THE CAULIFLOWER

by Nicola Barker

William Heinemann, 328p, £16.99

Review by David Robinson

“In the beginning,” writes Nicola Barker, “was the word. And the word was Calcutta.” Except, Barker being Barker, and one of the most excitingly and exhaustively non-linear novelists around, that's no more its beginning than her tenth novel is about a cauliflower. Indeed, in her work generally stories lack clear beginnings; rather, they have hundreds of them, and so the novelist has to hop around, bird-like, picking up twiglets of possible beginnings to stick into the nest of possible middles and ends.

So: we're in 1849, and inside the mind of rich widow Rani Rashmoni, who is about to build a massive temple to Kali, Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, near the city we know as Calcutta or Kolkata but which in Bengali means “field of Kali”. We also flit promiscuously inside the minds of her acolytes and feminist film star playing her a century later, and – because all their lives are inseparable from stories of the Puranas and the Mahabrabata – into the lives of the main gods of Hinduism too.

Yet all of this is just background. At the novel's core is a fictionalised biography of illiterate guru Sri Ramakrishna (1836-86), chief worshipper at Rani's temple, whose devotion to her reaches near-mythical proportions, and whose life, Barker reveals in the afterword, has fascinated her for much of her own.

Barker has written about charismatic religious leaders and their followers before, notably in Behindlings (2001), but whereas there they were the grotesque eccentrics of her own baroque imagination, set in against a background of near-contemporary Canvey Island, here the challenge is of an altogether different magnitude. Not only has she to to fit her story into Bengali history and the geography – which most writers who, like her, have never ever been to Calcutta wouldn't even dream of attempting – but she has to flesh out Ramakrishna's ecstatic mysticism. To show, for example, what is meant in Vedantic theology by nirvikalpa samadhi – the state in which the soul (usually, but not always, in death) is unified with God. All this, and with a historically real person and no small amount of comedy too.

Such audacity comes with a style to match: the narrative by the guru's nephew Hriday is constantly interrupted by haiku, stage directions, authorial interjections, letters and theatrical dialogue, and even an (almost) blank age for meditation. Not everything works: some cultural cross-referencing seem too forced, sometimes (as in chapter headings such as “An enquiry into the essential nature of farina pudding”) playfulness slides into pretentiousness, and the guru's encounters with those of little faith (always outfoxed, out-thought, out-prayed) are invariably repetitive. Even the book's title, alluding to a documented anecdote about the guru eating a cauliflower despite warnings that it gave him wind, is oddly ponderous, and not even (Kali-flower) a particularly good implied pun.

More important, though, is the way in which she opens up a mindset usually incomprehensible to secular westerners, in which education can be dismissed as something only wage monkeys value, where reason doesn't matter, innocence can count as wisdom and the gods treated like family members. Hriday notes of his uncle that “He could not see the point in any human pursuit if it didn't lead directly to God”, but to Sri Ramakrishna nearly everything did. Everything, that is, apart from such things as sex (his marriage was, we are told, blissful but unconsummated) and money, which are part of the earthly realm of maya, an inconsequential, transitory dream.

How do you imagine a life lived completely on those terms? How do you take all of that theology and history, explain it to the sceptical western mind, and pare it down into “something deliciously condensed, like a sweet, biographical mango compote”?

Barker's best answer comes in a scene in which she imagines a swift flying over Rani's temple in 1855. Swifts, being bird-brained, miss everything that counts in our world, so she provides it with a microscopic camera, and gives a commentary both on what we're seeing, and what we would see if we could glimpse both the past and future, if we were held (“Oh my, oh my, oh my”) by the hand of God.

Swifts, apparently, can't feed on the ground, as their feet are unsuited to walking on it; instead,they live almost entirely on the wing. As such, they are an almost perfect metaphor for Barker's dazzling, and defiantly non-pedestrian style. Despite a few minor flaws, this exuberantly imaginative novel novel about mysticism takes flight with panache. (752w)