Book review: The Body by the Shore by Tabish Khair
Terror on an oil rig
Tabish Khair`s new book is a scientific thriller where the action mostly takes place on an oil rig turned dubious resort in the North Sea just off Denmark. Set around 2030, with frequent references to the coronavirus pandemic that hit the world a decade ago, the reader sees that the world has not changed drastically in the wake of Covid. The mess of politics, the dire state of economics, manipulative games being played by those with political and economic clout, all seem to be same old, same old.
There are dirty deeds being done in the dark on that rig by powerful people who have got away with it for some years. Now, there are a couple of Danish police officers, one retired and one serving, on the tail of these baddies. The retired cop is the one who got to sniffing around the closed- without- resolution police case of an African man whose body was found floating in the North Sea a few years ago. Being possessed of a powerful curiosity and an equally powerful determination to get to the root of things, Jens Erik decides to dig deeper into the case, and of course the proverbial can of worms spills open.
Elsewhere there`s a killer who thinks he has gone into complete retirement, tending to his garden and his security cohort of aggressive swans. But Harris Malouf is abruptly brought of that retirement and plunged into an assignment that leads him to the oil rig.
On the rig itself, some very suspect `guests` arrive, do their mysterious work, and go, all observed by a beautiful Caribbean girl, Michelle Nancy. She came onto the rig following her suave lover Kurt, and all too quickly realised she is a prisoner there. Being anything but dumb, as also possessed of a curiosity as powerful as Jens Erik`s, Michelle starts to look around the rig stealthily, and comes across horrors in secret chambers.
Twist in the tale
Khair brings together all the characters in a series of face-offs while making the grand reveal. The twist in the tale is whether the killer is human or something else, a virus perhaps. Because the cabal of scientists connected to that body by the shore and to this tale, were all involved in conducting experiments or writing up papers on just what symbiotic microbes can do inside the human body. Not too horrifying in academic treatises, most horrifying when applied. Khair switches from the action on the ground to tracing the scientists` work and beliefs every few pages. This switch can be disconcerting at first, then the reader comes to expect it as an aid to gaining more knowledge of what exactly underpins this sinister experiment.
The plot does get a bit dense at times, as you`d expect from a cerebral sci-fi thriller. The characters are all very well drawn, as are the observations on the post-pandemic world, racism, mention of a mosaic virus that would hit humanity soon, climate activists; and though there aren’t too many surprises by the end, all the strings are tied up neatly.
The character arc of Jens Erik is most satisfying but, to this reader, where the novel faltered was the India connect. Sam Atkins` Indian mother, non-Indian characters greeting others with a namaste, a character called Jyoti Lankeshwar, it all seemed rather contrived.
The Body by the Shore. By Tabish Khair. HarperCollins Books. Rs 399. 322 pages.
This appeared in the Sunday Express magazine of 9 October 2022.
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