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The Last Jet-Engine Laugh
It is the not-so-distant future, and in the belligerent wannabe superpower that is India, Para, a tomboyish fighter pilot, flies sorties against the Pak-Saudi alliance. She has been trained to kill, to be a deadly instrument for the military ambitions of an ultra-modern, ultra-competitive state. And yet it is less than a hundred years since her smart, sarcastic, principled grandparents met on a non-violent demonstration against British rule in Ahmedabad, falling in love as they were trampled by the mounted police. Their only son, Paresh, grows up to drift through life, torn in different directions all at once, though he does produce an entirely spirited daughter - Para.
How did India get to Para from her grandparents? And what happened to the generation in between, of Paresh and his peers? Moving between crowd scenes and midair battles, between sexual farce and social embarrassment, Joshi maps the arcs made by these four striking characters, by the family they make up, and by their country across a complex and confused century.
How did India get to Para from her grandparents? And what happened to the generation in between, of Paresh and his peers? Moving between crowd scenes and midair battles, between sexual farce and social embarrassment, Joshi maps the arcs made by these four striking characters, by the family they make up, and by their country across a complex and confused century.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 3, 2022
"I need new prayers, the old ones don't work anymore."
'The Last Jet Engine Laugh' is ostensibly a family saga covering three generations of the Bhatt family stretching from a period when India was on the cusp of independence from Britain to the near future; to 2030 when the country is at war with a Pakistan-Saudi alliance and his daughter, a crack fighter pilot, is above the earth as a member of a crew manning an Indian Space Station.
Paresh Bhatt, a once celebrated photographer who has spent much of his life in France before returning to live in India is at the centre of this book. He is writing backwards in time, the country has been devastated by interminable disputes with Pakistan which have included the use of nuclear and chemical weapons by both sides; waters are poisonous to drink, yet life goes on.
Paresh writes about the life of his parents, his own childhood and adult life, bringing a child, Para, into the world and how all of their fates have been entwined with that of India.
Joshi touches on a whole lot of themes including war, famine, shortages, political ineptitude but ultimately focuses on fact that in the future the lack of drinkable water and loneliness are likely to be India's biggest killers.
I found it a really difficult read. The main problem being that the timeline just isn't linear, instead it stops haphazardly over a period of roughly seventy years which simply left me confused.
Joshi can certainly write so I blame this, at least in part, on his editors. There are the bare bones of two if not three good books here but as a whole its a mish-mash that just doesn't work and left me disappointed.
'The Last Jet Engine Laugh' is ostensibly a family saga covering three generations of the Bhatt family stretching from a period when India was on the cusp of independence from Britain to the near future; to 2030 when the country is at war with a Pakistan-Saudi alliance and his daughter, a crack fighter pilot, is above the earth as a member of a crew manning an Indian Space Station.
Paresh Bhatt, a once celebrated photographer who has spent much of his life in France before returning to live in India is at the centre of this book. He is writing backwards in time, the country has been devastated by interminable disputes with Pakistan which have included the use of nuclear and chemical weapons by both sides; waters are poisonous to drink, yet life goes on.
Paresh writes about the life of his parents, his own childhood and adult life, bringing a child, Para, into the world and how all of their fates have been entwined with that of India.
Joshi touches on a whole lot of themes including war, famine, shortages, political ineptitude but ultimately focuses on fact that in the future the lack of drinkable water and loneliness are likely to be India's biggest killers.
I found it a really difficult read. The main problem being that the timeline just isn't linear, instead it stops haphazardly over a period of roughly seventy years which simply left me confused.
Joshi can certainly write so I blame this, at least in part, on his editors. There are the bare bones of two if not three good books here but as a whole its a mish-mash that just doesn't work and left me disappointed.
August 20, 2007
So The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is one of the best-written books I’ve come across, but the structure of the book left me quite befuddled (and that takes some doing, I having a brain the size of a planet and all). It’s all very well to fiddle around with narrative structure, but it’s either got to have a form or some point. Mr. Joshi doesn’t have either. I mean, that’s the problem with the book: what is the bloody point?
