A State of Narcopolis

The first thing that attracted me to Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis was its brilliant cover, and it certainly fits what was a great read. I often wonder about covers: does the author get a say in them, and when the book is rebranded who decides it's time to get rid of an old cover and move onto a new one? If I ever have novels published I would hate it if they were given bland covers, or had covers with images on them that I didn't like, or that I thought altered the way in which my work would be perceived. Narcopolis has a cover that it makes it look like a druggy book about India informed by centuries of its culture, and that's exactly what it is. It reminds me of Trainspotting, Salman Rushdie, and Naked Lunch with the meandering insanity slightly tempered, and this combination could never be a bad thing. Narcopolis, combined with the recent BBC series Welcome to India (which showed the hand-to-mouth existence of some extremely poor people, doing anything they could to eke out an illegal living), has renewed my interest in India, but though I would love to visit it I think it wouldn't be so much a holiday as a difficult insight into the gross privileges we enjoy in the West.

My November novel, still untitled, is coming along very well. I'm now up to 19,000 words, having written every day since last Monday, easily a record for me. I used to find myself riddled with excuses not to write: bemoaning the lack of comfort and writerly atmosphere in my house and reasoning that when I move next year everything will be fine and I'll be able to write without problems, but now all those cares have drifted away as I'm desperate each evening to sit down and see where my story goes. Then an hour later I've done my 2000 words, and my story has new characters and incidents that if I rewound time and sat down again to write would probably never exist. I haven't read a word of it yet, and I'm excited at the end of the month to look back on it and see what I came up with. It does have something of a plot now: it's about a boy who overcomes his supreme shyness to learn how to manipulate others to his will, and leaves for Los Angeles when he's sixteen to eventually become the leader of a cult. Beyond that, the story is still writing itself as I go along. It's all very exciting!