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A review by rosseroo
The Thing about Thugs by Tabish Khair
3.0
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. It's also using 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.
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. It's also using 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.