After completing this rather long book (601 pages) I found that I was left with a vast range of impressions of the book, which would make perfect sense considering that Rohinton Mistry tries to cover so much ground in his vast novel. I enjoyed the storyline that tells the history of the main characters and how they happen to end up at the same place.

Mistry's character development was uneven however. The character of Dina Dalal is the most highly developed personality. She is a beautiful widow in her 40s trying to maintain her independence is a society where a single woman would find survival difficult, even if they were Parsi. She is reserved and the tragic death of her young husband is a defining moment for her. Yet she does not go insane with grief, as did her mother when here physician father dies. Maneck Kohlah is developed well, especially in his youth, until the end of the story and Mistry selects to make a point about family and connectedness and thus sacrifices this character to the writer's agenda. I can certainly deal with sad situations in a novel, but when the sadness is constructed so as to convey a philosophical point, and then I grow weary. The two tailors, Ishvar Darji and his nephew Om Darji, are treated as individuals but also as types. They are from the lower castes and thus every possible hardship is heaped upon their heads to convey the immense social injustice and human cruelty present in Indian society during the 1974-75 political emergencies. To some extent the tragedies become so dramatic and so frequent that I kept wondering "what next can happen to these poor guys?'

A range of secondary colorful characters move the action forward, much like in a Charles Dickens or Jane Austin novel. These characters, some of which are eccentric and odd, however are meant to play a range of 'types' which includes beggars, prisoners, murderers, thugs, criminals, street performers, lawyers, business men, and religious types. They are entertaining to the extreme except for Mistry's tendency to have them voice political ideology. The character of Beggar master is a good example. Too quickly he warms to Dina, Maneck, Om, and Ishvar and tells them his sordid past and the horror of his profession whereby he buys children and mutilates them to become more profitable beggars. He even shows them his sketchbook where he designs beggar strategies and then mutilates other humans to fit the image he wishes to convey to elicit maximum charity and pity. He is a sculptor of pathos using human flesh as his medium.

Whereas the characters of Dina and Ishvar are relatively well developed, Maneck and Om both have sharp truncated treatment in the final passages of the book. Once Om is mutilated by the village leader who killed his parents and little sisters, he almost disappears from the narrative. We never hear his rage or his response or his reconciliation.

Thus we are left with the uneasy feeling that even Maneck and Om are types, meant more to make a political or socio-economic or social injustice point than to explore a personality and the response of that personality to the social and political conditions around them. Maneck seems to symbolize the new young Indian, pulled from their historic regional family roots and sent forth to become technicians. Maneck develops a surrogate family with Dina, Ishvar, and Om that serves him well for two years, but the 8 years he then spends in Dubai seem to completely disorient him. He views his parent's desires for him to leave the old life behind and become a technocrat in the new Indian economy as personal rejection. Thus Mistry not only wishes to convey to us the horrors of the Indian poor, the mass corruption in government, the large criminal element that preys on the poor, but Mistry also wants us to sense that the middle class is paying a price for modernization, which is alienation from their own children.

The narrative is a bit long and could have been shortened by 200 pages with no real loss to the overall novel. Yet the ending of the novel seems truncated and uneven. I was entertained throughout the entire novel but sometimes in a comic dark humor way that I just don't think Mistry intended. When a writer wishes to make a social justice point and makes that point by having gross social injustice heaped upon his main characters, the writer runs the risk of ridicule if the strategy is used too often.

This is absolutely the best book I have ever read. It is very well written and has memorable character with whom I became very close to. This book has left quite an impression on me with a new understanding of life in a third world country and how cruel life can be. My only complaint is that it seems as though Rohinton has speed through the ending and lacked the increadable detail that was through out the rest of the story.

This is one of the 15 best books I've read in my life. The writing is good, as is the character development and depth. It accurately portrays India, from what I've seen in traveling there and talking with people. It's entertaining and educating, not often combined well.
When I started it, I thought it was going to be like "The Glass Palace", which I read before going to Burma. But it's not a history of generations over great spans of time - it stops at a set of 4 characters after covering some of their predecessors and goes into depth on the lives of those 4.
Best $11 I've spent in a long time.
Paul