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In THE HOUSE OF BLUE MANGOES, David Davidar's embroidered prose at
times achieves sublime heights. Adept at setting the scene, he
lavishly communicates a sense of place and skillfully explores the
confluence of home, identity, and familial ties. Passionate
affairs, assassinations, caste wars, and household acrimony are
inextricably linked to the Dorai family's home --- the house of
blue mangoes of the title --- in the ocean-side village of
Chevathar. No matter how far members of the clan may travel,
they're always drawn back to their ancestral land.

Sweeping, epic and wholly ambitious, Davidar's 500-plus-page novel
chronicles three generations of the Dorai clan. Covering 1899-1947,
a turbulent period that saw the fall of the British Raj, the
turmoil of caste wars, the rise of Gandhi, and the culmination of
independence, the story is at turns heartbreaking, humorous and
moving, but attempts entirely too much. As a result, the plot lacks
cohesion and most of the characters --- particularly the women ---
fall flat.

The story focuses on the Dorai men, and the inescapable conflicts
between father and son that tragically play out each generation,
from Solomon to Daniel to Kannan. Davidar goes to great lengths to
detail the unlucky lot of Indian women, so it seems somewhat
appropriate that he too relegates his female characters to the
margins. The only memorable one is Charity, Solomon's wife. In one
exquisitely crafted scene, Davidar effectively portrays the acute
pain and anxiety Charity feels for her daughter on her wedding day
--- one of the few truly genuine moments in the novel.

In a world irrevocably shaken by historical events, most of his
characters remain curiously unscathed. Too entangled in their own
familial disputes to notice the world around them changing, the
characters come across as superfluous, ignorant and entirely
self-centered. For example, while Gandhi is busy becoming a
household name, Daniel embarks on a ridiculous expedition to taste
every mango in India for the sole purpose of confirming his opinion
that Chevathar's fabled blue variety are indeed, as he suspects,
the best in the land. Only Aaron, Daniel's brother, is swept up in
the tide of history. He joins the struggle for freedom with
catastrophic results.

Despite the flaws in character development, Davidar's prose, for
the most part, flows at a rapid, fluid clip. At times, however, his
usually lyrical writing plods along at a most cumbersome pace --- a
tiresomely detailed description of how to brew tea immediately
comes to mind. But the author eloquently conveys the raw beauty and
power of the Indian landscape, and the cycle of the seasons and day
turning into night provide a sense of the wheel turning and the
steady progression of time.

This multigenerational family epic follows the tradition of Vikram
Seth's A SUITBALE BOY and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez's ONE
HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. The novel, however, possesses neither
the lucidity of Seth nor the sheer poetry of Márquez.

As a publisher at India's Penguin division, Davidar has watched
some of his country's finest writers blossom. With his debut novel,
he's making a bid to be included among the ranks of Seth, Arundhati
Roy, Rohinton Mistry, and Vikram Chandra. THE HOUSE OF BLUE
MANGOES, albeit an ambitious debut that shows promise for Davidar's
future works, fails to deliver.