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The Light at the End of the World
Connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its potentially apocalyptic future, this sweeping tale of rebellion, courage, and brutality reinvents historical fiction for our time: a magisterial work of shifting forms reminiscent of Cloud Atlas and Underworld.
Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the “New Delhi Monkey Man.” Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in history. Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft. And in 1859, a detachment of British soldiers rides toward the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each section is a pursuit, centered around a character who must find or recover crucial but hidden truths in their respective time. Mirroring the future and the past, these narratives illuminate and reimagine Indian identity and history. The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in a decade and a half, is an astonishing work that brilliantly reimagines the structure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the “New Delhi Monkey Man.” Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in history. Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft. And in 1859, a detachment of British soldiers rides toward the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each section is a pursuit, centered around a character who must find or recover crucial but hidden truths in their respective time. Mirroring the future and the past, these narratives illuminate and reimagine Indian identity and history. The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in a decade and a half, is an astonishing work that brilliantly reimagines the structure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
458 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2023
162 people are currently reading
9425 people want to read
About the author
Siddhartha Deb
14 books89 followersSiddhartha Deb is an Indian author who was educated in India and at Columbia University, US. Deb began his career in journalism as a sports journalist in Calcutta in 1994 before moving to Delhi to continue regular journalism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
Want to read
December 5, 2022plot seems so cool wtf
i love anticolonialist books ♥️
i love anticolonialist books ♥️
April 11, 2023
Not quite what I expected when getting into this new story. While I enjoyed the writing and commentary on the subject matter, there were several times when the book just seemed to drone on about topics that--while relevant--didn't seem to require as much attention to detail that were being given. This caused moments that were likely meant to be inciteful instead turn into a chore to be completed in order to get to the next page.
July 8, 2023
This story tried too hard to be too many things. I couldn't keep up with the storyline, and I couldn't wait for it to be over.
October 22, 2023
Unveiling the New India's hysteria through the lanes of her past.
Hypnotic. Surreal. Multi-layered. Haunting. Decieving. Nuanced. These are some adjectives I'd want to use for Siddharth Deb's recent fictional oeuvre 'The Light at the end of the world'. It might test patience of some readers making them crawl throughout the read, at times it might also lead to nowhere, but ultimately, Deb's employment of the ethereal elements in the history of India do mirror the complex socio-political dynamics of India and shed light upon the interplay of power, identity and destiny that shapes an individual in tough times.
Divided into four parts the novel starts out in contemporary India where the division is clearer than ever. The updated citizens list is already in place and Bibi, a Muslim journalist in Delhi has her life entangled between the political and the personal. She faces threats due to her previous scandalous reports which now provide discomfort to the establishment and she is also tasked with finding her suspiciously missing colleague Sanjit.
Moving back to 1984 in Bhopal, where an unnamed assassin, following the principles of Manu, is assigned by his masters in Delhi to monitor and eliminate a factory operator with sensitive information about safety violations of an American-run chemical plant
In 1947 Calcutta, Das, a veterinary student, believes he has been chosen to pilot a mystical Vedic vehicle to restore harmony in a riot-ridden India. He has to go through rigorous exams to prove himself.
Finally, the narrative shifts to 1857, during the Indian mutiny against British rule. A British army unit pursues mutineers into the Himalayas and are seeking refuge in a surreal palace of the man called the White Mughal, where they face extraordinary events shaped by magical forces.
Back to 2021 where all the vignettes make sense as Bibi is set to the Andaman Islands to locate her former employee. India's past and present and future and the fiction and the real and everything else falls into place.
Hypnotic. Surreal. Multi-layered. Haunting. Decieving. Nuanced. These are some adjectives I'd want to use for Siddharth Deb's recent fictional oeuvre 'The Light at the end of the world'. It might test patience of some readers making them crawl throughout the read, at times it might also lead to nowhere, but ultimately, Deb's employment of the ethereal elements in the history of India do mirror the complex socio-political dynamics of India and shed light upon the interplay of power, identity and destiny that shapes an individual in tough times.
Divided into four parts the novel starts out in contemporary India where the division is clearer than ever. The updated citizens list is already in place and Bibi, a Muslim journalist in Delhi has her life entangled between the political and the personal. She faces threats due to her previous scandalous reports which now provide discomfort to the establishment and she is also tasked with finding her suspiciously missing colleague Sanjit.
Moving back to 1984 in Bhopal, where an unnamed assassin, following the principles of Manu, is assigned by his masters in Delhi to monitor and eliminate a factory operator with sensitive information about safety violations of an American-run chemical plant
In 1947 Calcutta, Das, a veterinary student, believes he has been chosen to pilot a mystical Vedic vehicle to restore harmony in a riot-ridden India. He has to go through rigorous exams to prove himself.
Finally, the narrative shifts to 1857, during the Indian mutiny against British rule. A British army unit pursues mutineers into the Himalayas and are seeking refuge in a surreal palace of the man called the White Mughal, where they face extraordinary events shaped by magical forces.
Back to 2021 where all the vignettes make sense as Bibi is set to the Andaman Islands to locate her former employee. India's past and present and future and the fiction and the real and everything else falls into place.
January 10, 2023
It was a good read.
July 25, 2024
Begin with City of Brume,
spin tales of earthly gloom;
Claustropolis: 1984,
Repetition is a bore;
Paranoid: 1947 ("Sky-man in a man-hole with astronomy for dream, astrology for nightmare..." A.K. Ramanujan)
less annoyed, felt I'd reached heaven;
The Line of Faith: 1859
A shrine and a path to shine...
...at the end of the world, the light, (" What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?" Mary Shelley)
wake up from nightmares affright.
-=-=-=-=-=
From the antediluvian flight,
to the just happened lunar site,
I know India's past less than her caste,
more about my relatives order than their geopolitical border.
I sleepwalk writings collage,
only afloat in references barrage.
Monkey Man, ant people, the Bull, the Bone,
animals and names thrown;
Bibi Bobo Baba,
an experimental saga.
spin tales of earthly gloom;
Claustropolis: 1984,
Repetition is a bore;
Paranoid: 1947 ("Sky-man in a man-hole with astronomy for dream, astrology for nightmare..." A.K. Ramanujan)
less annoyed, felt I'd reached heaven;
The Line of Faith: 1859
A shrine and a path to shine...
...at the end of the world, the light, (" What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?" Mary Shelley)
wake up from nightmares affright.
-=-=-=-=-=
From the antediluvian flight,
to the just happened lunar site,
I know India's past less than her caste,
more about my relatives order than their geopolitical border.
I sleepwalk writings collage,
only afloat in references barrage.
Monkey Man, ant people, the Bull, the Bone,
animals and names thrown;
Bibi Bobo Baba,
an experimental saga.
February 18, 2024
I read this because the author has written for _Dissent_ and I'm interested in fiction that imagines possibilities beyond necrocapitalism, as well as immigrant perspectives. The story takes place in India. It's never quite clear what's happening, and that in itself seems to be an embodiment or demonstration or commentary on the Current Situation - that there are people in charge who are hiding things, while at the same time it's an open secret that behind all our daily lives are prisons and torture chambers and secrets.