Various anecdotes in various space-time continuums about various characters in the Patel genealogy give us an idea into something, I can’t put my finger on it, which eventually leads to our understanding of wossname and his/her goings on in somewhere-or-the-other. There’s vague talk of the future where all water comes in capsules, including scatalogically detailed explanations of how people take a dump in the mid-21st century, combined with a nuclear war where Karachi and Bombay have already been wiped out. There’re flashbacks into pre-Independence Ahmedabad and how two people fell in love while braving a stampede. There’s Calcutta in all its splendour running like a used tampon all through the book. It’s about places, people, paraphernalia and pointlessness. It’s exciting in the quality of the writing, because the man is a genius in turning phrases and quite the Grand Panjandrum for similes, metaphors and what-have-yous. But story-telling is a different art. It’s more than picturesque speech.
Various anecdotes in various space-time continuums about various characters in the Patel genealogy give us an idea into something, I can’t put my finger on it, which eventually leads to our understanding of wossname and his/her goings on in somewhere-or-the-other. There’s vague talk of the future where all water comes in capsules, including scatalogically detailed explanations of how people take a dump in the mid-21st century, combined with a nuclear war where Karachi and Bombay have already been wiped out. There’re flashbacks into pre-Independence Ahmedabad and how two people fell in love while braving a stampede. There’s Calcutta in all its splendour running like a used tampon all through the book. It’s about places, people, paraphernalia and pointlessness. It’s exciting in the quality of the writing, because the man is a genius in turning phrases and quite the Grand Panjandrum for similes, metaphors and what-have-yous. But story-telling is a different art. It’s more than picturesque speech.
April 19, 2015
Tried but could not get past first chapter. Really wanted to like this book but the style of writing was like gibberish to me. Had to stop.
July 13, 2017
Interesting style.
Some self-gratification description.
But is not Salman Rushdie, who wishes to be.
Some self-gratification description.
But is not Salman Rushdie, who wishes to be.
December 10, 2012
Ex Bookworm group review:
Put simply, this was the saga of a family called Bhatt over three generations from before Indian independence to a time beyond our own. But it was anything but simple. At first, I found it rather difficult, rather inaccessible. It required some effort to get into, but it was worth the effort.
.
My feelings about the book when I had only read the first 100 or so pages were completely schizophrenic and deeply affected by two impressions, one bad, one good. Firstly, all the foreign language in the book was irritating, obstructive to the story and way overdone. It really isn't possible to grasp the nuances between Gujerati, Hindi and Bengali when you don't understand any of them.
Secondly, the chronology of the book was non-existent. It was random, perverse and confusing. But I liked it! It reminded me of an apocryphal story about the Beatles, where on one song (was it Sergeant Pepper?) George Martin was supposed to have taken a tape of a piece of music, chopped it into bits, thrown the bits up into the air, then picked them up and spliced the bits back together in random order producing a capricious, kaleidoscopic, whimsical interlude that challenged you to try and make sense of it. Paresh's memories were like that and making sense of them was quite hard work. Good exercise for the cerebrum, this one.
But this is how people remember, isn't it? You don't remember your first day and then every day thereafter in chronological order. Some months or years you hardly remember anything at all, but other memories stick out like icebergs. Sometimes these are big events, sometimes they are small, more personal ones. Sometimes they are family stories you have been told, sometimes they are things you have experienced yourself. But memory is random and it is prompted by photographs, letters, songs, just as it was in the book. Another strong memory evoked for me by the book was the many afternoons spent with my mum going through a battered brown cardboard box (which irrelevantly, I will tell you, had "48 SAUCERS TEA", "FRAGILE" and "NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL REQUIRED FOR USE" on it) of old photographs, letters, old tickets to cinemas and theatres and things of that ilk in it. I would say to my mum, "Who's that" and she would say something like "That's my Auntie Pem's husband, Jasper, who was sued for breach of promise when he refused to marry someone he got engaged to" or "that's your dad's uncle Frank, no-one in the family would have anything to do with him because he ran off with his nephew's wife". Most interestingly, on finding some love poems addressed to her from someone called Joe Egg and asking her who they were from, was told they were from my dad (Who wasn't called Joe or Egg). These often repeated stories about people and events from before I was born are woven into the history of my family, just like the love affair between Mahadev and Suman is woven into the history of the Bhatts. Small things, like the Jet Engine Laugh, assume a disproportionate relevance compared to historical events in a family context. I remember hardly anything about the Vietnam war which should have been a big event in my lifetime, but I remember vividly two women in our street having a punch up in one of their back gardens when I was about five. I thought Joshi was perceptive in his understanding of how memory works and skilful in conveying it, though it made the book more difficult to read than a story which runs chronologically from "once upon a time" to "they all lived happily ever after".
