Ashok Mathur's debut novel, Once Upon an Elephant, was a hilarious murder mystery steeped in Hindu mythology and starring elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesh.
The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar continues Mathur's playful jaunt through mythology, this time blending the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, with the geography of Canada and Australia. Harry Kumar is an unlikely hero who finds himself vaulted into a globe-trotting quest to rescue his closest friend and confidant who's been kidnapped by a mysterious villain. With his travelling companion, a somewhat high-strung dog named Hanuman, Harry becomes embroiled in the odd politics that govern our world—and his own history. On the move, Harry's fantastic, twisting trail takes him to BC's Gulf Islands, Toronto's Islands—and to islands beyond—all in search of a woman, his best friend and perhaps lover, in a twisting tale of fate and the backwardsand forwards of time.
The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar explores the world in the context of islands, prisons, and the retelling of stories from the distant and not-too-distant past.
Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Fiction Prize (Canada-Caribbean section).
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Harry Kumar is a 35-year-old Vancouverite, half-Indian, half-white, a bank teller without ambition or, it seems, desire. He has two friends of note: a woman named Sita and the preternaturally charismatic Athnic Long. The greatest companionship in Harry's life comes from his ill-tempered dog, Hanuman, a strange canine who shares more than a few attributes with his monkey-god namesake. One day, Sita mysteriously disappears, and Harry and Hanuman set off in search of her, aided only by a few mysterious inscriptions. Their adventures take them on a series of increasingly bizarre prison tours and bring them into confrontation with a secretive revolutionary society fronted by an insane CSIS agent.
This is a strange and intriguing novel, but it suffers from its own narrative hyper-awareness. Mathur's narrators get so caught up in the process of narration that the story itself often flags--this is, presumably, the point, but it will frustrate general readers. Quirkier sorts, however, who grin with anticipation at the prospect of humorous postcolonial mythopolitical language sports, will love this one. --Jack Illingworth
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—Quill & Quire (Quill & Quire)
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