The protagonist is a Muslim female journalist now working for an organization that's always issuing papers with titles that are a color and a noun - like Blue Justice or Green Energy, which I thought was quietly hilarious. Soon the group becomes interested in the journalist's former investigations, a long with a male partner/boyfriend, of a prison/workhouse type thing - it's unclear in the story what, exactly, is there, and that's the point. There are animal-humans who might be magical realist elements or might be bioengineered beings linked to whatever odd nexus of power/corruption/violence the journalist is investigating. She'd thought her partner was dead, but it turns out he isn't.
The book reads a lot like _The Castle_, in that it's a very long book where the protagonist exists in a world where she needs to accomplish something and can't, and the length and complexity and seeming futility of the search are themselves part of the story.
Spoiler alert: the light at the end of the world turns out to be from a bomb called/linked metaphorically to Hindu world destruction mythology.
I had been assuming/hoping the story would paint a future instead of being what seemed to me another dystopian apocalypse. Maybe I missed something.
The writing is often lyrical, and Bibi's lostness seems emblematic until it becomes tiresome, even if I understand/recognize it: "Bib can sense the heightened pitch of her thoughts as she stands in the kitchen surrounded by food she cannot really afford. yet on the phone, she is almost silent. Her responses are restricted to monosyllables. She wants to say that she is broken. That love, writing, friendship, everything has been soured. That she makes her way through her days like someone picking a path through ruins after a war. That for years now, her evenings have been hollowed out by loneliness, her only companion a derisive voice in her head, lacerating, embittered, a voice that doesn't want to shut up and that can only be silenced by Bibi's promises to quit, to give it all up, leading to long reveries of moving far away, to a place fantastically remote, as though only at the edge of the world, on a mountain that looks over shadowy, elongated valleys, or on an island where a single lighthouse peers over the edge of the continental shelf, can she reconstitute herself into a better, happier Bibi." (49).
Watching a demonstration of farmers and members of oppressed ethnic minorities with the one-armed security guard, Mohinder, who seems to be a tether to reality in some ways, he says their American boss would not be able to hear him listing the names of the tribes, but that Bibi "understand[s] because you still hope other worlds are possible" (100), then he offers her "a video story about some of the worlds that are possible" (101). And then Mohinder disappears.
The long sentence beginning on page 424 sums up so much of what the story is about. It begins, "Door after door is shut, although it seems to Bib she can hear murmurs from inside as she walks by, like news of the greatest import is being passed from room to room, and she feels, even though she is walking at a normal pace, that time has somehow become sluggish, dilated . . . and that the rooms are whispering to her all the secrets they know, the secrets that have never been published, that can never be published, because that is the whole point of news, that behind every story, there is always a truer, unpublished story, so that for every daily published in this building and kept in the official archives, there is a least one shadow daily printed in type that runs blood-red, not funeral black . . " 425)
The journalist boyfriend who was thought dead but was instead hiding says, after he stops writing, "that initial bourgeois humiliation, of having failed, gave way gradually to a feeling of liberation" (435).
After she finds the boyfriend, they escape to a remote island, where Bibi finally reflects that "the truth is sometimes everywhere, even if it turns out to be as strange as fiction. It is in the dreams that unlock themselves, in the walks that you take, and in the eyes that follow you in tailoring shops and along subway corridors. [It continues in this vein for a paragraph, then reflects on the meaning of cybernetics. Then] "Everywhere, those who have doubt in their souls about the lies their world is mired in, who mourn its long, ongoing collapse under the tutelage of a few, they all receive intimations from the kubernetes. Sometimes, this takes the shape of passing strangers who have something of the animal in them" or messages in spam, calls from unknown callers late at night, "suggestive shapes in clouds and dust storms" and "mineral-rich bird droppings." "And, of course, the messages are most frequent, most insistent, in that last free realm of ours, our dreams, asking us to listen to our deepest selves, to whatever in us that most yearns to be liberated" (441).
She realizes that the AIs and other self-aware systems are aghast at the destruction of the world. "Blasting the moon into two segments, melting the ice caps, the ensuing disaster tracked by the powerful from their supposedly inviolable properties as ruin visits all those they believe count for nothing. but perhaps it is in their winning that they have created a blowback, opened the doors to other realms, through which now float androgynous angels of dust and monkey men and kubernetes. Boatmen without faces." (443).
If it's supposed to be leftist fiction, it's pretty far from a Marxist view of altering actual material conditions, a reliance on a dream of blowback from an alternate universe. But maybe what it offers is just the possibility of imagining freedom, a possibility necrocapitalism has rendered nearly impossible to imagine.
The protagonist is a Muslim female journalist now working for an organization that's always issuing papers with titles that are a color and a noun - like Blue Justice or Green Energy, which I thought was quietly hilarious. Soon the group becomes interested in the journalist's former investigations, a long with a male partner/boyfriend, of a prison/workhouse type thing - it's unclear in the story what, exactly, is there, and that's the point. There are animal-humans who might be magical realist elements or might be bioengineered beings linked to whatever odd nexus of power/corruption/violence the journalist is investigating. She'd thought her partner was dead, but it turns out he isn't.
The book reads a lot like _The Castle_, in that it's a very long book where the protagonist exists in a world where she needs to accomplish something and can't, and the length and complexity and seeming futility of the search are themselves part of the story.
Spoiler alert: the light at the end of the world turns out to be from a bomb called/linked metaphorically to Hindu world destruction mythology.
I had been assuming/hoping the story would paint a future instead of being what seemed to me another dystopian apocalypse. Maybe I missed something.
The writing is often lyrical, and Bibi's lostness seems emblematic until it becomes tiresome, even if I understand/recognize it: "Bib can sense the heightened pitch of her thoughts as she stands in the kitchen surrounded by food she cannot really afford. yet on the phone, she is almost silent. Her responses are restricted to monosyllables. She wants to say that she is broken. That love, writing, friendship, everything has been soured. That she makes her way through her days like someone picking a path through ruins after a war. That for years now, her evenings have been hollowed out by loneliness, her only companion a derisive voice in her head, lacerating, embittered, a voice that doesn't want to shut up and that can only be silenced by Bibi's promises to quit, to give it all up, leading to long reveries of moving far away, to a place fantastically remote, as though only at the edge of the world, on a mountain that looks over shadowy, elongated valleys, or on an island where a single lighthouse peers over the edge of the continental shelf, can she reconstitute herself into a better, happier Bibi." (49).
Watching a demonstration of farmers and members of oppressed ethnic minorities with the one-armed security guard, Mohinder, who seems to be a tether to reality in some ways, he says their American boss would not be able to hear him listing the names of the tribes, but that Bibi "understand[s] because you still hope other worlds are possible" (100), then he offers her "a video story about some of the worlds that are possible" (101). And then Mohinder disappears.
