Book Review: The Guide by R.K. Narayan

Midway through reading R.K.Narayan's The Guide, I noticed a couple of things about the story - one, how the story was narrated, and two, the absense of any long detailed description of anything. It was as if Narayan, was trying to writing a story as he thought of it and didn't want to waste any time writing down the details. The book has a very nice non-linear style - starting with Raju's release from jail and then switching back and forth between his life before prison and his current life, until the two narratives meet into the present. Starting with the prison part gives the story a nice momentum that keeps the reader engrossed because they wamt to find out why he went to prison in the first place.

I'm not a writer (as in - I haven't written any books), but I do like to write and I've attempted to write short fictional pieces, and one challenge I've always faced while writing them is the part about the details - details about the characters, of the place and surroundings, of the times the characters live in; it's something I've never been able to do, which probably explains why I haven't really completed any story I've started. A good writer brings to the table a good sense of observation. Take V.S. Naipaul for instance. He's a favourite author of mine, mainly because of his style of writing, which is very detail oriented. When Naipaul is writing about a walk that one of his characters takes, he'll provide enough detail that you could paint an entire picture based on the description; he describing not only the road on which he (or one of his characters) is walking on, but also the color of the road, the trees that stand along the road complete with the names of every tree the character encounters on that walk. R.K. Narayan in contrast avoids most of the details. He doesn't let that come in the way of the story. In his foreword to The Guide, Michael Gorra mentions the contrast between Naipaul and Narayan. In trying to come up with a reasoning behind R.K.Narayan's style of writing, Michael Gorra also mentions an interesting anecdote of how two of Anita Desai's students (one of which was an Indian) when given a writing assignment submitted stories both involving a kitchen, yet were very different in the manner in which they approached it - the Indian student skipped all details of what the kitchen looked like, while the others account was very detail oriented. The Indian explained his lack of details with the rationale that every Indian knows what a kitchen looks like, so there wasn't any need to explain it again. While this may not explain why R.K. Narayan avoids details, it is an interesting observation none the less.

Another thing that stands out in The Guide is that loose ends are left untied. We never find out about what happens to Rosie/Nalini, except that she is famous or her husband "Marco". I expected her to be brought back into the story in the end, but that doesn't happen; Narayan keeps Raju the focus of the story the whole time. While The Guide is the R.K. Narayan's first book that I've read, I was a little intrigued by the title of some of his other books - The Vendor of Sweets, The Financial Expert, The English Teacher, all of which seem to involve characters and a job they have, in many ways similar to the Guide. They are already on my reading list!