insightful journey into mid seventeenth century India

books:


	• The Temple Dancer: A Novel of India John Speed St. Martin's Press, 2006 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Genius!

Genius! Pure Genius.

John Speed's The Temple Dancer is not only a modern-day page turner, but it is also a literary work in the classical sense.

Speed's novel is vivid and cinematic in scope. His vibrant descriptions of India during the 1600s bring this historical time and place to life. He transports the reader to a far off past civilization, and we fly there naturally, as though we have just stepped off a jumbo jet and landed in an exotic culture.

Although Speed is a historian, his real brilliance lies in magically creating characters that pop off the page. He does his magic through clever, witty dialog, and through an amazing ability to capture and express subtle nonverbal communication. This is Speed's genius. Like Tolstoy, Speed reveals to us his characters' hidden subconscious thoughts and feelings. Speed's vivid descriptions of the nonverbal - facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures- reveal his characters' inner life, illuminating the reader with elevated awareness. The result is the infusion of life into ink, the birth of complex characters in the reader's mind. The effect is psychedelic.

The plot keeps one on the edge of one's seat, with many twists and turns that propel one to turn the pages. But these twists of fate are not arbitrary or forced. Rather, Speed invokes the Indian law of karma - fate is determined by character - to eventually dole out justice, making for a most natural and satisfying conclusion.

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Adventure, romance, intrigue and exotic sex

A friend told me that if I liked Shogun, I'd like The Temple Dancer.

My friend was right: The Temple Dancer is a classic: A historical novel that kept me turning pages by the bedlamp long after I should have gone to sleep.

This story is epic in scale: wide, rambling, and dense with plot driven by richly drawn characters who grow more complex with each chapter.

Maya, the Temple Dancer, is a wonderful mix of innocence and eroticism, a slave being used as a pawn in a business deal between a fading Portuguese trading house and the new Sultan of Bijapur. She's paired with Lucinda, a flightly Portuguese heiress, and Slipper - an unctuous, duplicitous eunuch -traveling by elephant through central India in 1657, a time of turmoil and treachery.

Of course, handsome guards join the caravan, and of course there are bandits, and poison, and langourous evenings at lake palaces, and passionate meetings in jasmine-scented gardens under the moonlight, and elephants, and daring escapes, etc., etc.

Like the jacket quotes say: it's an ocean of a story...Errol Flynn meets Bollywood.

Unlike most modern historicals, which frankly are pretty thin gruel, this book delivers adventure on an epic scale -- great passions driving headlong against each other, and a young, innocent woman caught in the middle.

The author's descriptions were so vivid, with such sensory impact I became lost in his depiction of that fascinating time and place.

All in all, pretty cool.

I've already lent this book out, and I can scarcely wait to get it back so I can re-read some of my favorite parts (the elephant's death, in particular).

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Crowd-pleasing beauty...with serious muscle.

Usually, when faced with a work of fiction, there's a certain point, somewhere in the middle, that you can point to and say, "Now THIS is where the plot really starts to thicken." Even a great page-turner like the Da Vinci Code will have a storyline that becomes quite elaborate and developed within the first 150 pages and fizzles out at the end.

In the case of The Temple Dancer, the plot thickens on page 5, doubles in on itself by page 50, and develops into a superlatively loopy conundrum by the middle of the book. If the plot were any thicker, the book would certainly implode, which would be a shame because nobody would get to read it then.

Mr. Speed keeps the whole thing chugging along by killing off characters unexpectedly, thus creating opportunities to insert yet more action. This is exactly the sort of kinetic artistry that defines blockbuster adventure stories, and the author is clearly a master at his craft. With a little effort spent on keeping the interlocking story lines straight (the map and list of characters help), the reader can remain engaged until the very last page. Which, as it happens, contains an astonishing plot twist.

I am eagerly awaiting the second volume of this trilogy, to find out what happens next.

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Lush and Exotic

A sensational debut, an incredibly well told story by a master story teller. For a first novel, this is simply outstanding and deserves high acclaim. I read this book in 24 hours. The lush and exotic scenery is very evocative of India in the 1600s and I truly felt I was there in the scene and not watching from the sidelines. The authors ability to create an atmosphere so real that the reader is literally able to hear the sounds of trumpeting elephants, the jingling bells worn on the feet of veiled women, to feel the wet spray of waterfalls and raging rapids, shows pure talent and promise of an author to be watched and remembered as one of the great historical novelists to come. The story is engaging, riveting, and the reader gets a firsthand account education of the place and time. Everything that one needs in a good book is here. Romance, action, adventure, culture and history, murder, good dialogue, beautiful scenery, what a great epic movie it would make. In fact, recently I had just watched the DVD of Fritz Lang's India epic that was filmed in the 50's and this book was a good match for the setting and time. Lots of plots and twists and turns, believable characters, and the future of two more books to come in the trilogy turned this book into a hit for me. I love historical fiction and am very selective about authors and good writing styles, I hope to see this novel hit the best seller list. I eagerly await the next installment.

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insightful journey into mid seventeenth century India

In 1657 Goa, India after the Dutch win the Pepper Wars, Carlos Dasana worries about his Portuguese family so he courts widowed sultana of Muslin Bijapur. However, Carlos also understands who the current power is as the sultan is a preadolescent; he insures he stays on the friendly side of the Grand Vizier Wali Khan by sending him a former Hindu temple dancer sold into prostitution Maya to do whatever he wants.

Carlos dispatches his dissolute nephew Geraldo and his niece Lucinda to oversee the caravan delivering the human gift to the vizier. Along the treacherous trek in which bandits attack and assault the two females, Lucinda and Maya forge a friendship as they share their recent history especially when their elephants have accidents. At a stop in Belgaum, Lucinda realizes she loves traveling companion Da Gama while Maya and Geraldo seem to want one another though they must show caution as the Vizier has sent Captain Pathan to protect his present from other males.

Though in some ways a historical romance, THE TEMPLE DANCER is much more as three ways of lives clash on the journey serving as a microcosmic metaphor of the larger battles between Portuguese, Hindu and Muslim cultures during the final age of the Mogul empire. Each key player and several support characters (for instance the Vizier's former concubine who runs Belgaum) are distinctive, which adds to the reader understanding the differences between the three people. Though the ensemble cast leads to complicated subplots that compete for supremacy (paralleling the underlying theme of a clash of civilizations) making for at times a difficult read, fans of historical tales will want to join the caravan riding the elephant on this insightful journey into mid seventeenth century India.

Harriet Klausner

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4

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