The long sentence beginning on page 424 sums up so much of what the story is about. It begins, "Door after door is shut, although it seems to Bib she can hear murmurs from inside as she walks by, like news of the greatest import is being passed from room to room, and she feels, even though she is walking at a normal pace, that time has somehow become sluggish, dilated . . . and that the rooms are whispering to her all the secrets they know, the secrets that have never been published, that can never be published, because that is the whole point of news, that behind every story, there is always a truer, unpublished story, so that for every daily published in this building and kept in the official archives, there is a least one shadow daily printed in type that runs blood-red, not funeral black . . " 425)
The journalist boyfriend who was thought dead but was instead hiding says, after he stops writing, "that initial bourgeois humiliation, of having failed, gave way gradually to a feeling of liberation" (435).
After she finds the boyfriend, they escape to a remote island, where Bibi finally reflects that "the truth is sometimes everywhere, even if it turns out to be as strange as fiction. It is in the dreams that unlock themselves, in the walks that you take, and in the eyes that follow you in tailoring shops and along subway corridors. [It continues in this vein for a paragraph, then reflects on the meaning of cybernetics. Then] "Everywhere, those who have doubt in their souls about the lies their world is mired in, who mourn its long, ongoing collapse under the tutelage of a few, they all receive intimations from the kubernetes. Sometimes, this takes the shape of passing strangers who have something of the animal in them" or messages in spam, calls from unknown callers late at night, "suggestive shapes in clouds and dust storms" and "mineral-rich bird droppings." "And, of course, the messages are most frequent, most insistent, in that last free realm of ours, our dreams, asking us to listen to our deepest selves, to whatever in us that most yearns to be liberated" (441).
She realizes that the AIs and other self-aware systems are aghast at the destruction of the world. "Blasting the moon into two segments, melting the ice caps, the ensuing disaster tracked by the powerful from their supposedly inviolable properties as ruin visits all those they believe count for nothing. but perhaps it is in their winning that they have created a blowback, opened the doors to other realms, through which now float androgynous angels of dust and monkey men and kubernetes. Boatmen without faces." (443).
If it's supposed to be leftist fiction, it's pretty far from a Marxist view of altering actual material conditions, a reliance on a dream of blowback from an alternate universe. But maybe what it offers is just the possibility of imagining freedom, a possibility necrocapitalism has rendered nearly impossible to imagine.
September 15, 2023
looooooved. fever dream
May 21, 2023
Siddhartha Deb zeros in on pivotal individuals caught in a dizzying web of cultural conflict and things beyond human understanding in this mega-meta-novel of Indian past/present/future. Think Don Delillo's Underworld crossed with Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. As smart and thoughtful as it is thrilling and suspenseful. 9/10
Read
September 19, 2024I was not lucid enough to meet this book where it was
August 10, 2023
Honestly I think one of the worst books I’ve read in several years. It was a chore to work through. So many sentences and thoughts just dragged on unnecessarily. Its almost similar to that high school class where you are just learning to write using expressive language and go overboard. I can see why his editor commented about his state when writing it. If I could give negative stars I would.
June 4, 2024
A dark, wondrous, densely atmospheric slog of a book. I love many things about it, but it didn't fully come together for me. Recommended for fans of the strange and the slow.
January 1, 2025
Absolutely extraordinary writing (like, not a single goddamn word wasted! HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN) that exquisitely satires the dystopian nature of modern Indian politics (and especially propaganda outlets like Arnab Goswami's). I replayed the chapter about the White Mughal again and again because it was so lush with detail and description, like a mix between How High We Go in the Dark and Annihilation (and also I was trying to keep the realities straight and that was HARD). Of course I loved the coincidence of reading another book so soon after Loot that brought up Tipu's Tiger.
This quote in particular blew my mind, and I think I really need to get this book in print and read it again, because I heard so many beautiful lines in passing and my memory, faulty as it is, was entirely incapable of retaining it perfectly:
*EDIT: Okay fine, Siddhartha, you can have your dirty star. BUT THE DAS CHAPTER DIDN'T DO IT FOR ME. I HOPE YOU KNOW.
Also, I highly recommend the audiobook version. Sneha Mathan does it again, and Neil Shah is FANTASTIC switching between as many voices as he does. Audiobook fiction is hard for me, but not with these two at the helm and such eloquent prose as the source material.
This quote in particular blew my mind, and I think I really need to get this book in print and read it again, because I heard so many beautiful lines in passing and my memory, faulty as it is, was entirely incapable of retaining it perfectly:
A paintbrush, erasing the marks of an old, much-used canvas, erasing the streets, the cars … the malice of the glossy-haired anchor, the banal evil of the masklike prime minister, erasing the ruins from the 20th century, the ruins from the 16th century, the ruins from the 11th century and the ruins from the third century B.C.E., erasing a countryside already erased and erasing a nation that has failed by every measure.This almost got 5 stars from me, but I was hoping the storylines would wrap up a bit more clearly at the end. I needed an "OH MY GOD, THAT'S WHAT WAS HAPPENING" moment, and maybe like a very literal, word-for-word explanation of how the plotlines intersect 😅
*EDIT: Okay fine, Siddhartha, you can have your dirty star. BUT THE DAS CHAPTER DIDN'T DO IT FOR ME. I HOPE YOU KNOW.
Also, I highly recommend the audiobook version. Sneha Mathan does it again, and Neil Shah is FANTASTIC switching between as many voices as he does. Audiobook fiction is hard for me, but not with these two at the helm and such eloquent prose as the source material.
July 12, 2023
I really didn’t get this book, but wanted to.
Want to read
May 15, 2023i've been desperately searching for historical fiction sff books set in the subcontinent and this might just be it. The premise sounds very Cloud Atlas and Sea of Tranquility, exactly the kind of shit I love!
June 30, 2024
This book is trying to be incisive social commentary about modern India and its troubled past, but instead it often reads like an extended, overly cynical political rant instead of a cohesive narrative. I despise Hindu nationalism and systemic casteism and political corruption and crony capitalism and communalism and every evil “ism” this novel digs its teeth into, but I don’t need to read a novel to vent about such topics. This isn’t to say that literature shouldn’t contain commentary; quite the opposite. The commentary in a novel should offer something that we can’t find on a news channel. It should be more subtle and subversive, not grating to the read. When an author’s idea of subtle commentary is to name his fictional viral bioweapon “NaMo-03”, you know he’s lost the plot (even the biggest Modi hater like myself rolled his eyes reading that).
The book is strong when it leans into literary sensibilities. The sections based in India’s past—for example, the Union Carbide factory disaster—contain more creative literary devices and rely more on compelling narrative instead of political bluster. The sections based in modern India sometimes have well-written descriptions of Indian urban life, even when their failed social criticism is irritatingly shallow. But in the end, the author is trying to go down too many paths at once without enough depth or deftness, and leaves basically no space for hope. It’s a frustrating read.
