Animal's People

Dennis Bock

Set in the slums of a re-imagined and re-named Bhopal, India, site of the deadly Union Carbide gas leak, the novel promises to level a damning indictment against corporate greed and indifference to human suffering. And so it does, and so it might have remained, righteous and dreary. But the book achieves much more than the predictable conjuring of sympathy, outrage or mute despair, and for this the reader has Animal to thank, the irrepressibly horny and uncannily resourceful narrator, whose spine, twisted as a result of that poisoned night, forces him to walk on all fours…An oddly arresting balance of the tragic and the comic saves Animal from becoming little more than a hapless chump through which the author can display his pity and outrage. Our narrator, four-legged bugger that he is, will shape his own destiny, thank you very much, and happily pick your pocket to boot.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Orphaned Bhopal slum resident Animal, who "used to be human" before an industrial chemical accident left his bones "twisted like a hairpin," narrates in a rich argot this tense and absorbing Brit import, shortlisted for the Booker in 2007. Animal, who walks on all fours, focuses on the events surrounding the impending trial of the "Kampani" responsible for the accident. He falls in with a group led by famous musician Somraj; Somraj's daughter, Nisha; and Nisha's boyfriend, "Saint Zafar," who devotes his life to fighting the Kampani and caring for the poor. Tensions mount as suspicious "Amrikan" doctor Elli Barber opens a clinic in the slums, lawyers from the Kampani arrive in Khaufpur to negotiate a settlement, and Animal, desperately in love with Nisha, copes with his desires and frustrations. While some of the supporting characters remain one-dimensional, Animal's voice-a mélange of grit, pointed social criticism, profanity and lust-brings to life what could have become a tendentious parable, and his struggles personalize the novel's grand themes of secrecy, betrayal and unexpected acts of love and kindness. Sinha balances big issues with an intimate depiction of life at its bleakest. (Feb.)

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Booklist

"[A]n antic, ribald, and searing tale of greed and heroism - .Sinha's daring farce asks what it means to be human, rekindles compassion for the still uncompensated victims of the real-life catastrophe, and celebrates the resiliency of love and goodness in the poorest and most poisoned of places." -- (starred review)

Kirkus

"A double triumph for Sinha: The plight of the world's powerless has seldom been conveyed more powerfully, while Animal is destined to be one of fiction's immortals."

Library Journal

Last year's Man Booker Prize winner is a story with a message: Animal is a teenage boy who lives on the streets of the Indian city of Khaufpur. He goes around on all fours since his spine is badly damaged; he cannot walk normally. As an infant, he was one of the thousands of victims of a poison gas leak at an American-owned company, here just called "the Kampani." Animal also lost his parents "that night" (as the local people refer to the horrible event). Animal has a lively mind and a way with words, some of them angry and profane, some of them bitterly funny, as he gets caught up in the struggle of those in Khaufpur who seek long-delayed justice from the Kampani. Sinha, who frequently contributes to bhopal.net, has clearly based his story on the human and environmental disaster at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in 1984. The result is a gripping novel that also reminds us of a continuing real-life tragedy. Recommended for all larger collections.
—Leslie Patterson

Kirkus Reviews

Take a feisty young cripple, connect him to one of the world's worst industrial disasters, and you have Sinha's extraordinary, incandescent second novel, a Man Booker Prize finalist. Thousands died after an explosion at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1985. The British-Indian Sinha (The Death of Mr. Love, 2004) uses the catastrophe as a springboard; it's now years later, but residents of Khaufpur (his name for Bhopal) are still dying from poisons as they battle the Kampani (the company). Grim material, but this is not a grim novel, thanks to Animal, Sinha's narrator, a 19-year-old Khaufpuri. Abandoned on the night of the accident, he was raised in an orphanage; at age six, pains twisted his spine, forcing him to walk on all fours. He left the orphanage for the streets; the name Animal (a child's taunt) became his badge of pride. Smart, tough, sneaky, horny and improbably upbeat, Animal is an astonishing creation with a bawdy, layered narrative voice, seasoned with scraps of French and Hindi. His story is inextricably linked to that of his wounded yet still hustling city. The plot revolves around the campaign against the Kampani waged by Zafar, a saintly young college graduate beloved by the poor. The other main characters are Zafar's sweetheart, Nisha, coveted by Animal, and her father Somraj, a famous singer until the poisons destroyed his lungs. Zafar's campaign is complicated by the arrival of Elli Barber, an attractive American doctor opening a free clinic. Suspecting she is a company stooge, Zafar imposes a boycott. Meanwhile, Animal is working to detach Nisha from her man, and why not? He's capable of devotion; he's got a fine torso; and he's hung like ahorse. There's a gripping climax as company lawyers arrive and Zafar's hunger strike threatens to kill him. A double triumph for Sinha: The plight of the world's powerless has seldom been conveyed more powerfully, while Animal is destined to be one of fiction's immortals. Agent: Carole Blake/Blake Friedmann Agency

The Barnes & Noble Review

When Indra Sinha's Animal's People was published in the U.K., virtually every review of the novel took account of its lacerating first line, delivered by its horrifically maimed 19-year-old protagonist: "I used to be human once. So I'm told." It isn't hard to figure why it hooked critics: Sinha controls language so magnificently in this novel -- which was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize -- that the serrating lead sentence carves out his territory with a vengeance.

