Making Choices or having them made for you: Reviewing Anuradha Roy (2018) All the Lives We Never Lived London, Quercus, Maclehose Press

This novel deals almost entirely with the issue of ‘life-choices’ (in the glib contemporary language of half-thought). It queries whether we, any of us, ever make choices and the consequence of so doing – particularly of those roads not taken as well as ‘lives never lived’. But it is neither glib nor simple-minded about choice and its determination to follow through the effects of how a particular choice gets made – contingent upon accidents (the effect of being late from school on one particular day) determinations from the past, culture, effects like gender and, of course social power (not least that exerted by money) and so on – to its ends however mixed.

In this novel people who identify with the choices they make, even at the expense of chances to revise such choices and reliance on the fictions we tell ourselves about our intentions (to reconnect with one’s son for instance), are tragic figures who get bound into – imprisoned indeed - in these choices. To emphasise this Roy combines factional and fictional lives. The two central choosers respectively being Walter Spies and Gay are both imprisoned - both embrace that choice in almost existential self-determination. In both cases however, their fate is determined more by the power of how they are constructed by others and the power of those people’s fictionalising. The analysis of how Spies as a gay man became constructed and then punished as either a German spy (not possible) or a paedophile (a story still peddled on Wikipedia) is extremely moving but also subtle.

Readers will be divided I believe (between themselves and perhaps intrapersonally) by the scene in which Spies lies down with the narrator-hero as a very young boy, in which half-formed and inarticulate ideas of threat mingle with issues of belief and trust that are so endemic to an engaged reading of fiction.

The ‘non-fictional’ characters could not really have been believable in fiction one feels sometimes – Walter Spies (with that enigmatic second name), Margaret Mead, Beryl de Zoete, Arthur Wailey were all exceptional people – cushioned by power and a bourgeois background, they were brought up to believe in their right to choices that eventually narrows into stoic defiance of the conventional world as they age. I find Roy’s complex readings of that quite convincing. That is because these existential choices are often treated with irony – moments when the reader is asked to see that choice as somewhat tarnished by a lie, as when Walter takes a young very beautiful Indian young man on as an assistant in his research and sometimes has to ask him to stay overnight to complete his tasks. This is all so wittily done through the eyes of a 7 year old.

Gayatri is a wonderful character not least that she is examined through the eyes of, and thoughts about her son, whom she never quite tells the truth about. A key moment is her refusal of a frank offer from Spies to pay for his passage to her from India to Bali. Her refusal is given reasons but the book is as much about ‘the reasons we never gave’. For after all, with her son, Gayatri may never have become the autonomous young woman she was. But are there other reasons she refuses being bound to Walter in the matter of her son. They aren’t articulated but then so much isn’t in this novel – whose emergent complexity is that between what we can say and to whom and when. Sometimes we cannot say things even to ourselves, lest we contradict the most important things we want to believe about ourselves. Gayatri is a staunch articulator of faith in Spies being altogether a harmless person.

And Gay is deliberately tragically wrong about Indian politics, which can’t be mediated around her feelings about her husband, however inadequate we are shown this man of surface contradiction to be. Our narrator hero too is more than half-fiction. From the beginning he is constructed as Dostoevsky’s ‘idiot’, Myshkin and throughout referred to by this name. He is inevitably linked to Spies – in his interests in plants and insects, his blindness to a world of the mass-movement of peoples in wars and ‘Partitions’ – and, as in no other novel I have read, I have felt in this one both the longing to depoliticise the ways we see the world in the face of a too abstracted politics and the exposure of this longing, once it becomes a choice, exposed to the fact that to its maintenance as a ‘life-style’ choice is tragic. It is the choice of someone who stoically goes down with ship, encaged but singing, as Spies does. Beautiful though and maybe in the world of the tragic metaphysic of humanism that is enough.

In my view this is a monumental novel. No doubt though to be displaced from where it belongs on the Booker shortlist by some intelligent cognitively-led literary ragbag blockbuster from the States. But I hope not!

Steve