The book is strong when it leans into literary sensibilities. The sections based in India’s past—for example, the Union Carbide factory disaster—contain more creative literary devices and rely more on compelling narrative instead of political bluster. The sections based in modern India sometimes have well-written descriptions of Indian urban life, even when their failed social criticism is irritatingly shallow. But in the end, the author is trying to go down too many paths at once without enough depth or deftness, and leaves basically no space for hope. It’s a frustrating read.
dnf
November 16, 2023i've honestly felt no desire to come back to this and it's been like. five months so i think i'll just dnf it
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put on hiatus at 33%
i'll probably come back to this. but i'm honestly not in the mental state right now to read anything heavy and/or dense
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put on hiatus at 33%
i'll probably come back to this. but i'm honestly not in the mental state right now to read anything heavy and/or dense
May 15, 2023
I felt the story dragged in a few places and could have been told in fewer pages.
June 24, 2023
Siddhartha Deb's "The Light at the End of the World" is a captivating exploration of hope and desolation
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Siddhartha Deb's novel "The Light at the End of the World" is a mesmerising literary work that delves into the complexities of human existence against the backdrop of desolation and the relentless pursuit of hope. With his distinctive prose and profound insights, Deb weaves together a gripping narrative that captivates readers from beginning to end.
In this groundbreaking novel, Siddhartha Deb masterfully connects India's tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries with its ancient history and a potentially catastrophic future. The story revolves around Bibi, a modest employee of a global consulting firm in futuristic Delhi. Her mission is to locate a man believed to be deceased, but who now possesses a vast collection of documents that claim to expose the secrets of the Indian government. These revelations include the existence of detention centers, mutated creatures, engineered viruses, experimental weapons, and the discovery of alien wreckage in remote mountain regions.
As the narrative unfolds, it transports us back in time to Bhopal in 1984, where an assassin hunts his prey through a city that is on the verge of experiencing the worst industrial disaster in human history. We also delve into the life and work of a veterinary student in Calcutta in 1947, whose connection to an ancient Vedic aircraft could potentially prevent genocide. Additionally, we witness a British soldier's journey in 1859, as he leads his detachment to the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
These interconnected timelines merge to create an extraordinary and expansive novel, where each protagonist must confront the hidden truths of their era and grapple with the parallel universe that binds them all together through automatons, spirits, spacecraft, and extraterrestrial beings. "The Light at the End of the World," Deb's first novel in fifteen years, is a literary masterpiece that pushes the boundaries of storytelling while vividly portraying contemporary India.
One of the novel's greatest strengths lies in Deb's evocative descriptions. His vivid and poetic language breathes life into the dystopian realities of India, allowing readers to vividly experience the harsh realities faced by the characters. The rawness of the setting is juxtaposed with the profound darkness that permeates their lives, creating a powerful narrative that accentuates the emotional depth of the narrative.
Deb's exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the struggle for meaning is thought-provoking and deeply affecting. Through the lives of his characters, he tackles existential questions and examines the nature of human connections. As the story unfolds, the characters' motivations and desires are laid bare, exposing the universal yearnings that drive us all. The author's ability to delve into the complexities of the human psyche is commendable, leaving readers with a profound sense of introspection.
The pacing of the novel is measured, allowing for moments of reflection and contemplation. While this deliberate approach adds depth to the narrative, it may feel slow-paced to readers seeking a more fast-paced plot. However, the languid rhythm of the story serves to amplify the atmosphere of desolation and despair, ultimately enhancing the overall impact of the novel.
In conclusion, Siddhartha Deb's "The Light at the End of the World" is an engrossing literary work that blends poignant storytelling with profound philosophical inquiries. Deb's exquisite prose, vivid descriptions, and deep exploration of human emotions make this novel a compelling read. Though it may not satisfy those seeking a fast-paced plot, it offers a rich and introspective experience for readers who appreciate literary fiction. "The Light at the End of the World" is a testament to Deb's talent as a storyteller, leaving a lasting impression long after the final page is turned.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Siddhartha Deb's novel "The Light at the End of the World" is a mesmerising literary work that delves into the complexities of human existence against the backdrop of desolation and the relentless pursuit of hope. With his distinctive prose and profound insights, Deb weaves together a gripping narrative that captivates readers from beginning to end.
In this groundbreaking novel, Siddhartha Deb masterfully connects India's tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries with its ancient history and a potentially catastrophic future. The story revolves around Bibi, a modest employee of a global consulting firm in futuristic Delhi. Her mission is to locate a man believed to be deceased, but who now possesses a vast collection of documents that claim to expose the secrets of the Indian government. These revelations include the existence of detention centers, mutated creatures, engineered viruses, experimental weapons, and the discovery of alien wreckage in remote mountain regions.
As the narrative unfolds, it transports us back in time to Bhopal in 1984, where an assassin hunts his prey through a city that is on the verge of experiencing the worst industrial disaster in human history. We also delve into the life and work of a veterinary student in Calcutta in 1947, whose connection to an ancient Vedic aircraft could potentially prevent genocide. Additionally, we witness a British soldier's journey in 1859, as he leads his detachment to the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
These interconnected timelines merge to create an extraordinary and expansive novel, where each protagonist must confront the hidden truths of their era and grapple with the parallel universe that binds them all together through automatons, spirits, spacecraft, and extraterrestrial beings. "The Light at the End of the World," Deb's first novel in fifteen years, is a literary masterpiece that pushes the boundaries of storytelling while vividly portraying contemporary India.
One of the novel's greatest strengths lies in Deb's evocative descriptions. His vivid and poetic language breathes life into the dystopian realities of India, allowing readers to vividly experience the harsh realities faced by the characters. The rawness of the setting is juxtaposed with the profound darkness that permeates their lives, creating a powerful narrative that accentuates the emotional depth of the narrative.
Deb's exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the struggle for meaning is thought-provoking and deeply affecting. Through the lives of his characters, he tackles existential questions and examines the nature of human connections. As the story unfolds, the characters' motivations and desires are laid bare, exposing the universal yearnings that drive us all. The author's ability to delve into the complexities of the human psyche is commendable, leaving readers with a profound sense of introspection.
The pacing of the novel is measured, allowing for moments of reflection and contemplation. While this deliberate approach adds depth to the narrative, it may feel slow-paced to readers seeking a more fast-paced plot. However, the languid rhythm of the story serves to amplify the atmosphere of desolation and despair, ultimately enhancing the overall impact of the novel.
In conclusion, Siddhartha Deb's "The Light at the End of the World" is an engrossing literary work that blends poignant storytelling with profound philosophical inquiries. Deb's exquisite prose, vivid descriptions, and deep exploration of human emotions make this novel a compelling read. Though it may not satisfy those seeking a fast-paced plot, it offers a rich and introspective experience for readers who appreciate literary fiction. "The Light at the End of the World" is a testament to Deb's talent as a storyteller, leaving a lasting impression long after the final page is turned.
September 6, 2023
I spent time preparing to read this, aware it would probably occupy the immense brainspace that Cloud Atlas did. But while Cloud Atlas left me marveling at the way every little clue came together like a puzzle, Light At the End of the World was different. Same concept, but it felt more like an acid trip than a puzzle- little glimpses of understanding peeking through, but almost entirely shrouded in a deep, deep fog of surrealism, and I mean SURREAL surrealism, sometimes rooted to the ground and other times completely untethered to reality, to a point where I was never sure what was imaginary. At times, this became even scary, which I absolutely loved, especially the conclusion of the Sykes storyline. I’m a big fan of multiple interpretations, unreliable narrators, and too many clues for the audience to easily fit together the first time. It subverts my #1 pet peeve- having the story explained to me.
