Throughout her new thriller’s characteristically gripping narrative, Kishwar Desai continues to place the reader in uncomfortable and almost voyeuristic relation to a series of increasingly disquieting events involving the young white woman. Caught on camera, fragments of these are sent as video messages to her urbane, cosmopolitan, Indian feminist protagonist, who must attempt to discern their meaning. But none of the images which these “clues” contain prove easy viewing. Nor are their implications easy to interpret in a westernised, modernising Indian landscape where it is ‘difficult to tell’ if the rape of female tourists is ‘just’ the result of ‘a clash of cultures’ or part of ‘a wider problem’ around ‘how to deal with female sexuality,’ and ‘some very politically incorrect’ questions may need to be raised about who is ‘innocent’ and who is guilty of exploiting whom.

In the author’s note to Witness the Night (2010), the first in the series featuring the unconventional social worker turned investigator Simran Singh, of which The Sea of Innocence (2013) is the third, Desai, a former journalist and TV news anchor, diverged from the standard disclaimer typically used for such creative works. Instead, she stated in no uncertain terms that: “While the characters and places in this book are entirely fictional, the events which take place are not” and went on to assert — by way of justification — that “there is a complicity of corruption between the police, the judicial system, politicians, media and the uncivil society.” No attempt was made to hide her determination to use literature to expose real social issues, particularly the (violent, sexual) use and abuse of young women, and their worrying dispensability in “modern” India. She has used her fiction to investigate (in order, chronologically): sex-selective abortion and female infanticide in Witness the Night (2010); the exploitation of women and children involved in the booming surrogacy industry in Origins of Love (2012); and (apologies if this spoils the story) the grooming of foreign girls and drugs trafficking in the title under review here.

However, this latest addition to the Simran Singh detective series appears especially topical, as Desai sets out to use her central character to try and gain a perspective on highly contemporary events. The Sea of Innocence is dedicated to Jyoti Singh, the Delhi rape victim, brutally assaulted on a public bus; to Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old from Devon, England, who was killed in Anjuna in 2008; and to “the thousands of women who have been raped and murdered in India — in hope that one day they will get justice.” These real-life rape cases are alluded to in the course of Desai’s narrative, as Simran attempts to piece together what happened to Liza Kay, a fictional blonde British teenager subject to the usual assumptions about an independent white girl’s sexual looseness (including, at least initially, the social worker’s own), who goes missing after an evening out at a shack on a stretch of paradisal Goan beach. Simran’s intense, nightmarish search is also punctuated (albeit rather unsubtly) by the faltering progress of Jyoti Singh, who eventually succumbed to internal injuries in December, 2012.

As a novelist, Desai’s ability to capture and hold the attention of the reader as she weaves an intricate plot that connects all those caught in what she perceives to be Goa’s complex ecosystem — from the “outsiders” hungry to sample its high-life to the government ministers and their expressionless minions; to police officers, shack owners, casino girls and beach hawkers who are complicit in supplying it; to the unassuming village boy who might sabotage its functioning — is undeniable. She is particularly effective at conveying her middle-class Dilli-walli heroine’s discomfort as a metropolitan madam out of place in small-town India. One can feel palpably, for example, the usually confident Simran’s uncertainty as she attempts to interpret the information supplied by a laughing, multilingual beach vendor whose “smile did not reach her eyes.” Desai also has an eye for a haunting image or sequence of images, as already noted. Her description of a video following Liza’s painful progress as she totters, then falls, then rises again, almost certainly drugged and en route to her death, is particularly pathetic. In the novel’s later stages, the author’s attempt to demonstrate, through the shy and shuffling character of Liza’s would-be protector, the vulnerability not only of women, but of “poor and thus marginalised young men in this country,” brings an important sense of balance (not to mention humanity) to her story.

Yet, in general, the novel seems rushed. Desai explains in her acknowledgements that she had lost and “had to rewrite almost half the book” during the course of its drafting, and that due to “excessive travel ... a lot of work happened in aeroplanes and on trains.”

One suspects, however, that the desire to publish a novel which might capitalise on the publicity generated by the Delhi rape before — like so many other prominent cases — it faded from the headlines, was a more pressing contributing factor. Reliant solely on the middle-aged Simran’s rather blunt narration, only occasionally interrupted by a description of a new video message, The Sea of Innocence is disappointingly thin in texture in comparison to Desai’s Witness the Night, which won the 2010 Costa First Novel Award. Her more finely structured debut work, by contrast, interlaced the diary entries of Durga, the Jullundur-confined girl victim/suspect both with Simran’s first-person account of her endeavours to unravel the mystery, and with email correspondence sent by Durga’s British Asian sister-in-law, a key witness. Thus it provided moments of welcome relief from the beer-swigging Simran’s rather relentless singleton self-reflection and amateur sleuthing, and offered alternative, less moralised and more open-ended perspectives on the dichotomous-seeming Indian locale and sinister events of its similarly topical narrative. This polyphonic textuality of Witness the Night also perhaps mitigated the impact in this earlier novel of what the Observer critic Adam Mars-Jones recently termed Desai’s tendency to indulge in “slack editorialising” (to “relapse ... into opinion-mongering” and “think-piece tone”) in his review of The Sea of Innocence.

Yet, while it has its substantial stylistic limitations — and, for the reader, frustrations — The Sea of Innocence marks an attempt to use the slower and more personalised medium of fiction to re-effect a sense of shock which may be diluted when such cases are over-mediatised, rapidly relayed and relentlessly replayed through bold headlines and graphic images for the consumption of global audiences. Mars-Jones may be right to suggest that the thriller is not the most appropriate medium for ‘sensitising’ audiences, and that — in some instances — real reportage, rather than authorial commentary, may do it better. Yet, at this time it seems unconstructive to dismiss Desai’s endeavour not only to puzzle (via her detective heroine) over an individual set of circumstances that leads to a specific and brutal instance of an attractive, outgoing foreign teenager’s rape, but also to try and fathom — contemporaneously — what may be the underlying “problem” with attitudes to ‘female sexuality’ in India that links all such cases.

It is unfortunate that in The Sea of Innocence any answer to the most pressing question of what may shape the mentality that permits what we might term Liza’s “collateral” rape gets lost in the whirl of the international drugs trade that fuels Desai’s thriller and renders her disappearance expedient.

The reviewer has a PhD in contemporary South Asian fiction in English

The Sea of Innocence

(Novel)

By Kishwar Desai

Simon and Schuster, UK

ISBN 9781471101427

358pp.