Verzeih mir! This book isn’t just a thriller
Review of ‘The Trail of Four’ by Manjiri Prabhu
When you read a book where ‘shadowy shapes splashed with twilight orange’, interiors ‘scintillate under the stucco ceilings’, the banks of the lake has ‘lit torches perched like sentinels’, and one of the characters realises that ‘jealousy seemed just a fragment of the tenfold fear and anxiety that seemed to rip him apart’ you know in your heart that you are reading a thriller. No amount of baroque dreams and cathedral squares can diminish the adrenalin rush that slowly builds up. You read and turn the pages impatiently as if waiting for the first murder, an ‘ugly mass of mutilated skin and bones’… or the first clue that will eventually pervade your senses until the mystery has been cleared.
The moment I read that it was the prevention of the destruction of the Four Pillars of Salzburg that would be connected to clues, I knew that besides a thriller following the Dan Brown legacy, there will also be a fair sprinkling of history moistening the instincts of a travelogue. So yes, Manjiri Prabhu isn’t just India’s Agatha Christie but has effectively proven that she is even our desi Dan Brown now.
The characters also have a few surprises as we have Re Parker, a French-Indian photography enthusiast and an investigative journalist for whom ‘every case was a journey… meeting new people… discovering friends… and then parting and moving on’ making sure that one travels through mystery and intrigue with a camera poised. We have delighted angels and envious demons posing as the words in clues that befuddle Dan, another character. Isabel, the historian who is ‘different’ from the conventional characters in many ways, and Stefan, the police chief are just two of the characters that dominate the pages besides quite a large handful of others who probably fulfill the role leading the reader along lines that aren’t leading anywhere. But listen, these characters also help in completing the picture, so we mustn’t complain of an overdose of them.
We do need to wait for quite a while before we know if Salzburg was truly wiped out or not… at least not before murderous threats and pointless deaths dot the pages. Not before we, as readers, irrevocably fall in love with the place where the story has been conceptualized. And certainly not before explosions happen and drones spew gas and urgency propelling action to move faster as the mystery needs to be solved in forty-eight hours.
As I turned the pages through charming cerebral connections to ‘the four cardinal points – north, south, east, and west; four seasons; four basic mathematical functions: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division; four elements: earth, wind, fire and water’ I knew that solving the clues was entirely dependent on where the author is going to lead me to. This is interesting because instead of wild guesses, a reader is tempted to read on and follow the incredible sequencing that Max Reinhardt must have done in the past… or the sort of plot that Manjiri has devised. This plot, let me add, is complex at times as it twists and turns into a virtual retelling of the history of the arts as it exists in the region. The clues and the cues go back and forth from a physical description of the surroundings to the library until the protagonists realise that they need to ‘think like Max Reinhardt’.
Thrillers, let me say, can be killers and chillers and as Mohammed Ali said, be ‘like a gorilla in Manila’ but this one doesn’t go for outright blood spills and crazy shoot-outs but coaxes the reader to enter a cauldron of systematic ideation through a path that has everything existing in a readable travelogue. This is precisely why I loved reading the book at my own pace that took many weeks of slow and attentive understanding. There may be others who may wish to rush through even such a book, but then they are certainly going to miss the heavenly whiff of having read a book that isn’t just a thriller.
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Details of the book:
Title: The Trail of Four
Author: Manjiri Prabhu
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978-93-86349-00-2
Price: Rs 399/- (in 2017)
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‘The Trail of Four’ by Manjiri Prabhu. Bloomsbury
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Arvind Passey
19 September 2017