The only reason I gave this 4 stars is the same reason I loved it. I felt like I was being edged. It was amazing, but I never broke through to understanding, and I grew frustrated at recurring symbolism that I could only gasp and point to without being able to name its significance. Having finished it, I can only grapple surface themes, like imperialism bringing about the end of cultures, livelihoods, vibrance in the world, and the earth’s ability to sustain life. “Many worlds are possible” could mean the potential future for the Earth whether we continue on a globally destructive path. But there are vast swathes of symbolic elements (real or not) whose significance I never began to understand. That being said, I had to google many things, like Hanuman, Bibi/Babu, Vimana, and many mythical creatures; it’s likely that not being of Indian descent, I lack the cultural context to understand many elements. Given the novel’s anticolonialist themes, I feel just fine if not everything is meant for me.
—— ——- ————
one thing I want to add as a PS- I was born in 1996 and had never heard of the Bhopal Disaster. I was shook to my core reading about it and surveyed other people my age- only 16% reported that they’d heard of it. I find that shocking given how often we hear of Chernobyl and how the US is tied to this tragedy yet refuses to claim responsibility for it. I wish I could say I find it surprising that young Americans generally don’t know about it, but the US sure is good at covering up its oopsies.
The only reason I gave this 4 stars is the same reason I loved it. I felt like I was being edged. It was amazing, but I never broke through to understanding, and I grew frustrated at recurring symbolism that I could only gasp and point to without being able to name its significance. Having finished it, I can only grapple surface themes, like imperialism bringing about the end of cultures, livelihoods, vibrance in the world, and the earth’s ability to sustain life. “Many worlds are possible” could mean the potential future for the Earth whether we continue on a globally destructive path. But there are vast swathes of symbolic elements (real or not) whose significance I never began to understand. That being said, I had to google many things, like Hanuman, Bibi/Babu, Vimana, and many mythical creatures; it’s likely that not being of Indian descent, I lack the cultural context to understand many elements. Given the novel’s anticolonialist themes, I feel just fine if not everything is meant for me.
—— ——- ————
one thing I want to add as a PS- I was born in 1996 and had never heard of the Bhopal Disaster. I was shook to my core reading about it and surveyed other people my age- only 16% reported that they’d heard of it. I find that shocking given how often we hear of Chernobyl and how the US is tied to this tragedy yet refuses to claim responsibility for it. I wish I could say I find it surprising that young Americans generally don’t know about it, but the US sure is good at covering up its oopsies.
September 14, 2023
The light at the end of the world by Siddhartha Deb
There are many confusing nouns in this book, such as the black caliph, such as the ant people, such as the
dog people.
I do wonder what is Deb’s message….
The first section seems to be at about Bibi a person in modern Delhi in a meaningless corporate job for Amidala, who has been in a previous life a reporter. A crazed man enters Amidala office and makes accusations, leaving behind a USB drive.
Bibi lives with Moi, who is trying to emigrate from India to the West. Bibi is mentioned in the drive and is called upon to justify her previous work as a reporter to the big boss at his remote office….
In the next section set at the time of indura’s assassination, and the Bhopal disaster we follow an unnamed assassin with a mission to disrupt a conspiracy….by an operator….
The third chapter starts off in 1947 with Das, a veterinary surgeon being tested for horsemanship … and fainting as he contemplates: …communism, Ghandiism, sensualism, and body sculpting are choices….and occultism. ..the Committee and the Vimana casa
Dr Bose, a Bengali psychoanalyst has a savage Freud clinic.
Both MI6 and OSS are interested in the Vimana.
The Committee and detective Sleeman are also.
Weapons of mass destruction. …V2; fat boy and maybe the Vimana
The part set in 1859 after the Sepoy mutiny….: Sykes meets the White Mughal
The white Moghul appeals to Sykes for help in suppressing a revolt against him; a somewhat satiric riff on the British suppression of the 1859 Sepoy mutiny.
They visit his White Castle and its world of fever dreams and predict a future….with the Bibi and Babu…the Colonel shows Sykes telegraph cables to the future…
Sykes at the White Castle: Sacrifice restoration or mutiny?
The story of the white mughal and how he built his White Castle;,.
The story of Colonel Sleeman’s searching for the Zone..
The ending of the search….
Last novella; bibi flight to andaman:
- [ ] …
- [ ] Echo syndrome; old emails recurring
- [ ] Bibi at the hotel lighthouse searches for a signal . and searches for her former journalist colleague Sanjit….
- [ ] Andaman Islands remember Godwanaland super continent !
Japanese invasion of WW2.
Flooding and blame game and muslim conspiracy
Intertwining of India and Bangladesh
Bibi recuperating in Delhi
Anjit was arrested and allowed to rot quite a while in prison; unclear how he got to Andaman Island
Final scene is the Indian bomb test (I think l)
- [ ] …
There are many confusing nouns in this book, such as the black caliph, such as the ant people, such as the
dog people.
I do wonder what is Deb’s message….
The first section seems to be at about Bibi a person in modern Delhi in a meaningless corporate job for Amidala, who has been in a previous life a reporter. A crazed man enters Amidala office and makes accusations, leaving behind a USB drive.
Bibi lives with Moi, who is trying to emigrate from India to the West. Bibi is mentioned in the drive and is called upon to justify her previous work as a reporter to the big boss at his remote office….
In the next section set at the time of indura’s assassination, and the Bhopal disaster we follow an unnamed assassin with a mission to disrupt a conspiracy….by an operator….
The third chapter starts off in 1947 with Das, a veterinary surgeon being tested for horsemanship … and fainting as he contemplates: …communism, Ghandiism, sensualism, and body sculpting are choices….and occultism. ..the Committee and the Vimana casa
Dr Bose, a Bengali psychoanalyst has a savage Freud clinic.
Both MI6 and OSS are interested in the Vimana.
The Committee and detective Sleeman are also.
Weapons of mass destruction. …V2; fat boy and maybe the Vimana
The part set in 1859 after the Sepoy mutiny….: Sykes meets the White Mughal
The white Moghul appeals to Sykes for help in suppressing a revolt against him; a somewhat satiric riff on the British suppression of the 1859 Sepoy mutiny.
They visit his White Castle and its world of fever dreams and predict a future….with the Bibi and Babu…the Colonel shows Sykes telegraph cables to the future…
Sykes at the White Castle: Sacrifice restoration or mutiny?
The story of the white mughal and how he built his White Castle;,.
The story of Colonel Sleeman’s searching for the Zone..
The ending of the search….
Last novella; bibi flight to andaman:
- [ ] …
- [ ] Echo syndrome; old emails recurring
- [ ] Bibi at the hotel lighthouse searches for a signal . and searches for her former journalist colleague Sanjit….
