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Can a bird sing in a thicket of thorns?

Recently, I was in the thrall of an unputdownable urge to defy gravity. Not in any dramatic, ballistic fashion but in some quiet, modest form of levitation. I wanted to, however briefly, get out of my skin.

The urge came because I was in essential ways replicating the life of a monk or, for that matter, a mole: buried days on end, not under some dimunitive hill, but under a sizeable stack of hardcovers and musty notes, trawling thoughts and emotions that held out the dark invitation an abyss.

It didn't help that I worked in a room which faced west and in a place where the state electricity board has become a byword for unpredictability. Dankness and darkness: more of this and I was sure my skin would turn into parchment.

I considered the limited options for levitation I had. Enough of the amber liquid would guarantee results but I dreaded an off-the-scale hangover and the attendant regret. A trip on the delightful metre-gauge rail network of south India would be truly transporting, I decided. But the duration it demanded plus the tedious waiting in the middle of nowhere to make the necessary connections, not to mention subsisting on snacks fried in sesame oil, made the prospect a bit daunting. What I was looking for was not an odyssey, only a sweet sojourn.

Salvation came unexpectedly and without stirring from my seat in the same dankness and darkness. A friend introduced me to Michael Crichton. He lent me Airframe.

My sceptical smirk disappeared after the third page. I started to read the novel at 9 pm and lapped up the entire 300 pages in one go, except for a two-hour nap and half-an-hour for morning chores. I finished at 11.30 am the next day.

If the tale of corporate conundrums, technological espionage and professional sorority in the aircraft manufacturing industry -- told in a riveting clipped, staccato-style pace: SLOCAL -- 5.32 AM; Hangar 5 -- 8.15 AM; Lovedale: 8.40 AM, et al -- had me defying G-forces, the after-effect was no less disorienting.

All my labours of the imagination of the past six months and a lifetime longing to scale the Parnassus of 'serious' fiction came under fresh scrutiny and seemed to smack of pretence. Could a story like the one I was attempting in my debut novel be so laboriously told and still survive the telling?

Of course, in my story I am seeking nuance and am trying to develop characters who are more substantial than cardboard cutouts; I exploit cliches only to topple them over the top; in forging an organic unity between content and language I seek a hydraulic drag for words and sentences to navigate thematically treacherous waters. Still. Still ...

A question continues to haunt me. It's an old one. Asked by many before and one that will be asked by many in the future too: Can a bird sing in a thicket of thorns?

I am reading Roddy Doyle now. I somehow missed out his Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha which won him the Booker Prize in 1993 and made him famous outside Britain. I have read his The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, a greatly engaging book which I feel is the Irish equivalent to Alice Walker's The Colour Purple, set in a Black milieu in America's antebellum south.

His A Star Called Henry too is quintessentially Irish -- a story set in the last-but-one turn-of-the-century Dublin -- and you can detect a Joycean ambition at work: an attempt to recreate an entire consciousness of a race in two to three hundred pages.

A daunting task. It's daunting reading too. Three, four days, if I find concentration enough to keep all else aside.

There are nuggets scattered across each page: insights, nuances, humour and black humour. But ultimately, it's the story's structure itself, the very breadth of conception that takes your breath away. Structure and breadth of conception in a story are as underlying and fundamental as an airframe -- or the basic body structure -- is to an aircraft. Ironically, in Crichton's Airframe, the airframe is present only nominally as theme of the story and not as its structure, as its scaffolding.

Probably, the original question about the song (and interchangeably, a story) needs to be rephrased. It's no longer a question of a bird singing in a thicket of thorns (a similie for the density of contemporary life) but, to use a more modern metaphor, of an aircraft soaring by defying gravity, air pockets, zero visibility and metal fatigue. In other words, a story should be able to shoulder its heavy burden and still remain a story.

Michael Crichton's stories are like birds -- light, quick, graceful and carrying little or no literary burden. Roddy Doyle's stories, on the other hand, are like aircraft -- powerful, swift, carrying heavy literary burdens and yet managing to remain graceful.

A bird or an aircraft, then?

Anil Nair