Quotes of the Day

"A man's past is not simply a dead history," George Eliot wrote in the sweeping novel Middlemarch. "It is a still quivering part of himself." As an executive summary of A Life Apart — the complex, occasionally overwrought but ultimately satisfying fiction debut of TIME contributor Neel Mukherjee — that pretty much fits the bill. The book was first published as Past Continuous in India, where, along with Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, it was joint winner of the 2008 Vodafone Crossword Book Award, the country's most prominent prize for English-language writing. The newly entitled edition is slightly revised and tighter, with one chapter deleted and some structural changes near its conclusion.

Like his creator, the novel's central character Ritwik is gifted and from Kolkata — and desires above all to leave it (Mukherjee's loathing of his birthplace is on record). Thanks to an Oxford scholarship, our protagonist absconds to England — so far, so autobiographical — but, as in all good novels of identity and redemption, he is hotly pursued by his past, or what Mukherjee calls "the gratuitous tyranny of memory." In this case, it's more than a literary device. Flashbacks of Ritwik's dreadful childhood — hallucinations of his late abusive mother terrify him in his college room — animate the plot, driving Ritwik to seek a "snack of oblivion" in anonymous gay sex in public toilets. They also cause him to work through, on paper, his attitudes to his motherland, for interleaved with Ritwik's story is that of Miss Gilby, a peripheral character in Rabindranath Tagore's novel The Home and the World, whose life Ritwik reimagines in a book he is writing. He uses the story of Gilby, a middle-aged English governess to the family of a progressive official in early 20th century India, to revisit his country through the detached perspective of a foreigner.

As a prim, reserved and historic counterpoint to the youthful, debauched Ritwik, Gilby is not entirely a success. The drive of her narrative is weak in comparison to the drama, passion and unpredictability of Ritwik's existence, and for much of A Life Apart, the links between her story line and that of her maker are tenuous, leaving the reader at a loss as to how these two interrelate. Only in the book's second half, when Ritwik is living in London illegally, working part-time as a male prostitute and looking after the elderly, incontinent Anne Cameron in exchange for free lodging, do their narratives' symbiotic pas de deux finally become clear. Ritwik and Cameron's relationship forms the book's redemptive core, with Cameron's tragic family history intertwining with the story of Gilby.

While A Life Apart revolves around the past, the past is not the same as nostalgia. There is little romance or Proustian yearning here (although a childhood storybook fills Ritwik with "a strange longing"). But if Mukherjee is scathing about Ritwik's history in a city "that had leaped out of the pages of Dante and transposed east," he also refuses to extol Oxford as the site of Ritwik's apparent freedom. Ritwik ignores the university town's prettiness, fixating instead on the "s___-brown door" of the toilet cubicle he favors for his risky liaisons. And London, while offering the superficial promise of multiculturalism, is fundamentally plagued by racism.

Mukherjee summons place and character brilliantly and unflinchingly in pages redolent with detail. His metaphysical vision, of course, is just as acute. The book ends in Europe, not with Ritwik but with Gilby, who will ultimately outlast him. But even as she contemplates the future, seeking to leave behind the wreckage of recent events, she looks into the distance and sees "snow-scarred mountains" — a vision of turbulence and beauty, framed by the glass through which she views it. In bearing the marks of a tumultuous past, the human soul is a mirror, it would seem, of nature itself.

• Lara Day
• Torment, memory, anonymous sex: Neel Mukherjee's debut novel is a troubling page turner