- [ ] Andaman Islands remember Godwanaland super continent !
Japanese invasion of WW2.
Flooding and blame game and muslim conspiracy
Intertwining of India and Bangladesh
Bibi recuperating in Delhi
Anjit was arrested and allowed to rot quite a while in prison; unclear how he got to Andaman Island
Final scene is the Indian bomb test (I think l)
- [ ] …
August 20, 2023
Slogged through 30% of this book and gave up. It is one long dystopian description of our current world, every sentence an attempt at writing the most dense, most clever, most creative description of the situation. Repeat for 150 pages (when I quit). Exhausting. There is not a plot, or only a hint of one, very little movement in the story, just one scene after another of variations on a theme. The theme could be a good one, but, alas, is it suffocates everything.
Connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its potentially apocalyptic future, this sweeping tale of rebellion, courage, and brutality reinvents historical fiction for our time: a magisterial work of shifting forms reminiscent of Cloud Atlas and Underworld.
Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the “New Delhi Monkey Man.” Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in history. Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft. And in 1859, a detachment of British soldiers rides toward the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each section is a pursuit, centered around a character who must find or recover crucial but hidden truths in their respective time. Mirroring the future and the past, these narratives illuminate and reimagine Indian identity and history. The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in a decade and a half, is an astonishing work that brilliantly reimagines the structure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
Connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its potentially apocalyptic future, this sweeping tale of rebellion, courage, and brutality reinvents historical fiction for our time: a magisterial work of shifting forms reminiscent of Cloud Atlas and Underworld.
Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the “New Delhi Monkey Man.” Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in history. Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft. And in 1859, a detachment of British soldiers rides toward the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each section is a pursuit, centered around a character who must find or recover crucial but hidden truths in their respective time. Mirroring the future and the past, these narratives illuminate and reimagine Indian identity and history. The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in a decade and a half, is an astonishing work that brilliantly reimagines the structure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 18, 2025
It is raining inside my brain at this moment.
I have a faint recollection of what I just read even just moments after I turned the last page. It felt like the entire plot scrolled past on ticker tape like a bunch of unrelated news pieces pasted on rails.
Okay let me try to clearly recollect. The book has five stories, the last one is a continuation of the first, the middle ones are their own stories. A Delhi based reporter is being hunted by the government and her identity is being systematically deleted while she is out looking for a guy who did something which I didn't understand till the end what exactly it was.
Second one is about a Hired Assasin chasing a worker in the Union Carbide Factory of Bhopal in 1984 days before the infamous Bhopal Gas Leak tragedy. It was a better read and had a tense atmosphere throughout.
Third one is about a Man who wants to pilot a mythological aircraft and has to go visit a psychiatric to be able to ride a horse but then accidently shoots one.
Fourth one is most interesting probably the best bit of the book. British soldiers set about to capture one Magadh Rai who they believe was involved in the revolt of 1857 from Fort Williams, Calcutta. They eventually find themselves in a castle with mysterious objects and unable to leave. The connection turns out to be a location known as "The Zone" which causes weird phenomenon to everything that enter somewhat like that Natalie Portman movie Annihilation.
Most of it is beautifully written language and heavy usage of literary devices which are great to read, appreciable but don't make any sense for the entire plot. You would read 20 pages and still not understand it's relevance. The author is either a genius beyond comprehension or my brain is too simple for this book.
Pick up this book if you're going though a "Must finish a book you don't want to read" challenge.
I have a faint recollection of what I just read even just moments after I turned the last page. It felt like the entire plot scrolled past on ticker tape like a bunch of unrelated news pieces pasted on rails.
Okay let me try to clearly recollect. The book has five stories, the last one is a continuation of the first, the middle ones are their own stories. A Delhi based reporter is being hunted by the government and her identity is being systematically deleted while she is out looking for a guy who did something which I didn't understand till the end what exactly it was.
Second one is about a Hired Assasin chasing a worker in the Union Carbide Factory of Bhopal in 1984 days before the infamous Bhopal Gas Leak tragedy. It was a better read and had a tense atmosphere throughout.
Third one is about a Man who wants to pilot a mythological aircraft and has to go visit a psychiatric to be able to ride a horse but then accidently shoots one.
Fourth one is most interesting probably the best bit of the book. British soldiers set about to capture one Magadh Rai who they believe was involved in the revolt of 1857 from Fort Williams, Calcutta. They eventually find themselves in a castle with mysterious objects and unable to leave. The connection turns out to be a location known as "The Zone" which causes weird phenomenon to everything that enter somewhat like that Natalie Portman movie Annihilation.
Most of it is beautifully written language and heavy usage of literary devices which are great to read, appreciable but don't make any sense for the entire plot. You would read 20 pages and still not understand it's relevance. The author is either a genius beyond comprehension or my brain is too simple for this book.
Pick up this book if you're going though a "Must finish a book you don't want to read" challenge.
October 29, 2023
A miss. Seduced by some review somewhere, I grabbed this and (obviously) hoped for something different. I suppose at some level it is meant to be a meditation on sectarian violence and prejudice in modern India, told through a series of tales over time. But none of the different sections seem to link in any meaningful way to the others, except in occasional echoes of names or rhythms in the prose. A variety of reviewers have sung the praises of the prose style but it left me cold. Each of the sections seems to features loads of dreams, hallucinations and transformations. These idylls allow for rhapsodic, endless periods but not much in the way of coherence or narrative. As each section passed, I kept longing for stronger links that would make the whole cohere. Finally, I just wanted to be done with it. The text reminded me of a much more rococo paranoid fever dream a la early Pynchon except that none of the dots connect in anything like a consistent way. It is not allusive so much as elusive. Not one star, because I think Deb actually achieves what he set out to do. Two stars because I don't think, finally, what he set out to do is particularly interesting, at least in his execution of said plan. YMMV.
June 19, 2023
This is a hard book to read, partly because it's so brilliantly written.
The book is comprised of 4 novellas, each depicting a time in India when the struggle for power was paramount and the willingness to murder ubiquitous. Whether it's the Europeans or the Muslims/Hindus or the many smaller groups of peoples, danger lurks behind every wall, every tree, every rock. Add to that the fact that the environment is uniquely dangerous: the air is chemical, the mountains sheer, the water beyond polluted. Then there are the crowds, always surrounding, always moving and jostling, always hiding potential danger. Minds become unmoored.
This is hell.
and it's a hell of mankind's own making. Unbridled anger and jostling for power have resulted in fiefdoms and "communities" dedicated to power and influence at whatever means, with little protection, either for workers or for the environment.
This is the logical result.
The writing is spectacular. The reader is hypnotized and smothered, amazed and terrified, and the story at the end of the world is both a hopeful and a cautionary tale.
The book is comprised of 4 novellas, each depicting a time in India when the struggle for power was paramount and the willingness to murder ubiquitous. Whether it's the Europeans or the Muslims/Hindus or the many smaller groups of peoples, danger lurks behind every wall, every tree, every rock. Add to that the fact that the environment is uniquely dangerous: the air is chemical, the mountains sheer, the water beyond polluted. Then there are the crowds, always surrounding, always moving and jostling, always hiding potential danger. Minds become unmoored.
