IF ever there were a time to not judge a book by its cover, it would be during the longlisting of novels for the Man Booker Prize. The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, both on the front and back covers, is peppered with blurbs as to its literary quality, its compelling story-telling, the complexity and staggering depth ... and while some part of this is certainly true, one can’t help but feel upon completion that a used-car salesman was hired as part of the publicity team.

This book, which is thick enough to qualify as a weapon, is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era that saw Bengal wracked by the Maoist-oriented Naxalite movement. The Lives of Others opens with a death-tale; a serf, in the throes of poverty and despair, kills his entire family and himself in a gruesome manner. From there, Mukherjee jumps into the communal life of a middle-class family settled in Calcutta. This family, the Ghosh clan, is a shadow of its former glory — a once-wealthy tribe that occupies the shell of its former Calcutta mansion — and the book is largely a study of the contrast between those who feel put-upon and those land-cultivating Bengali serfs who actually suffer through almost every day of their lives.

There are two major narratives that run in parallel through Mukherjee’s novel, with plenty of intersection. The first is of the many Ghosh kinfolk (I have, frankly, lost track of all of them) and their various predilections, frustrations, and aspirations. The second is an off-shoot of this, and involves Supratik, a Ghosh grandchild who runs away from home, armed with a copy of Chairman Mao’s The Little Red Book, to right the wrongs of the land-owning class by way of a violence-infused, village-by-village “uprising”. While he scampers off into the plantations of Bengal to preach elementary communism, the rest of his family spend their days behaving badly.

Although far reduced from their glory days of paper-mill ownership and aspirations of being tycoons, the family is still well-off, enough to have the luxury of treating each other poorly. Their tale is, unlike that of the peasant farmers, one of corrosive complexity — jockeying for position, and arguing over the sorts of things that are only really of import when you’re able to put food on the table. Supratik, frustrated by what he sees (accurately) as hypocrisy and cruelty amongst his family members, slips away with a group of his Maoist comrades to the Medinipur district of West Bengal. Tilling the soil and living the life of a peasant, he dictates his life, experiences and — pretentious to the point of pain — musings on Maoist theory into a series of unsent letters to his young widowed aunt. These letters, juvenile though some of them may be, illustrate his transformation from a well-meaning college activist into a violent revolutionary and terrorist.

In the meanwhile, drama unfolds apace in the Bhawanipur district of Calcutta where the Ghoshes live. Stifling, repressive lifestyles are brought into the light here, almost to the point of caricature; honestly, it would have been a welcome relief had Mukherjee actually been taking the mickey. The Bhawanipur house brims over with spite-filled family politicking of the Hindi drama variety. While I found the quality of Mukherjee’s writing debatable (more on that later), his ability to juggle a multitude of characters and plot strands verges on the extraordinary; it is the sort of complexity that would normally require a room full of script-writers to bring to the screen. There are soap operas with less convoluted storylines, and the fact that Mukherjee manages to keep a firm grasp on each member of the family’s individual tale is really remarkable.

Regrettably, this is not the only similarity that The Lives of Others bears to a soap opera; the cast of characters is exhaustive enough that you may sometimes wonder whether Mukherjee accidentally deleted ‘All and Any’ from the title of his novel. There is Prafullanath, the elderly patriarch (of course); his nasty-piece-of-work wife, Charubala (is there any other kind of woman, once she becomes a mother-in-law?), the dark-skinned, plain-looking (two strikes!) but intelligent (ah, and there’s the third) daughter Chhayha and four assorted sons, the most interesting of whom is — as one would expect — dead. His widow is, you may guess, practically a saint, set upon by her shrewish mother-in-law, because for goodness’ sake, why allow a single stereotype to go unused?

And then there is, of course, the looming spectre of marriage, which punctuates the entire novel. One marriage is initiated to save someone’s honour; another person is bitter to the point of absurdity because she can’t get married; there’s another that is falling apart because of internecine in-law rivalry. Rigid in its hierarchy, both literal and figurative, the Ghosh household is laced with the poison of dynastic succession, and impending financial disaster.

Where Mukherjee is utterly tremendous is in his commitment to chronicling, in minute detail, the circumstances, thoughts, and behaviours that drive individuals. As individual character studies, his creations are superb; you put the novel down with a genuine understanding of what motivates each of the people in the novel. There is no way to not understand, or even empathise with, the bitterness that fills Chhaya, or the despair that consumes Charubala; even the more ancillary grandchildren and assorted bit players are (mostly) empathetic.

However, where things fall apart is in the relentless pedantry of much of the novel. There are reams and reams of philosophising, of waxing eloquent about the repressive nature of Bengali family life, of … well, everything, really. What starts as an irresistible wave of description turns turgid, leaving the novel to coast largely on inertia; with the very occasional injection of some plot movement. We get it. The Naxalite movement spiralled out of control. We get it. Families that cling to tradition over all else can be blinded to their own flaws. We get it. There is occasional genius in even the lowliest of us. We get it.

Mukherjee’s borderline pedantic attention to detail starts to overwhelm the cleverness and unflinching, scathing critical analyses so inherent to this story. His editors seem to be driven by either a bad case of post-colonial guilt, or an utter lack of awareness.

Despite the many genuinely dramatic elements and highly readable moments in the novel, you may (will?) find yourself desperately hoping that the narrative will come up for air at some point. There is genuine pain and power in The Lives of Others, but it seems that the altar of pedantry requires sacrifice. If only the story itself had not been offered up, this could (and for many probably already is) have been a really stunning piece of work. But it sinks under its own weight, and that’s perhaps the most saddening thing about it.

The Lives of Others

(NOVEL)

By Neel Mukherjee

Random House, India

ISBN 9788184003796

599pp.