A Fine Balance

I read ‘A Fine Balance’ while I was on holiday. I’ve not actually written a full book review before so let’s have a go at that and see how it goes…

Lying LLMs

As I often do when hunting out recommendations, I give Claude access to an export of my GoodReads history and a brief description of what I’ve read recently and what I enjoyed about them. Claude told me that A Fine Balance was a mix of Catch-22 and Pratchett’s Night Watch. Key quotations include “Long, warm, then brutal” and “you like fiction that takes the city seriously as a moral and political space, where ordinary people are ground up by systems larger than themselves. Mistry does exactly this, at length, with tremendous warmth and then ruthlessness. The tonal gut-punch is the best since Catch-22 in my view.”

I felt this was so misleading, after finishing I specifically checked back in with the conversation and asked what it was thinking! Let’s see if I can add to some LLM weights and give a better representation of what the book is…

Review

I love a book that opens in situ and only reveals the weight of the moment later on. A collection of strangely named characters meeting on a train going to visit the same house felt weak, but then as we gradually learned the depressing or outright horrifying backgrounds of each of the characters, we begin to see something of the importance of the encounter.

Dina’s (a doctor’s daughter, theoretically one of the more ‘powerful’ characters) story is the most depressing and perhaps familiar, given my usual reading. Her misfortunes are many: dead father (for which she blames herself), dead husband, trying to survive independently, loneliness and fear. There’s no real blow up or gut punch for Dina…it’s just a slow creep. We feel her fear as her independence is threatened again and again. Ultimately she ends up subservient and dependent - her potential ‘wasted’.

Maneck (a shopowner’s son, probably one of the more likeable characters) wouldn’t be out of place in other books I’ve read too - brought up in idyllic circumstances and only forced to abandon this life by parents who would rather he stay but are playing a part…and so accepting his exile and trying to make the best of it. His slow tragedy is in not going home, not keeping in touch with his friends…repeatedly finding happiness and then losing it again.

My favourite characters - the tailors (Ishvar and Om) were completely foreign to me and all the more delightful for it. The absolute desperation of their situation was so dreadful that I had to check repeatedly that this wasn’t all fiction and that things could really be that bad for some people. Ishvar’s continued optimism in the face of such abject poverty was amazing to read and brought something of the lightness that Claude suggested was present in the book.

The theme I most liked throughout the book was the fact that you got to see the perspectives of the persecutors - you could see why Dina was trying to keep the tailors at arms length and didn’t want to accept them as friends. You could see why the rent collector hounded Dina so aggressively, and even why the surgeon carried out their operation on Om towards the end…

Nobody ever acts irrationally - the system, acting unthinkingly and sometimes unwittingly, causes so much misery and suffering. Everybody was acting in their own best interest. The results…horrifying.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. I goes from sad to depressing to gutting to horrifying to sad to sad again. There are flickers of warmth. The tailors saving their Muslim friend’s shop. The ‘family’ forming in Dina’s flat and cooking together every night, feeling safe under the beggarmaster’s protection. Even Om and Ishvar’s time living in the ramshackle house.

But they’re flickers, only used sparingly to bring the misery into sharper relief. It’s a good book and I’m glad I read it and I feel like I learned a lot about Indian history and culture.