Neel Mukherjee / Features / Untitled Books

“I don’t feel English at all. I couldn’t write about it unless it was cut with something else, I’d feel a total fraud.”

Neel Mukherjee

Neel Mukerjee's first novel, A Life Apart, is attracting widespread acclaim both here and abroad, he just wishes he'd started it sooner, he tells Beth Jones.

"I-didn't-sleep-last-night-I-was-on-the-red-eye-flight-I've-only-just-got-home-but-I've-had-four-cups-of-tea-not-coffee-I'm-allergic-to-coffee-isn't-that-strange-so-I-might-be-ok-but-forgive-me-if-I-don't-make-any-sense," Neel Mukherjee's voice tumbles down the phone line from his home in Clapham, South London.

It's early morning and 39-year-old Mukherjee has just returned from a trip to India where he has been staying with his brother in Bombay; seeing friends in Delhi; and revisiting the streets of Calcutta, where he was born and raised: "I left the place such a long time ago that I went back to familiarise myself with it again, to walk the streets, take pictures of houses and buildings," he says.

Calcutta, with its "incessant noise of traffic and horns and human living," is the setting for the opening part of Mukherjee's first novel, A Life Apart. The book, which was published in Indian in 2008 under the title Past Continuous, has just snatched the country's most prestigious literary prize, the Vodafone Crossword Award, from a shortlist of authors including Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a triumphant validation of a book which was very nearly not published at all. "I wrote it in 2000/2001 and no one wanted it. My wonderful agent kept sending it out and everyone turned it down before Picador in India picked it up," Mukherjee explains. But even then it wasn't plain sailing: the very first review of the book was, Mukherjee remembers, far from favourable: "They didn't like the font size and so gave it a savage review. I was really annoyed for about fifteen minutes and then I was able to laugh it off. That kind of review is easy to brush off. Besides, it came out to mostly very good reviews and then won the Indian equivalent of the Booker which was a dream."

The book will be published in the UK at the end of this month and is already creating a buzz: Ali Smith has hailed it as "incisive and poetic, sensual and intelligent," and The Sunday Telegraph has listed it as one to watch in 2010. Telling the stories of two very different migrants, the book interweaves England of the 1990s with Bengal of the 1900s: Ritwik is a young gay Indian student who has fled Calcutta for Oxford University and is determined to start a new life in modern Britain; Miss Gilby is a middle-aged Englishwoman in Bengal on the eve of India's first partition. Both are figures far from home struggling with the unknown. Miss Gilby is desperate to be immersed "into the intimate India" while Ritwik, exploring the streets of Oxford late one night, observes: "This is not Calcutta, this is the country of psychopathic serial killers, of thousands of AIDS-infected people, of twisted criminals the papers write about almost every day".

"I had migrant literature very much in mind," Mukherjee recalls. "I wanted to cross the flight paths of two immigrants in two different directions and then see how their stories would interact. The aim was to take quite common forms - such as the migrant novel, the Raj novel - and then see if I could throw all the pieces up in the air and form a new design." The result, according to Boyd Tonkin of The Independent, is that Mukherjee "smashes the partitions dividing several spurious genres" and he predicts its publication will "make a deep mark".

Much will be made of Mukherjee's migrant slant, but what stands out about this book is the structure - the way in which he has successfully managed to stitch two entirely divergent tales together so that one never overtakes, or submerges, the other. "The idea of a dual narrative came after I had started writing," he says. "I read A.S. Byatt's Possession and it made a very deep mark on me and I wanted to do something ambitious and complex like that. I started doing Ritwik's story first, then I wrote Miss Gilby's story and tried to make sure the two join in an interesting way". As a child, Ritwik commits to memory the entry "counterpoint" from his new encyclopaedia, repeating the words "note-against-note, or point-against-point," in a rapid chant, and it was this idea of counterpoint Mukherjee wanted to emulate in his writing: "One point will often echo another. Ritwik being taught by its mother in an aggressive, violent way finds its total counterpoint in Miss Gilby teaching in a gentle, affectionate way," he explains.

