China Room: The heartstopping and beautiful novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

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SIMON: It is difficult, and I say this with admiration, to read about the total subjugation. You know, I would certainly feel free to call it a criminal subjugation of three women in a house. It's hard not to reflect on that part of what draws you in is it's hard for the great-grandson to understand how people lived. And yet, we're still - these generations are wound up with each other, aren't we? I liked how Sahota linked his motifs between the two storylines, and I also found the narrative suspenseful and interesting. Sure, many questions remain unresolved, and the novel could have been longer and could have given more details - in the end, I would have enjoyed to stay longer with the characters, because I wanted to know more about the years and people left out. The atmospheric writing is highly effective and touching.

Freidel, Frank Burt; Pencak, William, eds. (1994). The White House: The First Two Hundred Years. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1-55553-170-9. Sahota had not read a novel until he was 18 years old, when he read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children while visiting relatives in India before starting university. After Midnight's Children, Sahota went on to read The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy and The Remains of the Day. In an interview in January 2011, he stated: Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 flees from England to the deserted sun-scorched farm. Can a summer spent learning of love and of his family's past give him the strength for the journey home?The book is also underpinned by a sense of loss and of having to settle for a substitute or reduced status. More in-depth thoughts to follow on https://thereadersroom.org/ where I am serving as a member of a panel (to analyze the Booker Prize). The narrative of the second strand is underpowered, and illuminates the first one only tangentially. Mehar's unnamed great-grandson has been shipped off to his uncle's house in India from the UK one summer to undergo heroin withdrawal before starting university in the fall. After disappointing his controlling and judgmental aunt (a latter-day Mai?), he moves into the old family farmhouse where Mehar lived. Cleaning up the property as a project to occupy his days, he discovers the room where she lived, and hears rumors about her legendary life, full of brutality, scandal, and betrayal. China Room is partly based on an episode from Sahota’s family history. There is a picture at the end of the book of a young child being held by an elderly woman. Since the book tells parallel stories of a man and his great-grandmother, we can draw our own conclusions.

China Room really shouldn’t have worked for me — it’s kind of a sentimental historical drama, dripping with desire and forbidden love — but it touched me. I cared about the characters, was fascinated by the customs, and appreciated the long view that author Sunjeev Sahota provides by splitting the storyline between two members of a Punjabi Sikh family, three generations and seventy years apart. This is unlike Sahota’s last Man Booker nominated novel ( The Year of the Runaways, which I loved), and although it feels less deep, it worked for me. Rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)I admit that I am an unabashed Indophile, so much so that all my cats are named after Bollywood actresses - so I was, I guess, predisposed to enjoy this, since many of my favorite books ( A Suitable Boy; Manil Suri's Hindu Gods Trilogy; everything by Anuradha Roy, etc) are by Indian authors and/or about Indian subjects. However, Sahota's last (also Booker nommed) novel I was decidedly ambivalent about, finding it difficult in places, and not quite so engaging as his latest. Both storylines converge in themes of escape and incarceration, whether literal or social and psychological. The narrator, living alone on the abandoned farm, having been shunned by his aunt and uncle, plays out an almost parodic tale of regeneration and reconnection that echoes Mehar’s less successful attempts at self-determination; their familial link hovers over the entire story, reminding us of the ghost-trauma carried from generation to generation. Garrett, Wendell D (1995). Our Changing White House. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1-55553-222-5.

His timeline and life connects with that of his great grandmother, Mehar, who as a young girl has an arranged marriage. She, along with Harbans and Gurleen, marry 3 brothers on the same day, in a period of time when they are expected to live under oppressive 'traditions' and rigid expectations, subject to the whims of rumours and judgements of small communities. Their lives are separate from the brothers, and whilst the men know who they are married to, they are kept in the dark, ruled over by their overbearing mother-in-law Mai, who organises the couplings, where there is a strong desire for a son. Any questions as to the brothers are rebuffed, and Mehar is to find her efforts for clarity and independence bring danger and threats. that it all depends on what one means by “understand”– points discussed in the section on The Intuition Reply. Others They live in the china room, which sits at a slight remove from the house and is named for the old willow-pattern plates that lean on a high stone shelf, a set of six that arrived with Mai years ago as part of her wedding dowry. Far beneath the shelf, at waist level, runs a concrete slab that the women use for preparing food, and under this is a little mud-oven. The end of the room widens enough for a pair of charpoys to be laid perpendicular to each other and across these two string beds all three women are made to sleep. The first sentence reads, “Mehar is not so obedient a fifteen-year-old that she won’t try to uncover which of the three brothers is her husband.”SAHOTA: No. So the main reason why, in the book, the women are brought into the family is to bear children. And by that, I mean to bear sons. And Mai, the mother-in-law, controls very much when those encounters between husband and wives take place and where they take place as well. So the tap on the shoulder is a way, again, for her to exert her control over all these young lives. There was one photo that I’d focus on, a small picture in a dark-wood frame. It was of my great grandmother, an old white haired woman who’d travelled all the way to England just so they she might hold me ………… The photo hung there quietly as I sat at the table, opened up my laptop and started to write ………… I’d been clearing the ground the better to see what was in front of me, which was the past. All sorts of pasts in fact, including the one that found me rehabilitating on a farm in India, in 1999, the summer after I turned eighteen.

The two narratives share themes (beyond the fact that the two protagonists are relatives), with the 1929 storyline making up probably about 3/4 of the book. I wished the 1999 plot had been developed further, as the ending in particular felt rushed and I wanted the characters to feel more fleshed out as I think this would have allowed it to sit better with the 1929 chapters. A story of forbidden love that echoes across generations - from the prize-winning author of The Year of the Runaways. The novel is broken into two narrative arcs joined by blood. The major storyline is set in Punjab, 1929. The protagonist is 15-year-old Mehar. Mehar and two other women are all married to three brothers in one single ceremony. The intriguing part is that none of the women know which of the brothers is their husband. Mehar never sees her husband, working in the fields through the day, and at night he remains an elusive silhouette. When she does see him briefly through the day, her veil adds to his concealment.essentially a novel of interior life and sensation, plot.... lightly sketched, as with much else in the novel, subtlety.....refuses to let his historical characters act as though they are in a historical novel, dramatically hushed .... The story, inspired by Sunjeev Sahota’s family history is created with strong story-telling skills and a fair share of claustrophobic tension. The novel takes his title from the cramped china room – complete with willow-pattern plates—that the breeding mare (Mahar) must go to when requested by her officious mother-in-law to meet her “husband” and hopefully, “get with child.”