The Thing about Thugs [Hardcover]

I wouldn't call The Thing about Thugs simply a crime novel, at least not in the traditional meaning of the term; it is so much more: a historic novel, a literary mystery, a meeting between the present and the past, and kind of a fairytale.

What one mostly enjoys in this book is not the suspense, even if there's plenty, and it's not the fast-pace, since it reads like a stroll in the park; it's the setting, the writing and the characters that make all the difference.

The author doesn't seem to be very interested in the mystery, since he lets the reader know who is who and what he or she does right from the start. He is mostly preoccupied with the themes of love, racial prejudice, social status, the rich and the poor.

He paints a pretty bleak picture of Victorian London where most of the action takes place, and it's exactly this picture, this background that grants his tale its validity, which makes it sound a bit outlandish, but nevertheless true.

His characters are sophisticated and fools; men of means and women of leisure; thugs and murderers; servants and dreamers. And most of them are either hypocrites or liars.

Amir Ali, one of the major characters, falls into the latter category. He made up a story to escape his past and find a passage from poor and illiterate India to rich and enlightened England; a story that he almost came to believe himself; or rather a story that defined him: "In some ways, all of us become what we pretend to be," he says.

He was supposed to be a thug back in his homeland. At least that's what he said to Captain William T. Meadows, the man who saved him from a life of danger and chaos. But the truth is that he was only a novice, a protégé of a real thug, his uncle. He had to lie in order to avoid killing or being killed, and now, living in London, in a new world that he more than less likes, but doesn't really comprehend, he comes to realize that his lie will come back to haunt him.

As a series of brutal murders start to take place in the city, during which the heads of the victims are stolen, all the suspicions of the police, largely thanks to the yellow press, fall on the immigrants. People talk about ancient, barbaric rituals being practiced in the dark alleys of the city, and a veil of fear seems to linger over it.

Amir is the prime suspect and he can do nothing to prove his innocence, not without betraying the trust of someone he loves. So he's left with no choice; he has to become a fugitive of the law in order to survive and make things right. In this battle he'll not be alone, as the other poor souls of the streets will hasten to his aid: a Punjabi woman, who's a queen bee in her corner of the world, a mostly drunken Irishman, a few of his compatriots, the thugs and the poppers and the Mole People of London, the crowd that lives underground. They know that he's a victim of the circumstances, and if they don't want to become victims themselves they have to take things into their own hands.

This is great book in more than one ways, as it copes with many of the issues of that past -and this present- world, and puts them into perspective. The myth is rich, the plot more than interesting and the writing quite exquisite; a joy to read.

The Thugee groups of India gave rise to our use of the word "thug". This group of assassins came into existence in the 1300s and (supposedly) died out in the 1800s through British intervention. Our "hero" presents himself as a member of that infamous group.

Though anything more than what the Book Description (above) tells about the plot will verge on being a spoiler, it's best if you assume that description downplayed the intensity of each of the things it mentions. Studying lumps on heads does take on a new dimension in Khair's novel. Though fiction, it is reflective of a harsh period in the history of both India and England. And, it is set among the edges of society where bad things happened on a regular basis.

The descriptions of the characters and the settings are kept at a minimum. We learn only that which is necessary for the story to develop. The story itself immerses the reader so deeply into those settings that some mental "hand washing" takes place after each stint of reading. This is a tense story told tightly and the book seems longer than it actually is. Most writers would take at least twice as many pages to tell the same story, and the telling would suffer because of it.

Readers who like their books to start on a Monday morning and progress through the week and have "The End" posted on Sunday evening might be disappointed. So will those who like for a story to have a single narrator who always tells the truth and keeps you informed about where the story is taking place and who the players are.

However, those who are willing to put some effort into the reading of the book and go on a tour through time, space and enough social situations to satisfy several dissertations will be delighted by the goings on in this book. Written in the style of authors from both India and Europe, this was a fascinating story about people not run into on the tourist circuit (even in the Victorian era).

I would love to have met some of these characters, but only on neutral grounds. Instead, I will have to settle for reading Khair's novel "The Bus Stopped". I ordered it when I was about 20 pages into "The Thing about Thugs".

(I received an Advance Reader's Copy from the Amazon US Vine program.)

Gruesome beheadings! The infamous Thugee cult! A young man Indian man in Victorian London! This all sounds like great fodder for a fun mystery/adventure story, and I was predisposed to like this book due to these elements. Unfortunately, although I more or less enjoyed this book well enough, it never quite fulfilled my expectations. One issue is that the book is told through three different narrative lines: a young man (the author) in contemporary India who is poking around his grandfather's old library and discovering scraps of a fascinating tale; the third-person story of a young Indian brought to London by a wealthy phrenologist to narrate his life as a thugee, and the diary-in-letters of that young Indian, written to his English love interest (set in a really annoying script typeface). The constant switching back and forth between these in different sections (there are 120 sections in the book, roughly one every other page), along with the occasional other insertion (a newspaper story, an excerpt from a book manuscript, etc.), kept taking me out of the story and the book as a whole.

A second issue I had with the book is not really of the author's making. It's being marketed to a certain extent as a mystery, but there's little mystery to the events. The reader learns who is committing the murders and why very early on, and the opening pages of the book include a description of the villan's fate. As a result, there's no real tension involving the murders until quite late in the story, when the hero is accused and his friends rally their underground resources to try and unmask the true culprits. Which aren't to say there aren't some fun characters, some colorful period detail, and scraps of a ripping yarn here and there -- but it doesn't coalesce into anything truly satisfying.

The story also uses imperial attitudes toward immigration to comment on contemporary attitudes, and the theme of identity runs strong throughout, but again, neither of these feels particularly fresh. All of which is to say that it's not a bad book, but with some heavy editorial changes, I could imagine the story working better on the screen than it does on the page. Comparisons to Michael Chabon and Wilkie Collins are even more wildly overstated than the usual publisher PR.