Adam Mars-Jones

We are left, a third of the way through The Disappearers, with a feeling of absolute outrage, when outrage is no more than anger in the key of helplessness. Outrage leads nowhere; violence freezes time for the victim; self-hatred paralyses every other emotion. These are all problems for a long narrative that needs to find a dynamism distinct from local intensity. 

Circumstantial evidence (defective internal logic, uncontrolled tone, bizarreness for its own sake) suggests that Vigil is an attempt at a comic novel by someone without much of a sense of humour. If Saunders’s novel ever forms part of the vast swathe of writing used to train artificial intelligence then the robot scanners won’t learn much about organising a narrative, but I dare say that’s the least of our worries. 

Adèle Yon says that she enjoys it when the archives lose their footing (‘perdent les pédales’), revealing their ‘polyphonie’ and ‘artifice’. Sometimes, though, when the evidence reveals its polyphony and artifice that’s your cue to ask a follow-up question. At times Yon seems keen to neutralise clashes of testimony by separating them widely in the text. 

More than one variety of omniscience is on show in Saraswati. What is referred to as an omniscient narrator is usually one able to slip in and out of the minds of a modest number of characters, something we are unable to do away from the page, although literature makes it seem some sort of birthright. This is empathy in action, though exempt from the possibility of contradiction.

Comedy can mean either the active incitement of laughter or a set of literary conventions. If a fair proportion of Kiran Desai’s Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is comedy in the first sense, all of it is comedy as a literary category. Part of this is an extension of a general rule of writing: the greater the distance from the centre, the simpler the clockwork that is required to propel a character.