This is hell.
and it's a hell of mankind's own making. Unbridled anger and jostling for power have resulted in fiefdoms and "communities" dedicated to power and influence at whatever means, with little protection, either for workers or for the environment.
This is the logical result.
The writing is spectacular. The reader is hypnotized and smothered, amazed and terrified, and the story at the end of the world is both a hopeful and a cautionary tale.
October 15, 2023
Descriptions from other (some from prestigious authors)reviews of this novel: Fever dream. Hallucinatory. Delirious. But very beautifully written. For much if the book I wasn't really sure what was going on. It felt a lot like watching the Game of Thrones segments where Arya is in the House of Black and White and she doesn't know what she has to do or how to do it.
There's real life stuff in the fever dream novel. Bhopal really did happen. The whole British Colonial era, modern day struggles with Indian separatist movements and, my favorite, a kind of throw away incident that sets the scene for a near future: “On a fogless but gloomy morning, Bibi discovers, via a text from Moi, that the money in her purse is no longer any good. All big denomination notes have been canceled and must be exchanged for new currency.” Which was my experience just a year ago when I had pound notes for my trip to England that suddenly weren't legal tender. It took a complicated work around to exchange them, only to discover that cash is pretty redundant in England these days.
I finished reading this book in the wee hours and it truly felt like I had been dreaming the whole time.
There's real life stuff in the fever dream novel. Bhopal really did happen. The whole British Colonial era, modern day struggles with Indian separatist movements and, my favorite, a kind of throw away incident that sets the scene for a near future: “On a fogless but gloomy morning, Bibi discovers, via a text from Moi, that the money in her purse is no longer any good. All big denomination notes have been canceled and must be exchanged for new currency.” Which was my experience just a year ago when I had pound notes for my trip to England that suddenly weren't legal tender. It took a complicated work around to exchange them, only to discover that cash is pretty redundant in England these days.
I finished reading this book in the wee hours and it truly felt like I had been dreaming the whole time.
April 19, 2024
"The Light at the End of the World" is Siddhartha Deb's third novel, a thrilling exploration of India's turbulent history. The story begins in a near-future India, where technological advancements create a "superweapon" that causes chaos. The story then moves back to 1984, a time of conflict and sectarianism following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's murder. Krishnan, a veterinary student, embarks on a mission to discover the fabled airship Vimana, reflecting the instability of the partition. The narrative then returns to 1859, introducing a British army commander on an expedition to the Himalayan home of the White Mughal, a leader of a renegade anti-colonial complex. The quest narrative connects the characters' journeys across time, examining the complex relationships between mystical aspects and colonial and post-colonial realities. Deb's prose shines in each chapter, particularly in depicting the 1984 events and the near-future episodes. Despite its haphazard structure, "The Light at the End of the World" is a visionary book that beautifully analyzes the intersection between history, mythology, and modern culture.
September 26, 2024
This is quite possibly one of the most exceptional books I will ever read.
Having said that, it will find the most resonance either if you are Indian or have the sort of obsessive interest with India, that a country like the United States expects as its due from the rest of the world.
The absence of that context probably explains the tepid reviews and scores here.
There's a rant to be made about how some reviewers bring up the "demands" made by the book, when writers from the Global North have spent several decades making similar 'demands' of their audience across the world, without any notable pushback except maybe over the last couple of decades or so - but I will save that for another time.
To return to my review, something strange happened once I was nearing the end of 'The Light at the End of the World' - my reading pace slowed to a crawl, reluctant t0 find out how it ends and to be done with it. And then once I was finished, I wanted to restart it all over again.
'The Light' is perhaps more encouraging of such experiments than most books.
Starting in contemporary India, it shifts to India in the 1980s - just before the Bhopal gas tragedy; then to 1947, in the run up to Indian independence; and finally colonial India in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising, before an epilogue-like final segment ties it all together.
It's tempting to read the book sequentially and that's probably what I'm going to start on next.
Each of these segments struck me as a chronicle of failure.
In the first book, Bibi, a former journalist turned 'content and event' person is in a state of stasis, as her life gets hemmed in by ghosts of the past, and new terrors and threats that are birthed by her identity. As a Muslim from one of the states that's at the centre of a campaign against 'infiltrators' and 'illegals', her religious identity is in danger of subsuming her status as a citizen and downgrading her and her entire family to the level of unwanted immigrants, or 'termites' as one of the Indian politicians put it.
The city she lives in - Delhi - comes across as an oppressive force, a sapper of energy and initiative and a daily reminder of the hopelessness of any sort of effort. Against this backdrop, she is given the assignment of tracking down a former colleague - a rare 'activist' journalist in the mostly flaccid and sycophantic Indian media landscape - who is presumed dead.
In the second narrative, a state sponsored assassin arrives at Bhopal to track and possibly eliminate an operator at the Union Carbide factory. To anyone familiar with contemporary Indian history, the factory is a ticking time bomb, all set to unleash the Bhopal gas leak one of the worst industrial disasters of the 20th century. Halfway through, the assassin is acutely aware of falling out of favour with his political masters and finds his assignment hindered by obstacles of an escalating and surreal nature. The prose in this segment - a first person narrative - has an odd incantatory feel to it and an almost unbearable harshness with which the narrator views his fellow citizens, all of which clearly point to his caste identity.
In the third segment, a vet in training imagines he has been chosen to pilot a celestial vehicle which will restore harmony to a country already experiencing the ruptures of an imminent partition, except his failure to clear a simple horse riding test, sets off a sequence of events that strike at the core of everything he has been led to believe in.
In the fourth segment, a unit from the colonial British army gets waylaid in its quest for fugitives from the 1857 uprising, and spend their days in a strange hallucinatory palace where mechanical tigers come to life and the soldiers themselves start to undergo life altering transformations.
'The Light' is many books rolled into one - it is where a chronicle of the socio-political reality of India across centuries blends effortlessly into cosmic horror.
Common themes and characters emerge across all the narratives - the infamous 'Monkey Man' who apparently terrorised the outskirts of Delhi in the early 2000s, the smell of burning chillies, one of the first indications of the Bhopal gas leak; a deep state with well defined socio-religious objectives that appears to be operating either unhindered by or actively abetted by whoever is supposedly in charge.
The Operator's account of his time in Iran is IMO some of the most compelling horror writing I've ever read - more so than many books and authors which claim to belong to the genre.
'The Light' evokes several of my favourite books without being directly derivative of any of them - there are shades of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh; and Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
The zone segments essentially make me realise what Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy could have been if it hadn't been a tedious slog, where the constant piling on of surreal happenings made me lose interest in it entirely.
More than anything else, I'm left in total awe of Siddhartha Deb - I've read Surface and The Beautiful and the Damned by him previously, and great as those books were 'The Light' is an exceptional gravity defying feat. The only analogy I can think of is when I heard OK Computer by Radiohead after The Bends and was amazed by how far the group had come in the span of just one release.
