You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
drewdaimonia 's review for:
A Rising Man
by Abir Mukherjee
I felt let down by this book, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the mountain of praise which accompanied it. The premise sounded like it was something I would really enjoy, but I was sad to find the execution thoroughly underwhelming.
Our protagonist, Sam Wyndham, is an English detective thrown out of his depth into the sordid mysteries of colonial Calcutta. At first glance he appears as the classic White Saviour archetype, a friend to the downtrodden and a thorn in the side of the established elite, and it’s clear that he certainly sees himself in that way. Perhaps the author does, as well. But his attitude on that front varies wildly, and his moods seem to swing from scene to scene: one day he is sympathetic of the natives and appalled by racial segregation, enough to make him physically violent, but then the next he is exactly as dismissive as that man he was going to hit.
He is also needlessly rude to others he considers beneath him, such as taking pleasure in making a harmless secretary’s job miserable. It soon becomes apparent that he is only a friend to the meek when they are falling over themselves to serve him (and even then, he’s perfectly happy to take advantage of them without thanks), and more than happy to order them around when they show independent thought. Or that he’s only a supporter of equality when he’s trying to sleep with somebody, with a nice note of misogyny in the way the scant few female characters are treated and described: pretty girls deserve politeness, but there is no respect for the women whose ugliness is always carefully noted.
Sam is also more traditionally flawed: the author has added a weakness for drugs and women, but they are so blatant that they take away from his character rather than adding to it. He is supposedly mourning a dead wife, whose name is occasionally tacked on to other thoughts as if he or the author is suddenly remembering she exists, but he forgets about her when one suspect has legs he can stare at. Because this is a wish fulfilment novel she is, of course, flattered by the attention, and available whenever he needs her. He neglects his own case to chase after her with his tongue hanging out, and even shares sensitive details with her despite the fact she might be involved… whilst being utterly and needlessly hostile to all other suspects, simply because they don’t have shapely calves.
He has an addiction to opium, which could have been played in an interesting way, but instead it’s just a plot device for him to made bad decisions repetitively. When the plot needs to be slowed down, he simply gets high, and it’s always a mistake which anyone could have seen coming. He goes to an opium den, leaving himself vulnerable in a dangerous part of town, is obviously then threatened by thugs, and has to be saved by his rickshaw wallah. He then… just goes back to the same place again, with no more precaution… and yes, he is again attacked by thugs… and again rescued by the same deux ex rickshaw! None of this adds anything to the plot, except to lay bare how thick our protagonist is.
That’s the real problem, for all his other character flaws. A successful detective novel has to keep its star at least one pace ahead of the reader, but Sam lags painfully behind from the start. He’s introduced as this decorated officer from Scotland Yard, and starts by turning up some promising leads, but then just… doesn’t follow them up. He is inexplicably hostile to some characters from the get-go, marking them out to the readers as Bad Guys in the absence of a real reason to suspect them, but then does nothing to look into them. Instead, after spending the start of the book telling everyone the case is more complex than the obvious answer, he suddenly swivels and decides it’s an even more obvious answer because someone else tells him it is. It’s clearly a lie, but he does no more detective work to even check it, just spending the whole middle of the book digging that hole to nowhere.
Meanwhile, the actual leads he’d found are just… sitting there, unfollowed. He finally picks them up at the very end of the book as a last resort, and they immediately lead to the truth, as anyone could have told him they would. In what other detective story would we find out there was a witness to the murder on page 13 and not get around to asking them about it until page 291, at which point they say there was someone else, and not bother to look for them until page 363, when they just tell us the solution. There are only nine pages to the book after that. It seems the body of the novel is just there to delay a rather simple solution, all of the history and description to cover up a paper-thin plot. Everything is set up in the first 100 pages, and from there you could skip straight to the last 20 and miss nothing.
In place of actually talking to people – witnesses, the person the victim had started spending most of his time with, the people who we know are hiding something – Sam’s approach to solving crimes seems largely to be to turn up and angrily accuse random people of committing them, with no evidence, and then taking their denial at face value and bouncing off to accuse somebody else… but somehow never the actual culprits, who were flagged as suspicious from the start. There is never any real deduction of the solution, just blind guesswork, trial and error as he throws a dart at a random suspect and decides to rush over to accuse them: as if cases could be solved just by process of elimination, accusing all of the suspects until one of them happily confesses.
The actual fact-finding work is done off-camera, by other characters who actually discover Clues, and simply hand them to Sam – whilst you were away, I spoke to x and found out y! Almost none of that important work happens on screen, and on the rare occasion that they do make a clever breakthrough, such as noticing inconsistencies in a story, it’s just a set-piece which has no effect on the plot. For example, one suspect denies talking with someone, but also implies that they did. Sam is asked if he wants to interrogate them, but he just says ‘later’ – of course, they never talk to them again, never bother to find out what happened, and the whole interrogation scene is worthless and could have been cut with no impact on the plot. Another suspect denies talking to someone, but Sam is told that they did, and also that they made an important telephone call that they neglected to mention – of course, Sam doesn’t bother finding out who it was to, even though it would have solved the case within 100 pages.
It's a wonderful setting, the place and the time and the people, with so much potential to develop as Sam continues to strive within the confines of a corrupt regime, as the last days of the Raj burn as a backdrop. But it’s one of those historical crime novels where the crime novel is very much propped up by the history, and the actual plot would be seen as threadbare outside of its colourful context. In fact, it almost feels as if all of that description might be to blame for the inconsistent pacing – perhaps Sam is only painfully dragging out the plot to give the author time and space to tell the more fascinating story which lingers in the background.
