IN THE BACKWATERS OF KERALA, a young student gets involved in the Naxal movement. His friend, a lookalike, but in-nocent of politics, gets picked up by the po-lice and is killed in custody. Years later, justice is done. A common enough tale for the dark days of Emergency. But the fast-paced narra-tion, lucidity and intensely descriptive pas-sages makes C.P. Surendran’s debut novel a story well-told.

The note from the author explains the ker-nel of the novel—a true incident that “in-volves the custodial death of the young engi-neering student, Rajan, in 1976, and the long and lonely one-man war that his father, Echere Warrier, waged against the State to wrest justice of a sort…”.

It does come as a surprise, therefore, that the entire story unfolds through the eyes of John, the young Che-Guevera-like protagonist, almost the alter ego of Abe, the regular happy-go-lucky guitar-playing vic-tim of the State.

And it is John whose journey is explored in the novel—more so than that of Abe’s fa-ther, the old and tired Sebastian, shattered by the death of his only son. Ironically, it is Sebastian who comes alive through the pages and not John, who is merely the arche-type of the rootless hero, a revolutionary by default. Even his great romance seems only a half-hearted affair. And his great motive, the murder of his union leader father who was killed because he turned a conformist, taught him nothing. He is the weak charac-ter who has greatness thrust upon him, who even at the last page of a 326-page novel, fails to grow.

... contd.