I look forward to whatever he comes up with next, but honestly don't believe 'The Light' can be equalled or surpassed by anyone or anything.
I'm sure it will reward re-reading over and over. I intend finding out firsthand, starting now.
Edit: And it was incredible rewarding - I read the book sequentially this time, starting with the Colonial segments, moving on to Bhopal and then the contemporary first chapter / epilogue.
An absolutely incredible feat and one where you can finally see the disparate parts come together and being foreshadowed.
Having said that, it will find the most resonance either if you are Indian or have the sort of obsessive interest with India, that a country like the United States expects as its due from the rest of the world.
The absence of that context probably explains the tepid reviews and scores here.
There's a rant to be made about how some reviewers bring up the "demands" made by the book, when writers from the Global North have spent several decades making similar 'demands' of their audience across the world, without any notable pushback except maybe over the last couple of decades or so - but I will save that for another time.
To return to my review, something strange happened once I was nearing the end of 'The Light at the End of the World' - my reading pace slowed to a crawl, reluctant t0 find out how it ends and to be done with it. And then once I was finished, I wanted to restart it all over again.
'The Light' is perhaps more encouraging of such experiments than most books.
Starting in contemporary India, it shifts to India in the 1980s - just before the Bhopal gas tragedy; then to 1947, in the run up to Indian independence; and finally colonial India in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising, before an epilogue-like final segment ties it all together.
It's tempting to read the book sequentially and that's probably what I'm going to start on next.
Each of these segments struck me as a chronicle of failure.
In the first book, Bibi, a former journalist turned 'content and event' person is in a state of stasis, as her life gets hemmed in by ghosts of the past, and new terrors and threats that are birthed by her identity. As a Muslim from one of the states that's at the centre of a campaign against 'infiltrators' and 'illegals', her religious identity is in danger of subsuming her status as a citizen and downgrading her and her entire family to the level of unwanted immigrants, or 'termites' as one of the Indian politicians put it.
The city she lives in - Delhi - comes across as an oppressive force, a sapper of energy and initiative and a daily reminder of the hopelessness of any sort of effort. Against this backdrop, she is given the assignment of tracking down a former colleague - a rare 'activist' journalist in the mostly flaccid and sycophantic Indian media landscape - who is presumed dead.
In the second narrative, a state sponsored assassin arrives at Bhopal to track and possibly eliminate an operator at the Union Carbide factory. To anyone familiar with contemporary Indian history, the factory is a ticking time bomb, all set to unleash the Bhopal gas leak one of the worst industrial disasters of the 20th century. Halfway through, the assassin is acutely aware of falling out of favour with his political masters and finds his assignment hindered by obstacles of an escalating and surreal nature. The prose in this segment - a first person narrative - has an odd incantatory feel to it and an almost unbearable harshness with which the narrator views his fellow citizens, all of which clearly point to his caste identity.
In the third segment, a vet in training imagines he has been chosen to pilot a celestial vehicle which will restore harmony to a country already experiencing the ruptures of an imminent partition, except his failure to clear a simple horse riding test, sets off a sequence of events that strike at the core of everything he has been led to believe in.
In the fourth segment, a unit from the colonial British army gets waylaid in its quest for fugitives from the 1857 uprising, and spend their days in a strange hallucinatory palace where mechanical tigers come to life and the soldiers themselves start to undergo life altering transformations.
'The Light' is many books rolled into one - it is where a chronicle of the socio-political reality of India across centuries blends effortlessly into cosmic horror.
Common themes and characters emerge across all the narratives - the infamous 'Monkey Man' who apparently terrorised the outskirts of Delhi in the early 2000s, the smell of burning chillies, one of the first indications of the Bhopal gas leak; a deep state with well defined socio-religious objectives that appears to be operating either unhindered by or actively abetted by whoever is supposedly in charge.
The Operator's account of his time in Iran is IMO some of the most compelling horror writing I've ever read - more so than many books and authors which claim to belong to the genre.
'The Light' evokes several of my favourite books without being directly derivative of any of them - there are shades of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh; and Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
The zone segments essentially make me realise what Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy could have been if it hadn't been a tedious slog, where the constant piling on of surreal happenings made me lose interest in it entirely.
More than anything else, I'm left in total awe of Siddhartha Deb - I've read Surface and The Beautiful and the Damned by him previously, and great as those books were 'The Light' is an exceptional gravity defying feat. The only analogy I can think of is when I heard OK Computer by Radiohead after The Bends and was amazed by how far the group had come in the span of just one release.
I look forward to whatever he comes up with next, but honestly don't believe 'The Light' can be equalled or surpassed by anyone or anything.
I'm sure it will reward re-reading over and over. I intend finding out firsthand, starting now.
Edit: And it was incredible rewarding - I read the book sequentially this time, starting with the Colonial segments, moving on to Bhopal and then the contemporary first chapter / epilogue.
An absolutely incredible feat and one where you can finally see the disparate parts come together and being foreshadowed.
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August 18, 2023"They sang together, and they sang in tune, with a male and a female lead that alternated off each other and then harmonized together, their singing swelling and peaking and then trailing off until, just at the moment there appeared to be silence settling like a thick, heavy blanket over the claustrophobic, sleeping slum, the rest of the Dog People joined in, bursting out in a loud, tremendous chorus that met up with a joyous, thunderous beat that recalled the jungle drums of the savage hunter gatherers in the National Collection of Man and that was sung in a way that shook not just the slum but the walls of the houses in the Old City and the foundations of the buildings in the New City and that sent tremors through the bungalows of the rich on Shyamla Hills and reached out to shake the throne of Delhi and the control room in West Virginia and the board room in New York and seemed about to spin the earth into a different axis."
Strongest sections were Bibi and Bhopal.
Strongest sections were Bibi and Bhopal.
March 31, 2025
I picked up this book because I know the author and had gotten my local library to buy his book. I struggled to read this, but admire Mr. Deb's creativity in writing it. I have superficial knowledge of India's history, but only a basic understanding of Indian culture and no knowledge of its myths. I wonder if those who grew up in or studied India would have enjoyed this book better.
I believe the book is a story of the influence of foreign nationals on India. The story starts and ends in the current day, with a woman, Bibi, off to find a man who has disappears. The tale then goes back in time, to Bhopal in 1984 (just before the Union Carbide explosion), to 1948 (before India's independence), and the 1800s, during the British colonial occupation of India. Other than reading other reviews of the book, I wasn't able to grasp the connections between the different time lines.
Sorry, Mr. Deb, that I didn't like this book much, but I have great respect for you. Osu!
I believe the book is a story of the influence of foreign nationals on India. The story starts and ends in the current day, with a woman, Bibi, off to find a man who has disappears. The tale then goes back in time, to Bhopal in 1984 (just before the Union Carbide explosion), to 1948 (before India's independence), and the 1800s, during the British colonial occupation of India. Other than reading other reviews of the book, I wasn't able to grasp the connections between the different time lines.
Sorry, Mr. Deb, that I didn't like this book much, but I have great respect for you. Osu!
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