel is a powerful one, making up for the slowness of the beginning. In language that approaches myth, Meidav portrays the complex ways in which ego and greed and the love of power come together to destroy the utopia Henry had dreamed of. Nothing is as the naive Henry--or even the reader--imagined it to be. The village (and, by extension, the world of the novel) demonstrates that it is a mysterious blend of opposites, as indicated by the two names it is known by, Rajottama, or Greatest of Kings, and Rutaeva, or Slippage. Death and loss stalk Henry through these last pages as he climbs Sigiriya, the lion mountain, seat of the ancient king Kashyapa, in an effort to “understand cause.” The redemption he finally manages to wrest from his life forms a surprising but satisfying end to an ambitious and distinguished first novel.