However, he finds that virtually everyone, from the department of public security to the hospital staff, and even journalists and family members, believe that Senthil died of natural causes. The writer, Christy Andrapper, scion of an important local family, seeks to discover more about the crime.

At a nearby table, a young man named Senthil is shot fatally in the chest and his body spirited away to hospital by a boat-ambulance.

It does not take the reader long to figure out that its writer zooms in on a crime that takes place at a coffee shop where he is chatting to a female friend. Set in Diego Garcia, part of an archipelago off the coast of south India, the action commences due to a mysterious manuscript arriving in Benyamin’s email account. Like diseases, weaknesses, too, are in our blood.” Given the specific structure of the novel, both the actual and fictional writers may be forgiven a certain level of self-consciousness, though such a novelistic approach obviously departs from the safer, more traditional structure of crime fiction.īenyamin’s latest novel has its moments, but disappoints on many scores It could be that writers become weakened by the very intensity of their experiences. For instance his work is peppered with claims such as “From the hotbed of experiences I return to the writing desk. One of these episodes involves Benyamin’s receiving the manuscript written by the protagonist.īenyamin appears quite unapologetic about implicitly emphasising that on the level of meta-discourse the book is primarily about the art of creating fiction, and indeed he reminds one of this frequently. However, readers will initially be somewhat confused as to whether the first person being referred to in the book is Benyamin himself or a fictional narrator in point of fact it is both, since the novel is partly a narrative recounted by a fictional character (created by Benyamin) set within the framework of a series of episodes in Benyamin’s own life. In spite of the fact that the inept translation has caused the writing to come across as choppy and clumsy, the plot engages the reader’s attention almost from the very beginning. The novelist originally wrote this in his native tongue, Malayalam, but given that he has acquired considerable readership after the success of Goat Days, it is fitting that an English translation of his novels be available to those who cannot understand Malayalam but still wish to appreciate Benyamin’s work. The most recent English novel by Benyamin (Benny Daniel), Yellow Lights of Death is an excursion into crime territory.

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