Chronicle of an Hour and a Half review: A searing novel about mob violence in New India

In the best ways possible, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half (Context) is a remarkable ode to a lesser-known Gabriel García Márquez classic: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In Márquez’s novel, Santiago Nasar’s public trial and assassination is masterfully reported through multiple witnesses as an attempt by the narrator to investigate the crime. In Kannanari’s novel, the crime per se is postponed till the end, but it’s the anticipation and execution of unsettling mob violence which does not let you stop reading the book.

Kannanari’s debut novel (which is shocking to announce, given the masterful writing) sits you down and throws cold water at you every time your attention veers away from its sensational plot. Naturally, it is a perfect book for our age, and naturally — with chilling accuracy — it also satirizes our alarming world of digital overexposure and hyperreality. Where information is weaponized to cause riots and lynchings, accentuated with thumbs-up emojis.

Chronicles of women who hate their children

One of the most striking achievements of the novel is its ability to represent its women. In one of my favourite Sylvia Plath poems ‘Tulips,’ as the poetic persona recovers from a mental health crisis in a sanitarium, she is reminded of her family’s smiling photograph by the bed: ‘My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; / Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.’ Kannanari’s women, too, live with these hooks deeply embedded in their bodies. They confess to hating their ‘useless’ children, who ‘clung like bats’ to their breasts, and being repulsed by their insensitive and unavailable husbands.

Reyhana, one of the protagonists, suggests that the difference between men and women is that men will never understand the revulsion that women feel towards their husbands and sons. It is also Reyhana, who ‘transgresses’ the social order by taking on a lover 15 years her junior, at the age of 40. Reyhana’s daughters are just two years younger than her lover, and her husband works tirelessly in the Gulf to send money home to his wife and daughters, but when Reyhana sees Burhan for the first time, she describes the feeling as a desire that ‘took wings and rose from some deep repressed region inside me like a bird.’

Their illicit affair continues for two months, but as all provincial truths in provincial towns, it comes out… As another character related to Reyhana suggests: ‘a woman is honourable only so long as she isn’t smuggling in a man when her husband isn’t home. And once a woman chooses her own flesh over her husband’s, that woman is a bitch forever.’ This is the crisis at the centre of the novel, wherein a small town confronting deluge and relentless rain becomes a theatre of mob justice and retribution. And fundamentally a microcosm of the system of lynchings and cultural degradation so commonly present in our everyday lives.

Morals of a bereft Republic

In an age where legislations about registrations of live-in relationships have become normal, Kannanari’s novel indeed perfectly represents the inane absurdities of a real world. The news of the illicit affair breaks out on WhatsApp and soon mobilizes the men of Vaiga to take justice into their own hands — armed by blatant misogyny and misinformation. Hundreds of messages and videos and rousing calls to ‘justice’ flood the community groups on the application, and soon a mob of more than 500 bloodthirsty men seek to restore the balance of misogyny masked as ‘honour.’

Reyhana becomes an everywife — representing the besmirched purity of this community, a disgraced woman who initiated an “incestuous” sexual relationship with a man of her daughters’ age. But men also remark that one couldn’t blame Burhan because Reyhana, even at 40, has a ‘voluptuous’ figure (and worse). In so many ways, then, the novel also becomes an eerie reminder of the rotten core of patriarchy. What plays out in the novel is grizzly and disorienting, but hardly shocking. Kannanari’s prose is perfectly adept at representing the moral decrepitude of our world: He writes in a dazed urgency, employing a polyphonous narrative style that connects multiple voices in a tight and troubling confessional tone.

All characters register their opinions and differences in the first pronoun; they often seem to be talking to a camera as if in a police procedural. They repeat their words and sentences, often suggesting that they were not the criminal minds behind the mob violence. The sentences are as a rule short and staccato: registering their urgency and force in this manner. This is another massive achievement of the novel; how it manages to create (and expose) a fiction of non-compliance and moral rectitude through these ‘non-participating’ character narratives.

We see this too, so often in our lives. How we are so quick to abandon responsibility and suggest that we are not ‘them.’ The salacious appetite for scandal, forever whetted by our ability to declaim it; to call the violence that surrounds us and the violence we participate in, a mere dysfunction perpetrated by a few anti-social elements, not us.

Screening violence, streaming violence

Over the last few years, our screens have become conduits of hate and violence. We not only contribute (sometimes unknowingly) to the mythologisation of communal and socio-moral differences, but also normalise them by quickly turning our visions off from their theatrical releases. Does violence stop if we look away? For months now, the world has been bearing witness to the annihilation of a nation of people. We receive updates on the numbers of children murdered and people displaced on our screens.

In Kannanari’s novel too, the world is plummeting not for the lack of information. It is perhaps an atrocious, atrophied and yet belligerently misinterpreted idea of social justice which has pervaded our legislative and communal contracts. So, a mob often orchestrates and imposes its Frankenstein-like justice on the marginal communities.

In one of the strongest passages of the novel, Kannanari writes about how a young boy decides to join the mob, aroused by its promises of fame and self-gratification: “It was all very exciting and scary. A kind of sustained and unabsorbable shock, a feeling that made me feel wanted, feel afraid of myself. It all looked too manly for me, too much heart and lungs and hot blood. Like the body was no longer within the mind’s control and I ran like mad, like all the others, surrendering to the throbbing urgency of it all, and I was the mob.”

Kannanari’s book is then important in quite an urgent manner. As the nation becomes a cohesive mob of vigilantes — united in their common fictions of patriarchy, religious extremism and other fundamentalist madnesses — a book like this one finds a way to talk to each individual in that mob and wake them out of a toxic reverie. This is essential reading.