The Body by the Shore
Tabish Khair
Harper Collins
Pp 322, `399
Dystopian fiction can be good or bad, but it can hardly be uninteresting. This applies more so on writer Tabish Khair’s The Body by the Shore, which can also be read as a sci-fi or a thriller. It is about so much that it cannot be boxed into one. However, the underlying theme remains the exploitation, or abuse, of science to cause more harm, rather destruction, than good.
The story begins on an abandoned oil rig somewhere in the North Sea, where a young Caribbean girl, Michelle, ends up following her lover, only to realise she might never escape from there alive. Tasked with cleaning, cooking, and everything else expected from a woman, she isn’t allowed information about what actually happens on the rig. Michelle’s story runs parallel to that of Jens Erik, a prejudiced former cop, and Harris Malouf, a former covert operative, in the 2030s post-pandemic Denmark. Their stories begin with different trajectories, only to converge at the end on the oil rig. A different timeline runs, that of scientists involved in a seminar on microbes, all of whom end up or die in mysterious circumstances, revealing the massive impact of scientific exploitation.
The world of the 2030s is crueler, more unequal, divisive, and gloomy than that of the present, with the virus having impacted humans socially, economically, and psychologically. It is a world where “corporations have bought most of the land, and much of other countries too”, where “you could not tell what was government and what was corporation”, and also where “the land was now dotted with resplendent villas and entire gated neighbourhoods where not a blade of grass was out of place, and then there were the broken neighborhoods, the dilapidated houses, the shanties and campers, the men and women burning with anger.”
It is a world where there is a rise in racism, of riots over bread, and even machines to replace human workers. It is a world of a worsening climate crisis, of increasing subjugation of the freedom of speech where “the government is more of a polite pretense” and mankind is all guns to colonise Mars.
It is also the world where organs of young, mostly coloured, refugees and migrants, are transplanted into older white men and women, who do not want to die. It is also a world where technology is being developed to make humans behave a certain way. Why, one might think. Naturally, to sell it further to governments who want votes and corporations who want to sell. It is with this ease that Khair switches from dystopia to science fiction.
Although set in Denmark, where the writer is based, it also travels to India, where he is from. India of 2030, in the writer’s imagination, is an accentuated version of India of today. All who dissent are termed anti-nationals, those who speak of the tribals are urban naxals, Christians are persecuted so much so that “ this particular missionary had been ordered to leave Delhi within forty-eight hours for posting some videos of starving aborigines on Cinemene”, and saffron is a compulsory school uniform in several schools in India.
There is also a rise of Islamism in Iraq, of racial tensions in America, bread riots in Brazil, and an attempt to life of the Saudi monarch. The book delves into many things but never does it read forced. In fact, there is a slight realisation that many of these things might come true to some degree, which stokes both intrigue and fear. For example, this line: “He had chosen one of the few nations to escape lightly, not just the consequences of the virus but of what continued to come after it, the accelerating roller-coaster ride of economies, turning entire nations into kingdoms run by oligarchs and corporate robber barons, under the thin veneer of elected Parliaments and free media”. It might ring a bell with many.
Khair unravels all this one by one, through the lives of Michelle, Jens Erik and Harris, with not a point where it gets jarring or overwhelming.
In the end, it ends with science and how scientific knowledge is exploited for the profit of a few and the destruction of many. It is beautifully yet frighteningly summed in this line: “Is that what Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and J Oppenheimer must have felt when they were told that atom bombs had been dropped on two Japanese cities?”
At 322 pages, The Body by the Shore by Tabish Khair can be a difficult read for some, but with an ability to keep one hooked till the last page.