Although part of the book was set in the future, it didn't feel like science fiction, possibly because the future (for us) was the present and the past for Paresh. I thought there was remarkable invention in portraying the future and it could have just been a planetary post-apocalyptic vision, but it was kept small and personal, kept in the family. I was fascinated by the parts about the water and though some of the social implications on a big scale were explored, the better understanding was in learning how Paresh had a poo or a bath.
Apart from the Gujerati, Bengali etc, which I hated because it was opaque to me, I thought Joshi often had a great command of language. There were lots of times when I stopped and thought "that's really cool". There was some over-writing and I meant to quote one bit but I can't find it now, where he had mixed up a dozen metaphors and sprinkled them with clever-clogsy verbal acrobatics, a whole paragraph to describe something very ordinary, and I remember thinking God, it's only a bottle of milk (or whatever it was). But this was only from time to time, and this is Joshi's first novel. I feel sure he is a writer to watch in the future.
I liked many of the characters in the book, with their idiosyncrasies and their eccentricities, but I liked Para best of all. She was terrific. It's odd really that the parts of the book I found the easiest to relate to were those set in the imaginary future. The past (and indeed the present) were more difficult because of my abyssmal lack of knowledge about Indian history. I had no idea who Subhash Bose was and had to do some serious Googling to make any sense of all that.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book and I was rather sorry when I got to the end of it. I felt I had got to know this family quite well and would have been happy to find out more about them. It wasn't a perfect book and wasn't, I think, one to relax with. It required quite a lot of mental agility and wide-awakeness. But I thought it was different, interesting and worthwhile.
P.S. It found it absolutely un-reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut. Don't they put some rubbish on the covers of books in order to tempt you to read them?
Put simply, this was the saga of a family called Bhatt over three generations from before Indian independence to a time beyond our own. But it was anything but simple. At first, I found it rather difficult, rather inaccessible. It required some effort to get into, but it was worth the effort.
.
My feelings about the book when I had only read the first 100 or so pages were completely schizophrenic and deeply affected by two impressions, one bad, one good. Firstly, all the foreign language in the book was irritating, obstructive to the story and way overdone. It really isn't possible to grasp the nuances between Gujerati, Hindi and Bengali when you don't understand any of them.
Secondly, the chronology of the book was non-existent. It was random, perverse and confusing. But I liked it! It reminded me of an apocryphal story about the Beatles, where on one song (was it Sergeant Pepper?) George Martin was supposed to have taken a tape of a piece of music, chopped it into bits, thrown the bits up into the air, then picked them up and spliced the bits back together in random order producing a capricious, kaleidoscopic, whimsical interlude that challenged you to try and make sense of it. Paresh's memories were like that and making sense of them was quite hard work. Good exercise for the cerebrum, this one.
