When you have one of your books already made into a movie and pretty successful one at that, what do you do next? Write a better book! This is exactly what Vikas Swarup attempted to. Well, did he succeed? To find out we will have to wait and see if anyone makes a movie on this book. (I am sure, many of us read Q&A only after Danny Boyle made it into Slumdog Millionaire, and so did I.)
Going by the author’s intention, I can say that he definitely intended to make it "larger" than Q&A. Six Suspects traverses almost the whole of India, covers all "headline" items in the Indian media, celebrates most festivities in each region, and includes people from the most popular sects of life-politics, business, movie, etc. I guess!) In a way, this book is definitely larger.
Similar to his style in Q&A, Vikas leans very much on a real life news/events and characters for his "suspects" leaving very little for the audience to imagine. A few lines of description of a character and you sure have a well known face in mind-from politics, movies, mafia, etc. Even the snippets of incidents of "mowed down by BMW", "bar girl shot dead", "black buck hunting", are ALL incidents that have grabbed prime time. However, what Vikas does with these incidents is this- Makes the reader skim through pages without bothering to read full details. It was difficult for me to imagine "any character without bearing resemblance to someone living or dead" and "that was not purely coincidental."
Having said that, I don’t want to take away any credit from his ability to create the plot in the book. I did like the narrative, although it had switiching from first person to third person in a couple of instances. All, in all a very "Indian masala filmy book" which does not persuade you to take it very seriously at the sametime not allowing you to put it down.
May be the film (if it happens) will be better and characters razor sharp, unlike in the book.
Thanks for reading my review.
Cheers!
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