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Title: Bombay Ice by Leslie Forbes, Susan O'Malley ISBN: 0-7861-1430-4 Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks Pub. Date: December, 1998 Format: Audio Cassette List Price(USD): $76.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.07 (28 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A strong, but flawed, first novel
Comment: In her debut novel, Leslie Forbes' reach exceeds her grasp. Fortunately for the reader, in failing to achieve perfection, she has still surpassed the bulk of the new fiction on the market. "Bombay Ice" is a dizzying, sultry foray into the dark underside of Indian culture.
The reader is pushed and pulled through a host of mind-bending circumstances and events as the heroine searches for her sister's murderer. In gritty detail, the reader is exposed to Bombay, and to a lesser degree, the rest of India through the eyes of someone who both loves and loathes the country.
The downside with this novel is that Forbes tries to tackle too much in one book. "Bombay Ice" is alternately a look at the sociology of modern India, an examination of mental illness, and of course, ultimately, a murder mystery. All of these elements are executed well, to a point; but there is simply not enough time to flesh them out completely and keep the novel moving along. Ironically, this mish-mash of angles confuses the plot and ends up having the positive effect of masking the conclusion.
Forbes is a writer of prodigous talent, and with a little polishing, she will undoubtably win raves in the future. In the meantime, "Bombay Ice" is a very strong effort, and a thoroughly enjoyable novel.
Rating: 2
Summary: Confused, meandering, somewhat schizophrenic
Comment: I picked up Bombay Ice after reading the John Irving Book "A son of the Circus", also set in India. Clearly Ms. Forbes has a knowledge and love of the country. Unfortunataly, the book tries to do too many things. Mystery, thriller, meditation on the complexity of Indian society, memoir of a young woman's relationship with her parents and sister, critique of the Indian caste system (both formal and informal), mood piece...it's just too much.
Which is too bad. The Author has a very good ear for language and despite the density of the content, her prose refrains from being overly weighty.
The books dustcover notes make a game effort at positioning the piece as carrying themes of Chaos (that is 'Chaos', the popular scientific and philosophical notion having to do with patterns in nature, not 'chaos', which is just messy), but I have to believe that that description was an afterthought--a kind of publisher's punt.
I hope that Ms. Forbes writes more books. If she does so, she would be well-advised to tightly frame her subject before layering on her talented prose. This book definitely illustrates the famous line "kill your babies"; with more discipline it could very well have been a nice, absorbing mystery story, perhaps even with a dose of character study thrown in. As it stands, the reader is left pretty much in the same state as the protagonist throughout the story--battered by a monsoon of ideas, words, characters, and cultural ideas, rather than gripped, as he might have.
Adam Caper
Rating: 1
Summary: tedious, boring and full of factual errors
Comment: The only reason I bought the book is because it is about two things I love - Bombay and the monsoon. Now I regret the waste of my time and my money. She recreates the city and the people in it from a tourist's eyes, rearranges the geography of the city to suit her purpose. Of course she misses the real Bombay completely. The author seems to have spent so much time developing the infuriatingly complex plot that she pays almost no attention to the characters. Some of them flit across the pages briefly and then completely disappear (whatever happened to Bada Johnny and Chota Johnny? who were they? where was Robi at the end? Sunila? Gulab?). The errors she makes when naming the characters should have been the first giveaway for me that her understanding of the place and its people is far too superficial. She turns a Sharma into a Parsi, and a Mistry into a Maharashtrian and gives many of them western first names which is more than a little unusual for india. Her depiction of the city is authentic only in tiny little vignettes spread through the novel, and even those would are more suited to a travel guide than to a novel.
If anyone is looking for an understanding of Bombay or India or Bollywood, this is not the place to find it. If you are looking for a good murder mystery, keep looking - this one makes very little sense. Her literary allusions just cloud the plot and leave the reader confused.
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