23 May 2013 12:06:21
Anand and Kamala are both dreaming big. He's the hardworking boss of a car factory in Bangalore with his eye on a lucrative Japanese deal; she's his domestic servant, who wants her bright 12-year-old son to get the kind of education that will haul the family out of poverty. They are each caught between the city's ambitious energy and its layers of bureaucracy: things will be better soon, as long as relatives stop meddling, and rent stops increasing, and kickbacks are no longer required to get anything done. We're almost in Dickens territory. The novel's characters are cartoonish, the plot arcs neatly, and one word is never used when five will do (why hand out drinks when you can "dutifully propitiate guests with alcoholic libation"?). But, like Oliver Twist, The Hope Factory succeeds best as a portrait of a city.
Bangalore is where the author grew up, before she trained as an investment banker in Pennsylvania, and the city is rendered in crisp, colourful 3D. It's a place where people like Anand eat Italian olives, rather than Kerala nuts, in noisy mall bars.
Although Anand cannot compete with the low prices and zippy turnaround times of Chinese factory owners, when he looks at the west, with its trifling 35-hour working weeks, he sees "the stoic industry of their ancestors" dissolved into "whining, waffling plaint". It is, he reflects, "the mirror image of his own existence", and the book's uncomplicated, upbeat message is that stoic industry pays off.
