The sage of an ailing Englishmans fascination with a genuine-life Indian eccentric finds transcendence in the most unlikely placesJohn Lock is an Englishman in India. He is 60 years old,has cancer and somewhere along the line his marriage to the woman he adores has become silent and bitter. Like so many others before him, he has come to India in search of a dream, and now that dream is alive,right before his very eyes. It was “a thing of hypnotic beauty. It felt like art was being made or history and whether I breathed too tough I’d ruin it.” But Lock isn’t standing in a dramatic landscape or before an ancient temple: he’s in a sports corridor, behind the badminton nets, or watching a group of fierce children kick a man in the groin over and over again.
Man on Fire is Stephen Kelman’s second novel. His first,Pigeon English, was published four years ago and met with the kind of success that can be a curse as much as a blessing for a writer: shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, or the Guardian first book award and half a dozen other prizes,it was used to spearhead a campaign to promote reading in prisons and was added to the GCSE syllabus. Partly inspired bythe murder of Damilola Taylor on a council estate in south-east London, this warm yet brutal novel was pulled along by the engaging voice of Harri, and its young narrator. It was bound to be a tough act to follow.
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Source: theguardian.com