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3.5

I don't mind saying this novel took a force of will to get through, a battle of stickability that I was determined to win. Once mentioned in a list of Hanya Yanagihara's 'best books for long flights', Sacred Games had been taking up space on my shelves for several years. I knuckled down to my task during my 5-weeks of lockdown and prepared to be transported to Mumbai's mean streets.

Sacred Games is a quintessential sprawling epic, with hundreds of characters all carefully linked in a fragile web of intrigue. Two narratives spiral around each other, one charts the rise of the gangster Ganesh Gaitonde while the other is the story of policemen Sartaj Singh as he chases down apradhi, sorts out complex blackmail plots and eats a lot of delicious sounding food. Alongside the two main stories, Chandra adds "Insets" essentially tangentially related short stories, that focus on the backstory of a minor character and provide an interesting historical or political dimension. These were often excellent and a nice vacation from Gaitonde and Singh but not all of these insets took us on a journey we needed to go on.

While this is nominally a crime-thriller epic, the resolution to those plot lines became less interesting to me than the atmospheric portrayal of Mumbai as a modern and complex metropolis. The author casts what appears to be a cynical yet loving eye over this city and its inhabitants. On that front it is a real masterpiece. But as time goes on with this novel it is easy to get digression burn-out, at one point I thought maybe I had been introduced to every gangster in Mumbai and knew what they all liked to have for lunch. I have no doubt a better novel could have emerged with some judicious pruning.

Summary A giant unruly Banyan tree of a novel that can be difficult to find your way out of but it is not without charms and I doubt I will read a more insightful novel about India.

Now off to watch the Netflix adaptation ?