Our protagonist, Sam Wyndham, is an English detective thrown out of his depth into the sordid mysteries of colonial Calcutta. At first glance he appears as the classic White Saviour archetype, a friend to the downtrodden and a thorn in the side of the established elite, and it’s clear that he certainly sees himself in that way. Perhaps the author does, as well. But his attitude on that front varies wildly, and his moods seem to swing from scene to scene: one day he is sympathetic of the natives and appalled by racial segregation, enough to make him physically violent, but then the next he is exactly as dismissive as that man he was going to hit.
He is also needlessly rude to others he considers beneath him, such as taking pleasure in making a harmless secretary’s job miserable. It soon becomes apparent that he is only a friend to the meek when they are falling over themselves to serve him (and even then, he’s perfectly happy to take advantage of them without thanks), and more than happy to order them around when they show independent thought. Or that he’s only a supporter of equality when he’s trying to sleep with somebody, with a nice note of misogyny in the way the scant few female characters are treated and described: pretty girls deserve politeness, but there is no respect for the women whose ugliness is always carefully noted.
Sam is also more traditionally flawed: the author has added a weakness for drugs and women, but they are so blatant that they take away from his character rather than adding to it. He is supposedly mourning a dead wife, whose name is occasionally tacked on to other thoughts as if he or the author is suddenly remembering she exists, but he forgets about her when one suspect has legs he can stare at. Because this is a wish fulfilment novel she is, of course, flattered by the attention, and available whenever he needs her. He neglects his own case to chase after her with his tongue hanging out, and even shares sensitive details with her despite the fact she might be involved… whilst being utterly and needlessly hostile to all other suspects, simply because they don’t have shapely calves.
He has an addiction to opium, which could have been played in an interesting way, but instead it’s just a plot device for him to made bad decisions repetitively. When the plot needs to be slowed down, he simply gets high, and it’s always a mistake which anyone could have seen coming. He goes to an opium den, leaving himself vulnerable in a dangerous part of town, is obviously then threatened by thugs, and has to be saved by his rickshaw wallah. He then… just goes back to the same place again, with no more precaution… and yes, he is again attacked by thugs… and again rescued by the same deux ex rickshaw! None of this adds anything to the plot, except to lay bare how thick our protagonist is.
That’s the real problem, for all his other character flaws. A successful detective novel has to keep its star at least one pace ahead of the reader, but Sam lags painfully behind from the start. He’s introduced as this decorated officer from Scotland Yard, and starts by turning up some promising leads, but then just… doesn’t follow them up. He is inexplicably hostile to some characters from the get-go, marking them out to the readers as Bad Guys in the absence of a real reason to suspect them, but then does nothing to look into them. Instead, after spending the start of the book telling everyone the case is more complex than the obvious answer, he suddenly swivels and decides it’s an even more obvious answer because someone else tells him it is. It’s clearly a lie, but he does no more detective work to even check it, just spending the whole middle of the book digging that hole to nowhere.
Meanwhile, the actual leads he’d found are just… sitting there, unfollowed. He finally picks them up at the very end of the book as a last resort, and they immediately lead to the truth, as anyone could have told him they would. In what other detective story would we find out there was a witness to the murder on page 13 and not get around to asking them about it until page 291, at which point they say there was someone else, and not bother to look for them until page 363, when they just tell us the solution. There are only nine pages to the book after that. It seems the body of the novel is just there to delay a rather simple solution, all of the history and description to cover up a paper-thin plot. Everything is set up in the first 100 pages, and from there you could skip straight to the last 20 and miss nothing.
In place of actually talking to people – witnesses, the person the victim had started spending most of his time with, the people who we know are hiding something – Sam’s approach to solving crimes seems largely to be to turn up and angrily accuse random people of committing them, with no evidence, and then taking their denial at face value and bouncing off to accuse somebody else… but somehow never the actual culprits, who were flagged as suspicious from the start. There is never any real deduction of the solution, just blind guesswork, trial and error as he throws a dart at a random suspect and decides to rush over to accuse them: as if cases could be solved just by process of elimination, accusing all of the suspects until one of them happily confesses.
The actual fact-finding work is done off-camera, by other characters who actually discover Clues, and simply hand them to Sam – whilst you were away, I spoke to x and found out y! Almost none of that important work happens on screen, and on the rare occasion that they do make a clever breakthrough, such as noticing inconsistencies in a story, it’s just a set-piece which has no effect on the plot. For example, one suspect denies talking with someone, but also implies that they did. Sam is asked if he wants to interrogate them, but he just says ‘later’ – of course, they never talk to them again, never bother to find out what happened, and the whole interrogation scene is worthless and could have been cut with no impact on the plot. Another suspect denies talking to someone, but Sam is told that they did, and also that they made an important telephone call that they neglected to mention – of course, Sam doesn’t bother finding out who it was to, even though it would have solved the case within 100 pages.
It's a wonderful setting, the place and the time and the people, with so much potential to develop as Sam continues to strive within the confines of a corrupt regime, as the last days of the Raj burn as a backdrop. But it’s one of those historical crime novels where the crime novel is very much propped up by the history, and the actual plot would be seen as threadbare outside of its colourful context. In fact, it almost feels as if all of that description might be to blame for the inconsistent pacing – perhaps Sam is only painfully dragging out the plot to give the author time and space to tell the more fascinating story which lingers in the background.