A Perfect Pledge by Rabindranath Maharaj

1.  Maharaj captures the local dialect very well and when I was reading the book, I was almost swayed into the lilting delivery I imagined might be spoken by each character.  In contrast, the voice of the author, not of Jeeves, is quite articulate.  I found his knowledge of plants and insect life extensive.  This made me wonder how many people might know some of this information.  Were you at all surprised by the language?  How so?  What was of interest to you?

 

2.  Narpat is a most demanding father with peculiarities which he inflicts on his children.  Take his dietary mania about eating well. “  You notice how the pepper causing you to drink water?  The best thing for digestion.  Clear out all the circuits.  Keep the engine from overheating.  Prevent anger, jealousy, and deceit.”  The children were also introduced to a variety of beans, grains, and legumes, which swam in their plates like drowning insect.  “Proteins. Fibre. Vitamins.” (p. 241)  Narpat reminds me of Polonius, from Hamlet, where his advice is one part sense and another part nonsense, mixed with ego and hypocrisy.  He means well yet in the end goes too far.  What do you make of Narpat.  Find a section where his character comes through in his actions or his words.

 

3.  There is a strong strain of irony in the story, making it somewhat bittersweet truth or attitude about life.  Sometimes I think the theme of the novel is “good intentions don’t amount to a hill of beans without proper planning and preparation.”  Take for example, Narpat’s preoccupation to build a factory.  Much as he might slight the lack of initiative in the locals, he himself is as unproductive as any of them in the end.

 

4.  Of the opposite extreme is Mr. Doon, the would be writer who toils away at the manuscript, with the the twins Dolly (Dostoevsky) and Tolly (Tolstory) then nagging wife and mother who he sees as “Bitches.  They climbing on me like ants…”  He too is a comic figure set up for his snobbery, only to be cast down by his wifes sarcasm.  

 

5.  Maharaj has set his novel in an earlier time, the 1950’s Trinidad, with Jeeves as the key character who develops throughout the story’s twenty or so years.  The novel’s five part structure might also be seen as a quest story, where each one of the stages of the hero’s progress is defined through a passage.  The crisis point is the mother’s death.  So I think.  After this, Jeeves sees his father differently and so does the reader.

 

6.  Narpat’s treatment of his wife  is in miniature the moral code of family destruction and disintegration which tears apart a society in the larger framework.  There is a partial truce at the end of the novel as a war between the sexes which must be negotiated.  That the claims of family sometimes inhibit progress, or that  men must negotiate their aspirations with caution.  What do you think Maharaj sees as the future for Trinidad?