The Valley of Masks by Tarun J Tejpal – Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist

The Valley of Masks by Tarun J Tejpal (2011, Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins, New Delhi).

A brilliant writer, Tarun J Tejpal has taken on the high-concept fiction project of creating an imaginary religious cult in which the elimination of individualism dictates the wearing of a mask by all adult members. The narrator of The Valley of Masks, an escapee from the cult’s hidden mountain compound, recounts his life’s story from birth to the present. He knows he is being tracked by the cult’s warrior avengers who will find and kill him. The plot echoes the 1950 film D.O.A. [Dead on Arrival] where Edmond O’Brien has been poisoned and has 24 hours to find the murderer before he dies, although the ex-cultist’s urgency in this novel lies in the telling of his story. Tejpal’s expansive imagination and driving energy guide us into a terrifying world of conformity and punishment, where power corrupts both the elite and the lowly; the innocent suffer grotesque reprisals for small infractions.

Unfortunately, Tejpal succumbs to some errors in judgment that could have been corrected by effective editing. The most significant problem involves what critic Yvor Winters called “the fallacy of imitative form.” The fallacy consists of “believing that a poem’s subject matter should dictate its form—so that, for instance, mental confusion should be expressed in a confused and disjointed poem.” Tejpal’s depiction of brutality descends, in a few passages, to a level of graphic detail and repetition that left me feeling brutalized as a reader. In writing about oppression, Tejpal himself inflicts oppressive, and unnecessary, anguish on the reader. If I had not been trying to read the longlist of the Man Asian Literary Prize, I probably would have abandoned the book at the first sexual assault sequence. As it turns out, the novel proved to be worthwhile, and I am glad to have finished it, although I cannot enthusiastically recommend The Valley of Masks to general readers. The author’s relentless vision gives the book its power, but his efforts to sustain the vision do not always succeed. The depiction of inhumanity may go beyond some readers’ endurance threshold. It exceeded mine. If parameters of good taste are culturally defined, then I could have come up against misunderstanding based on cultural difference when the story diverged from my idea of appropriateness. I have a hard time recognizing a wife beater as a “virtuous” man, for example, as the reader is expected to do.

My first impression on starting the book was of a wall of words delivered with a narrative punch that threatened to knock me down. The elevated, determined voice sounded more like chanting than fictional narrative. The riveting intensity brought to mind the question: Can he keep this up? And then, Can I keep up? The answers, no and no.

Tejpal tries to maintain the high pitch of energy and interest by adopting a storytelling style that ventures through many changes of character and place, almost as if he is writing a short story collection. My slight familiarity with the ancient tales of India, as told in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana epics leads me to believe Tejpal is aiming at a timeless narrative structure that follows traditional storytelling conventions. However, returning to the writer’s problem of maintaining a riveting intensity from the beginning of a novel to the end, I sometimes suspected that the author changed stories simply because he was stuck. Some of the transitions felt arbitrary. He has followed a path to its end. What next? Change the subject.

As a reader from a different literary and cultural tradition, I had some difficulty sorting out dazzling originality from the re-shaping of old tales. Irrespective of its creative foundations, the entire novel can be read as dystopian fantasy fiction that replicates in visionary style some of the tensions in contemporary civilization. The book treats religious extremism. Authoritarianism. The denial of individual worth and human rights. The absolute depravity of absolute power. When he succeeds, Tejpal presents these themes masterfully. He is capable of writing with lyricism and grace. He conjures up images that linger. Imagine a world where love, music and laughter are crimes. Children are taken from mothers at birth and raised in group homes. Personal relationships of all kinds are forbidden, since personal involvement means interaction between individuals, and the egotism of personhood is the supreme evil, according to the cult’s teachings.

As an example of the book’s fantasy elements, this passage describes a traitor, one of the ruling elite who has fled the group.

Those who saw him then say he literally radiated energy. His muscles moved even when he stood stock still, and he could appear and vanish in the blink of an eye. He fought with short swords, one in each hand, and he was a master of the fifteenth poetic form, a unique manoeuvre called a cachchua, the tortoise. Rotating at one spot, he could twirl his swords at such blistering speed that he became encased in an armour, a tortoise inside his shell. Nothing could pierce through–no sword, no spear, no arrow, not even a bullet. He could sustain this manoeuvre for almost an hour, and hold off three score men.

Working together magnifies the cult warriors’ power. This passage describes their group martial arts attack and defensive formations:

In the day they stalked each other through the undergrowth, warriors–once brothers–who knew every move of the other. QT2 arrayed his five bandsmen into two fighting animals–one a domukhi, a two-faced one; and the other a teenmukhni, a three-faced one. You perhaps know this is one of the fundamental fighting formations of the Wafadars in which they move with perfect harmony back-to-back–two, three, four, more–insulated against all surprise, capable of taking on a simultaneous assault from every direction. Inevitably, ZZ9 did the same. He set up his men as three fighting animals, one chaumukhi, one teenmukhi and one domukhi . . .

Photo by © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons.

Some names here can be found on Hindu websites, describing a mantra, a pendant, and a sculptural representation of Shiva. The photo shows a Nepalese stone linga (900-1000), or representation of the god Shiva, on display at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The four-sided fighting formation of the cult warriors reflects a traditional view of Shiva. The mask cult of the novel is not Hindu, however. They despise believers of that faith in the “outer world.”

Tejpal also loosely borrows concepts for the mask cult from Buddhism. Very loosely. The self is the source of all suffering in their worldview, but reincarnation is not part of the system. Alcohol consumption, ritual brothels, institutionally sanctioned homicide all make up the deranged mindset of The Brotherhood.

**Spoiler Alert**

One brutal passage that weakens the overall integrity of the novel is the account of the repeated, ritual rape by an elder of the brotherhood of a girl who has just reached puberty. The frame-by-frame description of the horrifying events adds nothing to the story; the passage begins to look like a sick male fantasy. As if that were not bad enough, Tejpal segues immediately into a love affair between the sex slave and the perpetrator’s young assistant. I call bullshit! A real-life rape victim who had just endured days of repeated attacks would probably be in a catatonic state, not looking for a new lover who just happened to be on the scene. This section was the low point of the book, a cheap trick by a writer whose imagination has failed.

**End Spoiler**

The Valley of Masks has been named to the longlist of the Main Asian Literary Prize. Even though the narrative’s frequent jerky shifts from one storyline to another may look to me like authorial inadequacy, the style may also reflect a different approach to storytelling, an approach canonized in Indian narrative tradition. I found the continuous stopping and starting of plot lines chaotic, as if the writer is losing the thread of his own fabric. Then there is the outrageousness problem. I think some of the more sensationalistic passages contribute shock value more than anything else. Tejpal explodes his pages with surprises in a way that could be viewed as intellectually dishonest, or put another way, I associate some of the more lurid excesses of the narrative with a type of simple-minded fiction I try to avoid.

Even so, Tejpal’s eloquence is undeniable, his imagination fecund, his understanding of the abuses of institutionalized power deep. The dehumanizing quest for perfection warps the personality, poisons the mind, and destroys the spirit. The greed of the mighty for control over the powerless knows no bounds. I can understand why the novel has been recognized by the Man Asian Prize jury, even though I still believe it would have benefited from an editor whose intelligence and force of personality matched Tejpal’s own and whose judgment exceeded his.

This novel has not yet been published in the USA. My copy came from an independent online vendor.

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