Small town money lender. Classic Narayan. ( )

It's more than three decades since I first encountered Narayan as a wonderful stanza i what in those days was called a "new literatures" paper in my undergrad programme. I was enthralled by his humour and lightness of touch, his whimsicality, I guess, and devoured The Guide with delight. I swore I'd visit him again, and fifteen years later I enjoyed a similar scamper through The Painter of Signs - albeit no longer with essays to write and exams to pass at the end of the exercise. So a couple of years or ago I picked up The Financial Expert, often considered Narayan's best work, and finally, this month, opened it with anticipation.

I found it utterly wooden. The characters, even read as caricatures, were two dimensional at best. The satire was forced, the dialogue unconvincing. Dr Pal seemed to blow in from another universe with no particular depth. Balu was a pastiche of reprehensible indulgence - okay, he's meant to be, but he is and remains such with no development, no depth, no psychological enfleshment. Margayya's wife (does she accumulate a name?) serves as a foil to her husband's self-indulgence, an oppressed and exploited woman whose oppression and exploitation remains an unexplored given. The borrowers remain an ugly horde of exploited victims - which no doubt is a reflection of the state of the money-lending trade in 1950s India, but which only add to the pantomime. Margayya remains unremittingly unpleasant from beginning to end. I found myself hoping Shiva would turn up and give the money-lender a good, and preferably fatal slapping.

The book was a disappointment. My once every fifteen or so years love affair with Narayan has spluttered to an end. ( )

A friend brought me this book from a trip to India, where the acclaimed author is well appreciated for his classic tales. They combine a deceptively simple narrative style and acute perceptions of human nature in all its absurdity and poignancy. Graham Greene was an early Narayan admirer and helped bring his work to attention in the West.
In this novella, the hero, Margayya, although indubitably Indian, also is “a type which should have taken its place long ago in world literature because he exists everywhere.” Margayya, whose name means “the one who showed the way,” indeed does show the way, although his ultimate destination is not what he hopes or has planned. His story begins in his early career, sitting daily underneath a banyan tree at the center of his dusty village with his small box of forms and pens, helping peasants sort their finances, brokering loans, and earning barely enough to keep his wife and adored son, Balu, in food.
Over the course of the book, his financial prospects greatly improve, Balu grows up, and Margayya rises to great heights on the back of his miraculous financial innovation that the reader recognizes as, essentially, a Ponzi scheme. But ungrateful Balu proves Margayya's undoing, and the lesson stretches beyond the financial calamity it produces: “The only element that kept people from being terrified of each other was trust—the moment it was lost, people became nightmares to each other.”
As the plot winds toward the inevitable, Margayya’s vanities, his obliviousness disguised as business acumen, and the jockeying for advantage of everyone around him—in an economic environment where so little advantage is to be had—provides ample fodder for the kind of laugh-at-ourselves “humour that knows no national boundaries,” says Der Kurier, Berlin, also the source of the earlier quote.
The story takes place in the mid-1920s to 1940s, when colonial rule in India was drawing to a close and the country’s legendary legacy of bureaucracy was increasingly entrenched. This exchange between two of Margayya’s acquaintances sums up the incessant frustrations:
The first man is commenting on his difficulties getting a nuisance business moved somewhere else: “. . . you know what our municipalities are!”
Second man in an aside to Margayya: “He is himself a municipal councillor for this ward . . . and yet he finds so much difficulty in getting anything done. He had such trouble to get that vacant plot for himself—”
First man: “I applied for it like any other citizen. Being a municipal councillor doesn’t mean that I should forgo the ordinary rights and privileges of a citizen.”
Well said. I laughed out loud.
In the introduction to another of his books, Narayan says that in India “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story,” and in Margayya he has selected an unforgettable protagonist and packed his tale with humanity. ( )

This is a witty and luminous novel set in the backward town of Malgudi in southern India. It is a world created by R. K. Narayan and like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County it is memorable and filled with characters that come alive on the page. The Financial Expert of the title is a man named Margayya who sits in a public park dispensing advice on economic matters to people who revere him. Throughout the novel the reader is introduced to several characters that may seem to play only a minor role, but in fact, are highly developed—almost without the reader being aware of it. Certainly, the main character, Margayya, is highly developed and the reader is given many insights into his motivations and thoughts. The reader is treated to his travails with the residents of Malgudi and his difficulties within his own family. Other characters in the novel are not so explicitly developed, yet their force cannot be underestimated, nor can their implicit development be ignored. The story-telling ability of R. K. Narayan is grand and with it he enthralled this reader. ( )

A captivating humour turned tragedy. ( )