Book review: Mr Iyer Goes To War is interesting in patches

Something is missing from Ryan Lobo’s Indian take on Don Quixote.

Mr Iyer Goes To War by Ryan Lobo is for Dh20 on Amazon.com

It sounds like an intriguing idea: an interpretation of the Don Quixote story, with all its tragicomic potential, set in contemporary India.

The titular Mr Iyer even has a Sancho Panza-esque sidekick, Bencho the undertaker – although not a very good one, given that he drops Mr Iyer’s roommate down a flight of stairs on his final journey.

So begins their companionship, and the tone of Bangalore-based Ryan Lobo’s playful debut is immediately set.

Of course, a Don Quixote story needs a journey, and it is kicked off by Mr Iyer's vision of a previous incarnation when he was Bhima, the heroic warrior from the Indian mythological epic Mahabharata. He might now be in his 70s and marooned in a hospice in the sacred city of Varanasi, but Mr Iyer convinces the unwilling Bencho to join him, and they set off on an ­adventure down the Ganges, not only to vanquish an amusingly vague "great evil", but also to woo the "half-beautiful" ­(because half her face bears acid burns) Damayanti.

Full of imaginary enemies (a crocodile in a dream), scrapes in which Mr Iyer will blindly come to the aid of someone seemingly in trouble ("the child bites his lip, realising beyond any doubt that this rescuer is insane"), and plenty of eye-rolling from the much-maligned Bencho, Mr Iyer Goes To War is neatly plotted – possibly overly so, in fact, as the heroes end up entangled in an antique smuggling ring, constantly cheating death. But there is something missing from the character of Mr Iyer that Lobo's novel never quite manages to resolve. Principled and proud he may be, but in a novel of this length there needs to be substance behind his wilful adherence to his strange vision.

In fact, Mr Iyer is ever so slightly annoying, and his deliberate “otherness” is a problem when the book has designs on being a satirical comment on 21st-­century Indian society. As Bencho himself says: “I am tired of the beatings, and also sometimes of your wisdom, sir. Please stop.”

The marks of Lobo’s career as an award-winning photographer and filmmaker are all over his literary debut – it feels very much like a series of carefully constructed set pieces and scenes, rather than a novel that satisfyingly hangs together.

That is not to say there is not much to enjoy here, and Lobo certainly has a sharp way with wit and good comic timing.

It is just that Mr Iyer Goes To War quickly starts to feel like a good idea in need of a more ­experienced guiding hand.