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| Trade paperback, 419 pages Published 2008 Acquired February 2015 Read May 2015 |
I read this as part of my ongoing investigation into Indian speculative fiction; Padmanabhan is one of a few Indian authors currently writing sf in English. Escape is set in a sort of Handmaid's Taleesque dystopic future India-- except where an evil General has carried out a near-complete femicide. One of the book's two protagonists is one of the last (maybe the last) woman left alive, but she's been kept on drugs and in ignorance, so she doesn't know she's different from the uncles who shelter her. Only the older she gets, the more rumors creep out, and the uncles realize they need to get her out of India, so the youngest of them accompanies her on a desperate trip.
What follows is a very bleak travelogue of sorts. Padmanabhan's future India is horrifying, but also fascinating. Without women, clones are used for reproduction-- but also clones with limited mental acuity ("drones") are created for the purposes of labor. And society has to adapt and to change to deal with the lack of women; there are some very twisted men as a result, men who cannot indulge the desires they have. The book is interspersed with maxims from the General's books, with titles like A Manual for Bold Soldiers, The Vermin Tribe: An Analysis (the "vermin tribe" is what they call women), and The Generals: A Plural Life. As that last title indicates, the General is actual more than one person; he too has cloned himself again and again, his intelligence almost functioning like a program in the cloud. Like future India, the General is both horrifying and fascinating, and I really enjoyed the interjections into the narrative of an interview with home done by an outside newscaster.
At the same time, our poor young protagonist has to adapt to a horrifying world in which she is literally the only one of her kind. Meiji's journey gets pretty intense at times, but is there's any complaint to lob at this book, it's that she occasionally disappears from it; much more of it is about Youngest protecting Meiji than it is about Meiji herself. What kind of sacrifices-- both physical and moral-- will Youngest make to protect his niece? There's a lot of commentary embedded in here, about how society treats women, how society treats other social classes, about the disposability of human life, and like the best sf it's as much a mirror of today as a potential future. Some of humanity's worst desires get brought to the surface, and the book has a very bleak take on sex throughout, perhaps unsurprisingly. It's an engrossing read, and I hope the sequel that the ending indicates ought to happen really does come to pass, though seven years later, I have my doubts.
Hello Steven Mollmann (I don't know any other name for you!) – I'm responding to this with some surprise: I thought I had seen most of the responses to ESCAPE's original edition, but this one is new to me. Yes, there IS a sequel to ESC, and also a new edition. Both published by Hachette India. The sequel is called THE ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS. I am in the throes of writing a third novel in the series. Your observation about Meiji's muted presence is a good one. We see more of her in ISLAND but she is still extremely subdued. In the next book we will, I think, we will see a more robust version of her. Thank you again for posting this thoughtful and engaging review.
ReplyDeleteHi Manjula (if I may)! Thanks for your comment. I think about Escape a lot; I actually recommended it to students in a class I was teaching just last week. (And will probably teach "Gandhi-toxin" this fall.)
DeleteThis review is pretty old; I finally did discover, read, and comment on The Island of Lost Girls last year: https://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2023/02/review-island-of-lost-girls-manjula-padmanabhan.html
Wow – that was QUICK! I didn't expect any response at all, since the original ESC review is nine years old.
ReplyDeleteSo: I read your response to ISLAND with interest. I'm sorry it was a disappointment. I smiled at what you said about the scenes on the General's yacht being in a sense more enjoyable, because his goals are at least clear. Yes, I can see why that might be. The reason that I'm chasing up reviews or references to ESC and ISL right now is that I am finally attempting to do what I can to make these books more accessible outside India. I am very keen for the third book to reach a broader audience than the first two and of course, it would be great if all three manage to find more readers – but right now I'm getting this effort out of the way as quickly as possible, before returning to the third book. In the end, as an author, my best option is just to keep writing. Thanks again.
Heh, I get an e-mail whenever someone leaves a comment, so if I am online, I can reply right away.
DeleteI am glad to hear there will be a third book; I am a fan of your writing. Good luck with the third book! Any idea on ETA?
Well, you're just a nice person, in that case. There's no obligation to answer at once!
ReplyDeleteAnyway: it's early days with Book 3. The tentative title is ZONE. If I finish it by the third quarter of this year then the likely earliest date for release will be around one year from now. But this might as well be dream-talk, as you probably know, if you're even slightly connected with the book trade (which you seem to be, much more than slightly). I took five years to write ISLAND and it was like wrestling with pythons all the way. Z might be different, but I have no way of knowing until I've waded some distance into it. Right now I'm still at the orchestra-tuning-up stage.
On another tack: would you like to receive a signed copy of my collected SF short stories? It's called STOLEN HOURS and I know that hard copies aren't available in the US. I'm in Newport, RI. Posting a slender little book to ... Florida? ... is really easy for me to do.
I'd be delighted! Drop me an email at stevemollmann@gmail.com to sort it out.
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