What, for me, makes this successful is that he slowly and gently takes the reader into the depths of the dream-like world they live in. Thayil opens the story in the 1970s in Rashid's opium house where his regulars, including the narrator, in Indian student named Dom, interact with Rashid and the memorable character of Dimple, a eunuch who expertly prepares the pipes. A cover quotation links the book to a similar vein (OK, that's a poor choice of words in the circumstances) to Trainspotting and that's not far from the mark. It's not a book that the Bombay/Mumbai tourist office will be keen to promote. In Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil pulls this off surprisingly well for me, although it's fair to say that it won't be everyone's taste. The challenge is to make the induced events interesting and meaningful to the, presumably, non-induced reader. Novels about narcotic substances are notoriously hard to pull off. Like a troubled dream, Thayil's poetic style can ramble and narcotic novels are always tricky to pull off but this one works better than many. Summary: Thayil's Booker longlisted novel uses the emergence of heroin over opium as a metaphor for the changes in Bombay/Mumbai.
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