The Girl with the Seven Lives
By Vikas Swarup
Bloomsbury
Reviewed by Feby Idrus
Best known as the author of the book that was adapted into the movie Slumdog Millionaire, Vikas Swarup has returned with a new novel, The Girl with the Seven Lives.
Much like Slumdog Millionaire, the novel follows a plucky protagonist (this time, a girl rather than a boy) from an impoverished background through a series of wild adventures that take her through the breadth and depth of Indian society.
In this case, the novel’s framing device isn’t a quiz show.
This time, our plucky protagonist has a gun to her head, held by a mysterious man who forces her to confess her sins.
The novel is split into seven sections, one for each “life”, and titled after the name she assumes in each one: Devi, Deepa, Deeba, etc.
From the slums, she is alternately whisked into the homes of the ultra rich, sent to a rehabilitation home for wayward girls, escapes to the confines of a religious sect and fibs her way into a nursing career.
This episodic structure gives us a wide-spectrum view of India, from its very poorest strata to its very wealthiest, from its institutions to its outsiders, through its multiple religions and regions.
Despite this wide view, which is engaging, the novel’s overall superficiality makes the work feel like a cartoon.
Take the plot.
Every section follows the same formula: our protagonist enters this new world, learns how it works, encounters one nice person who either betrays her or dies, something horrible happens to her as a result and she escapes to the next “life”.
Rinse and repeat.
Moreover, as the novel progresses, the plot twists become both increasingly repellent and meaningless.
At the rehabilitation home, a rape is described with such melodrama and sentimentality as to render it meaningless: “I hid my face in my hands and burst into tears, my boiling anger subsiding into powerless despondency […] ‘[He] ruined me, Sheru, he ruined me,’ I cried, my body wracked with sobs.”
The general superficiality and sentimentality means there is little psychological depth of any kind.
The sections set in Delhi’s slums therefore run the risk of reading as a kind of “poverty tourism”, allowing middle class Western readers to gawk at the poor little slum urchins and feel vaguely sorry for the impoverished families there, without ever really delving into who these people are.
Instead, Swarup spends more time spelling out the painfully obvious in bad prose.
One of the girls at the home describes her plight: “‘I wanted to be a Bond girl,’ Angie sighed, ‘and I’ve become a bonded housemaid!’”
The only caveat I must add is that Swarup may not be trying to meet Western expectations of what a good novel should be.
He is, after all, Indian, born and raised, and may well have grown up with Indian stories, which work within different parameters and narrative expectations than the stories of the English-language canon.
In some ways, The Girl with the Seven Lives does more closely resemble the Ramayana epic, with its archetypal characters, episodic structure, large ensemble cast and constantly churning plot.
If Swarup’s aim was to write a 21st Century epic showing Indian society, then he has succeeded.
If his aim was to write a compelling novel with loveable characters with real heart, then he definitely has not.
Feby Idrus is a writer, musician, and arts administrator.