The Village
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The long-awaited follow-up to the critically acclaimed, Booker longlisted Gifted, a provocative novel about an experimental open prison in India and the havoc a team of journalists wreaks on the delicate moral code of the inmates.
After a long journey from England, Ray Bhullar arrives early on a winter morning at the gates of a remote Indian village called Ashwer which will be her home for the next three months. The door of the hut she will share with Serena, her English co-worker, is a loose sheet of metal, the windows simple holes in the walls. Beyond the lockless door, village life goes on as usual. And yet, the village is anything but normal. Despite the domestic chores being carried out, cooking, fetching water and sewing and laundering linens, Ashwer is a village of murderers, an experimental open prison. And when Ray and her crew take up residence, to observe and to make a documentary, it seems that they are innocent visitors into a violent world, on a mission to hold the place up to viewers as the ultimate example of tolerance. But the longer Ray and her colleagues stay and their need for drama intensifies, the line between innocence and guilt begins to blur and an unexpected and terrifying new kind of cruelty emerges. A mesmerizing and heartfelt tale of manipulation and personal morality, Nikita Lalwani's new novel brilliantly exposes how truly frail our moral judgment can be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Lalwani's solid but slight novel, BBC filmmaker Ray Bhullar travels to India to make a documentary about Ashwer, an experimental penal community of men and women, all convicted murders, many of whom live with their families and travel without guards to jobs in nearby towns. A "prison with no perimeter," Ashwer is built on the idea that "trust begets trust." As Ray, her camerawoman Serena, and the film's on-camera presenter, Nathan, settle into Ashwer, they must gain the trust of the inmate-residents and find the stories that will lend their film drama. They must also navigate the professional and romantic tensions that flare up among the crew. Ray is a well-constructed character, but insufferably earnest; Lalwani is on surer ground with the less deep but more real characters of Nathan, Serena, and the glib warden, Sujay Sanghvi. It's an interesting glimpse at an unusual world, an exploration of the notions of guilt and atonement, and Lalwani shines in showing how documentarians manufacture drama. Still, the problems of three affluent filmmakers cannot compete with the stories of some of Ashwer's inmates (like the woman in an arranged, abusive marriage who killed her husband's mistress). Though Lalwani (Gifted) is at times too timid, her prose is evocative and excellent.