But Sinha's opening gambit works in a second way: it simultaneously gives the lie to their speaker's hot-breathed attempt to flee his humanity. Animal is among the poorest of the poor in the Indian city of Khaufpur; his spine has been twisted like a paper clip as a result of the industrial catastrophe at "the Kampani" 16 years back, and he now must crabwalk on all fours. In a series of purported transcripts from cassette-recorded testimony, he narrates the story of his life and that of Khaufpur in a monologue practically Rabelaisian in its extravagance. Animal's language draws on the Hindi-English patois of the basti and the cinema (the English is as mangled as his spinal cord); it is scabrous and pungently scatological, though never without humor, and utterly compelling. As with Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, a glossary appears at the end of the book to aid with some of the Hindi, but you don't really need it: The lyricism, strange syntax, and urgency in Animal's sentences seem to translate themselves, and his voice, at once furious and spicy, flows forth in a cataract. As one character says to him, "Animal, do you ever listen to anyone else? Talk talk talk, is all you do. How you chunter. Honestly, if talking's what makes people human, no one is more human than you."

Khaufpur -- the name translates from Hindi-Urdu as "fear village" or "village of dread" -- is modeled on Bhopal, India, and the Kampani is of course Union Carbide, whose role in the 1984 disaster that killed (by some estimates) 15,000 Bhopalis and left another 100,000 with death sentences of rotten lungs and ruined kidneys, redefined the gold standard of corporate irresponsibility. As in Khaufpur, the citizens of Bhopal still argue in Indian courts that the company (in cahoots with corrupt government officials) has failed to face its moral obligations to clean up the hell left after the cloud of pesticides rolled through the city and leached into the town's wells. Animal provides anecdote after anecdote of the perfidy:

Thighs-of-fate, it's an Inglis name, I do not know what the Hindi might be. On that night when poisons came from the Kampani's factory, those who weren't then and there killed found themselves in a bad way with fainting, fits, pain, blood's coughed up, can't see, hardly can breathe etc. This thighs-of-fate was a medicine which was helping people get relief. News quickly spread, from all over the city people came to wait in line for injections, but suddenly the treatment was stopped. Some bigwig let slip that the Kampani bosses from Amrika had rung up their best friend the Chief Minister and told him to stop the thighs-of-fate.... Some doctors moved into a shack near the factory and began giving the injections. The police came, wrecked the shack, beat up the doctors.

Sinha has been an activist on behalf of the victims of Bhopal for a decade and a half. In 1993, appalled by the company's skullduggery in evading responsibility for cleaning up the site, he helped start a campaign to fund a free clinic to treat those who continued to die prematurely from the disaster. Writing about real and recent events can be a quagmire for some novelists, but Animal's People succeeds fully on its own merits as fiction. The plot of Animal's story concerns an idealistic firebrand, Zafar, who leads a boycott against a free clinic opened by an American expat, Elli. Sensing Elli's effort is a Trojan horse led by the Kampani to gather medical data on the victims in order to argue in court against their claims, Zafar enlists the crafty Animal to help spy on the clinic and its operator (according to Animal, he is an expert at "jamisponding"; it took me far too long to get the joke, but think 007). The problems of the scheme are twofold: Like any 19-year-old virgin, Animal fantasizes as much about screwing Elli as screwing the Kampani; and he is only slightly less carnally drawn to Nisha -- who is passionately in love with Zafar and a true believer in his cause -- to boot. Even more of a problem, Elli begins to develop her own love/hate relationship with the novel's other hero (and Nisha's father), Somraj, a brilliant singer called the Aawaaz-e-Khaufpur, the voice of Khaufpur, whose vocal music has been silenced by his burned-up lungs.

The principles, intentions, and motivations of the characters butt against one another at right angles. Of course, they are all portrayed through the words of the truth speaker Animal and sieved through his own tortured, limited experience. As in any Bildungsroman, his world widens considerably over the course of the novel -- from the slums of his city, to an encounter with the "internest" (where, of course, he visits www.khaufpur.com, a real site for the ersatz city), and even to his apparent new existence in paradise after he and all of Khaufpur seem to have perished in a second industrial disaster.

The fiery promise of the "Apokolis" hovers throughout the novel (Animal ministers to the at times comical Ma Franci, an octogenarian French nun who took him in as an orphan and now babbles on about the end of days). The showdown between the Kampani, the government, and the people's movement led by Zafar sparks a conflagration that threatens to destroy every player in Animal's world. (As he imagines himself dead, he writes of "a fading nightmare of a city of stinks and misery, I think of thousands and thousands dead in the last moments of Khaufpur. Our whole lives were lived in the dark. Those who were there with me are now in paradise, where's no Khaufpur, no India, no trace of flames, hell is not visible from here." Khaufpur does sound like hell in Sinha's telling. What's most remarkable about this remarkable novel is that the voice emerging from this village of death is so relentlessly, jauntingly alive. --Eric Banks

Eric Banks is the former editor of Bookforum. He has contributed to The New York Times, Slate, the Guardian, and the Financial Times and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors.