Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri (Oneworld, £14.99)
It is a common move in post-colonial novels to revisit a previous story. JM Coetzee’s Foe and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea each return to a canonical literary work—Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre—and tell their tales again, from a new perspective. Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel performs this trick with not one but two major predecessors. Odysseus Abroad centres on Ananda, a young Bengali student in London in the mid-1980s. As even the briefest summary will make clear, this short novel is built on Homer’s Odyssey and, through it, Ulysses by James Joyce. Ananda is far from home, with a stomach ulcer and a poetically naive sensibility, and one Friday he goes to meet with his tutor, and then on up to Belsize Park to visit his uncle Radhesh. The two slightly buffoonish men stroll across north London and then take a tube to Bloomsbury.
This stroll occupies the bulk of this gentle, restrained novel, and while there is pleasure in the echoes—the tutor, for example, is called Nestor—it is never clear what is at stake. Sometimes Ananda corresponds to Telemachus and sometimes to Odysseus. The Cyclops does not appear, which is a shame; looking at a kebab, Ananda wonders: “Could these be the progeny of the food mentioned adoringly in the Iliad?” Despite a certain amount of small-talk about homesickness and the relations between expatriate communities in London, this novel feels less post-colonial than colonial, and—in its rhapsodies over the transient English weather and the excitements of the London Underground—the product of a previous age.