But this is how people remember, isn't it? You don't remember your first day and then every day thereafter in chronological order. Some months or years you hardly remember anything at all, but other memories stick out like icebergs. Sometimes these are big events, sometimes they are small, more personal ones. Sometimes they are family stories you have been told, sometimes they are things you have experienced yourself. But memory is random and it is prompted by photographs, letters, songs, just as it was in the book. Another strong memory evoked for me by the book was the many afternoons spent with my mum going through a battered brown cardboard box (which irrelevantly, I will tell you, had "48 SAUCERS TEA", "FRAGILE" and "NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL REQUIRED FOR USE" on it) of old photographs, letters, old tickets to cinemas and theatres and things of that ilk in it. I would say to my mum, "Who's that" and she would say something like "That's my Auntie Pem's husband, Jasper, who was sued for breach of promise when he refused to marry someone he got engaged to" or "that's your dad's uncle Frank, no-one in the family would have anything to do with him because he ran off with his nephew's wife". Most interestingly, on finding some love poems addressed to her from someone called Joe Egg and asking her who they were from, was told they were from my dad (Who wasn't called Joe or Egg). These often repeated stories about people and events from before I was born are woven into the history of my family, just like the love affair between Mahadev and Suman is woven into the history of the Bhatts. Small things, like the Jet Engine Laugh, assume a disproportionate relevance compared to historical events in a family context. I remember hardly anything about the Vietnam war which should have been a big event in my lifetime, but I remember vividly two women in our street having a punch up in one of their back gardens when I was about five. I thought Joshi was perceptive in his understanding of how memory works and skilful in conveying it, though it made the book more difficult to read than a story which runs chronologically from "once upon a time" to "they all lived happily ever after".
Although part of the book was set in the future, it didn't feel like science fiction, possibly because the future (for us) was the present and the past for Paresh. I thought there was remarkable invention in portraying the future and it could have just been a planetary post-apocalyptic vision, but it was kept small and personal, kept in the family. I was fascinated by the parts about the water and though some of the social implications on a big scale were explored, the better understanding was in learning how Paresh had a poo or a bath.
Apart from the Gujerati, Bengali etc, which I hated because it was opaque to me, I thought Joshi often had a great command of language. There were lots of times when I stopped and thought "that's really cool". There was some over-writing and I meant to quote one bit but I can't find it now, where he had mixed up a dozen metaphors and sprinkled them with clever-clogsy verbal acrobatics, a whole paragraph to describe something very ordinary, and I remember thinking God, it's only a bottle of milk (or whatever it was). But this was only from time to time, and this is Joshi's first novel. I feel sure he is a writer to watch in the future.
I liked many of the characters in the book, with their idiosyncrasies and their eccentricities, but I liked Para best of all. She was terrific. It's odd really that the parts of the book I found the easiest to relate to were those set in the imaginary future. The past (and indeed the present) were more difficult because of my abyssmal lack of knowledge about Indian history. I had no idea who Subhash Bose was and had to do some serious Googling to make any sense of all that.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book and I was rather sorry when I got to the end of it. I felt I had got to know this family quite well and would have been happy to find out more about them. It wasn't a perfect book and wasn't, I think, one to relax with. It required quite a lot of mental agility and wide-awakeness. But I thought it was different, interesting and worthwhile.
P.S. It found it absolutely un-reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut. Don't they put some rubbish on the covers of books in order to tempt you to read them?
September 20, 2025
I really struggled with this book.
Whilst I didn’t dislike the prose despite its challenges and large parts written not in English, combined with some very interesting themes touching on different aspects of Indian history. The lack of an overarching connecting plot or theme that connected the different chapters and characters made this book one that I did not finish.
I wonder if it would have been better to write 5 short stories tracing Indian history without the attempts to link them together with the family history.
Whilst I didn’t dislike the prose despite its challenges and large parts written not in English, combined with some very interesting themes touching on different aspects of Indian history. The lack of an overarching connecting plot or theme that connected the different chapters and characters made this book one that I did not finish.
I wonder if it would have been better to write 5 short stories tracing Indian history without the attempts to link them together with the family history.
July 15, 2008
Been meaning to read this for awhile, so I did. Very poetic fiction, less concerned with structure than most "stories". Hard to enjoy alot while reading, kind of book that gives you a sense of it all when you finish. The writing slips in and out of consciousness(es), especially at the end. Another metafiction device that I feel was pulled off fairly well. First Indian modern fiction I've read, will keep an eye on this guy.
February 27, 2016
enjoyed it, plot, imagination and language, great fun, got rid of it, missed it frequently ever since, and that never happens to me. Totally recommend and definitely a 9 out of 10 despite being a fun novel and interesting about India and light scifi rather than a Great Novel
March 16, 2008
Interesting Book, well written and enjoyable.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews