Half and half

Published 06 December 2004

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall M G Vassanji Canongate, 439pp, £14.99 ISBN 1841955388

Vikram Lall, the narrator of this long and ponderous prizewinning novel, is a double exile. He is an ethnic Indian who grew up in east Africa and now, in disappointed late-middle age, he is an African living in Canada, from where he begins this retrospective about the life he left behind in Kenya. His is a familiar story of post-colonial decline and cultural displacement: he never feels fully African or, indeed, Indian. India, he says, was "always fantasyland . . . To this day, I have never visited my dada's birthplace."

Instead he inhabits, as do so many settlers in Africa, white or otherwise, an in-between world, a nebulous space of uncertainty, shadows and loss. A not-quite-African, then, with a "desperate need to belong to the land I was born in". Even his ancestral homeland of Peshawar is "lost" to him, because Peshawar is now part of Pakistan, another artificial creation of post-colonial rupture.

Vikram describes his childhood in an introverted, ritualised Indian community with considerable patience. There is very little communication with the African majority, and the white settlers, the "Europeans", are observed with a mixture of curiosity and admiration. It is a time of turmoil: the Mau Mau insurrection is beginning, Europeans are being murdered in their homes and on isolated farms, and members of the dominant Kikuyu tribe are imprisoned and tortured.

Later, Vikram goes to work for Jomo Kenyatta. He becomes rich through being a willing accomplice of the gangster-politicians who are hustling Kenya towards ruin. At the same time, he is in love with a sweet English girl, whom he meets in childhood and whose absence from his life he never ceases to mourn.

The Indian presence in Africa - why they are there and how they have adapted - is a fascinating subject for a book, as V S Naipaul has shown us again and again in his fiction and journalism. Today, the Indians in Kenya, some of whom were complicit in the corruption of the Daniel Arap Moi years, remain a powerful but anxious minority. They control many businesses and have accumulated huge wealth. Yet as were the Asians in Uganda before them, they are threatened with expulsion. What stops them being accepted? Can we not call these Indians - whose grandfathers arrived in Kenya as "coolie" labourers, laying down railway lines and building up the infrastructure of the new country - Africans? Or are they for ever doomed, like the last remaining whites of Kenya, to occupy what V S Naipaul calls a "half- and-half world", suspended between the ancestral homeland for which they long and the indigenous Africans from whom they feel excluded?

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall won the 2003 Giller Prize, Canada's pre-eminent literary award. If this is the best that Canada can offer in one particular year, then one would not hurry to read the rest of the shortlist - because, in brutal truth, M G Vassanji cannot write.

His prose combines cliche with fey nostalgia; he scatters exclamation marks throughout the text like an enthusiastic undergraduate writing home for the first time; he has little sense of the African landscape and none of the vernacular; and the tone, whether he is writing about the terrible violence of the Mau Mau or his grandmother's cooking, is the same. Blandly modulated, there is no urgency or sense of crisis. The novel describes turbulent events, but its overall effect is benign. This, above all, is a verbal failure.

In one scene at a family gathering, the young Vikram is asked by his father to sing. He chooses to sing a few words from a song for African independence he has learned from one of the local African boys.

There was a momentary pindrop silence. And then I caught a movement in the periphery of my vision, and sudden as a bolt of lightning a resounding slap landed on my cheek. It was from my father, who had swivelled on his haunches beside me and was leaning over me in rage. My mother had screamed. Exchanging a brief fearful look with Papa, I stood up and ran to Mother, my head pounding and cheek burning, tears barely restrained: completely, completely crushed. Where did you learn that obscene song! Papa shouted, now up and glaring at me as I took shelter in my mother's arms . . .

Need more be said?

Jason Cowley is a contributing editor of the New Statesman

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