From the first page the reader is struck by the extraordinary richness and brilliance of the author's imagery (though this is less consistent as the novel proceeds), and soon afterwards by the delineation the characters who are living in or near Kalimpong, under Kanchenjunga, the Himalayan peak on the border between India and Nepal. Living in an isolated house outside Kalimpong are Jemubhai Patel, a crusty, embittered and rage-filled retired judge who had withdrawn into this remote corner of India; his orphaned granddaughter Sai, for whom he needs has to provide a home and a tutor to teach her; and the judge's long-serving cook, who basks in the reflected glory of what the judge once was, and, above all, in the pride that he has a son, Biju, `working for the Americans', unaware of the menial jobs he is doing in New York as an illegal immigrant, along with the flotsam of other illegals from all over the Third World. With the exception of the cook, none of the book's main characters, especially the western-educated ones, really know where they belong when the clash of cultures becomes an issue.
For in that particular corner of India the Nepalese are the majority population, and the area is plagued by the rise and increasing activity of the Gorkha National Liberation Front with its demands for an independent Gorkhaland. Class is also an issue here. In the second half of the book, the activities of these people impinges on all the characters in the book: on the elderly middle-class and anglicised Indians in the area, but also on the unnamed poor caught between the violence of the rebels and the brutality of the police. The young are also affected: Gyan, Sai's tutor, is a poor but educated Nepali; and initially they are very much in love. One central part of the story is how Gyan becomes drawn into the liberation movement and what that does to the relationship between him and Sai.
All this could have made for a very strong story line; but around it are pages and pages which contribute nothing to the plot, but mainly paint people and places, mostly in India, but also in New York where the cook's son is working.
At the end, one strand of the story finds a moving resolution; but many other strands are left as loose ends: perhaps a symbol that for such conflicted lives as are pictured in these pages there is not likely to be a resolution.
Kiran Desai writes engagingly, and I did enjoy reading this book; but I found it rather self-indulgent, meandering, and too loosely constructed to be really satisfying. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, so the judges obviously did not feel the same.
