An Outline of the Republic
by Siddhartha Deb
Ecco Books, April 2005

Reviewed by Kurt Opprecht

for Kirkus Reviews , February, 2005

Protagonist Amrit Singh, a Calcutta journalist, dives into a far-flung region of India for the story behind a terrorist group's chilling photograph of an abducted porn actress.

This assignment from a European magazine is more than just another article for Singh, who is hoping to emerge from "the stupor of the past seven years" at his newspaper and start a new life. He quickly finds himself submerged in a miasma of broken-down government and ramped-up insurgencies. The milieu from beginning to end is the disorder of a developing region plagued by Islamic fundamentalist violence and insurgent militarism, where one more disappearance is not necessarily big news. The major players here are organizations with acronyms like MORLS and SLORC but it's the intimacy with the minor players, the aunt of the woman in the photograph, the tea salesman in the next hotel room, that give this story it's power. Unfortunately, the portrayal of Amrit Singh himself is not so intimate. Despite this being a first-person narrative, Deb (The Point of Return, 2003) is disappointingly stingy with the minor personal information that takes a protagonist into the realm of the real. The reader is left to infer Amrit's dimensions from the practical decisions he makes and the spare comments he shares vis-a-vis the other players in his adventure. Deb's style is straight-up occidental, forgoing the exotic aura of Arundhati Roy's, or Salman Rushdie's tales. His craft is sophisticated, mature, and best assessed alongside the world's writers at large, not just the South Asian English-language cannon. There are echoes of Conrad in his rich, lucid descriptions and the arc of Singh's blind journey into dark territory. On other terms, the work feels like a Chandler novel -- a mystery with few clues, parceled out to the reader via a wide palate of wily characters and gritty settings. This author has the craft, the sensibilities and potential for fine literature.

A sophisticated adventure novel. Restless to break out, yet wholly inside its genre.