Ritwik is a fiction of Mukherjee's imagination, but the character of Miss Gilby he took from the Indian Nobel Prize winning Rabindranath Tagore's novel The Home and the World, of which Satyajit Ray made an award-winning film in 1984. In both, Miss Gilby plays a fleeting role. In A Life Apart, she is rewritten as the novel's heroine but Mukherjee says, he has no idea why he chose to re-imagine her story. "I don't think most writers have access to this information. I don't know why this book began or why I picked these characters," he says. Neither Ritwik nor Miss Gilby are the characters of whom Mukherjee is most fond. This accolade falls to the elderly Anne Cameron, with whom Ritwik lives in London. "In an earlier version, I killed her off. But I couldn't live with that. She is the main character for me. I am so close to her, I had to rewrite it," he laughs.

While there are similarities between Mukherjee and Ritwik (both Calcutta-born, Oxford-educated men who choose to make their lives in England), the writer insists there is no particular autobiographical bent to his work. "Most writers write from life. But while characters start from life, somewhere along the line, they become different. It's difficult to calibrate," he says. He began the book whilst studying on the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. It was not, he says, a worthwhile experience. "I think the advantage of creative writing school is not for learning how to write, but how to add to your address book," he says. "Nowadays, you can't get an agent unless you went to one of the respected creative writing schools - UEA or Bath. So I went strategically, and that was born out in the result. It was useful, in a negative way."

The course represents the end of a long road of scholarship for Mukherjee: an undergraduate degree in Calcutta was followed by one at Oxford, then a BA, then an M.Phil. at Cambridge and finally a PhD. Since then, he's worked as a fiction reviewer, writing for, amongst others, the Times and TIME Magazine. His credentials are overwhelmingly impressive on paper, but Mukherjee admits: "I am slightly ashamed of them. They were wasted years. I should have been writing in those five years. If I'd started writing then, just think..."

But, as Mukherjee turns 40 this March, with one book behind him and his second underway, the writing now takes centre stage. "Reviewing has always been a means to make money. I do enjoy it, but I may review a lot less now simply because of time," he says. And if he had to review his own work? "I don't know how I'd review A Life Apart" he says, "but there is one thing that I think I'd highlight, which no one yet has, which is that this books is really about mothers and sons." The novel certainly weaves around these filial relationships - Ritwik and his dead mother; Anne Cameron and her dead son - but what stands out is Ritwik's sexuality and the increasingly fraught situations into which it leads him: sex with heroin addicts; acid attacks in Kings Cross; arms dealing in Park Lane. "[When it was published in India,] it was called India's first gay novel," says Mukherjee, "which it isn't, but that's what the chatter around it was about. I worried slightly, about how it would be received there. But needlessly, as it turned out because it wasn't at all as controversial as I thought it would be. I've been gone from India for a long time and in my absence the middle classes and the media have moved on [from such issues] in a way in which I hadn't imagined."

Since Mukherjee arrived in Oxford on a scholarship, it is the UK which he has called home and he has no plans to return to Calcutta: "I don't much care for living in India. It's a difficult country to live in. I can only return as a tourist," he says. But while his body might remain in England, his mind is still in the streets of the subcontinent. "I don't feel English at all. I couldn't write about it unless it was cut with something else, I'd feel a total fraud," he says. "Besides which there's something about English fiction that shuts doors. It's all middle class anxieties about adultery or surgeons worried about the Iraq war. English fiction is a cul-de-sac. Anything worth reading is set in other places." For Mukherjee, that other place is India, "an infinite source of inspiration and riches," and for the time being, it is serving him well. Part of the reason for his all-too-recent trip to India was research for his second book, a three-generation family saga set amidst its streets, and also for his first graphic novel which is currently being illustrated. As Mukherjee jokes: "You can take the boy out of Calcutta but you can't take Calcutta out of the boy".

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A Life Apart is published by Constable & Robinson.

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Wednesday, 27 January, 2010