Apr 17, 2010 09:56 AM
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I picked up three "first time" novels and Immortals of Meluha - Amish, was the first of the three I read, reason, eyeballs.
While browsing thru the shelves of Landmark the book cover caught my eye. Shiva facing the other side with a trishul on his back sort of spoke about what one could look for inside the book, a catchy cover that's sure to grab the eyeballs in the clutter of books
The abstract of the book"The Story of the Man, Whom Legend turned into a GOD", hmmm interesting, "1900 BC. In what modern Indians mistakenly call the Indus Valley Civilization". Read no further this was possibly the book for me and I put it into the shopping cart....
The book starts with Shiva, the Tibetian tribal, very much at home at the foot of Mt. Kailash near the Mansarovar lake, deep in thoughts and from there the book just zooms past a series of incidents involving Shiva and his tribals being taken in as immigrants by the Land of Meluha that is ruled by the descendants of Lord Rama, Shiva finding an able friend in Nandi, the love story between Shiva and Sati, the Chandravanshi threat to Meluha, Somras and the mother of all battles with a twist in the tale in the end. Excellent plot, refreshingly new ideas and very dexterous weaving of mythological characters into the 1900 BC Indus Valley society.
The book is fast...at places too fast...may be Amish was too impatient to get going.....in a mythological book some time needs to be given to create a vivid picture of the settings......some of the descriptions sounded too modern and not that of 1900 BC.....
The language of the book is what really disappointed me. Shallow at places (a mythological book cannot have words from the moden lingo being spoken by the characters), portions of the book appear pretty "filmi". Thank God there were no song sequences. The book could have been easily set in 20th Century Bangalore. I got transported to Lal Bagh more often than to Indus Valley while reading the book. Content, visualization and characterization. All three needs tweaking to be sent back to 1900 BC instead of 1900 AD.
As mentioned above the author seems to have got impatient at many places. Some situations demand a deeper dive which was missing and the story just skims through evenly across all situations and incidents. The pace has to vary.
Having said the above, a very good "first book" by Amish, much better than many others I have read off-late. The concept is great, humanizing a god and that generates a lot of empathy for the characters. And to add to the drama, this is the first of the trilogy so two more books to look forward to.
I hope Amish is looking for feedback and is able to do better justice to the character called Shiva, a Tibetan tribal, an incarnation of THE SHIVA, and one of my favorite gods :-)
Cheers
Vinod
