Such a Long Journey

The Novel That Introduced Mistry to the World

Such a Long Journey was Rohinton Mistry’s first novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991, and it announces the full range of his gifts. Set in Bombay in 1971 — during the Indo-Pakistani War and the political turmoil surrounding the creation of Bangladesh — it is, on its surface, the story of Gustad Noble, a Parsi bank clerk drawn into a conspiracy involving an old friend named Jimmy Bilimoria and a sum of money that turns out to have very dangerous origins.

But the political plot is the scaffolding, not the building. What the novel is really about is Gustad himself: his pride, his love for his family, his friendship with his neighbors, his complicated relationship with his son, and his attempt to maintain dignity and goodness in a city and a country that offers its ordinary citizens very little cooperation.

The World of Khodadad Building

Mistry’s great talent is the creation of community — the apartment building, the street, the neighborhood as a web of interdependence, irritation, affection, and mutual need. Khodadad Building and its residents are rendered with the same Dickensian generosity he would later bring to the characters of A Fine Balance: each person is fully themselves, comic and tragic in equal measure, and the texture of their collective life is the novel’s richest achievement.

The pavement artist who creates an ever-expanding mural of religious figures outside the building — a Hindu shrine that grows to include every faith and becomes the novel’s central symbol of tolerance and survival — is one of Mistry’s most beautiful inventions.

History in the Personal Register

The 1971 war enters the novel through its effects on specific people: Jimmy’s mysterious government connection, the fear that runs through the city, Gustad’s son’s increasing political radicalism. Mistry is interested in how the large political events of postcolonial history land in the bodies and domestic arrangements of people who have no power to shape them — and his answer, here as in A Fine Balance, is that they land with devastating force.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A magnificent debut: Mistry’s Dickensian gifts on full display in a story that transforms 1971 Bombay into a world you will not want to leave.