Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A Fine Balance is a great romp of a novel, set in western India. In a way, it’s a precursor of Slumdog Millionaire, but much darker, and without the all-singing all-dancing ending. I’ve included it in my pick of five books because of the Dickensian richness with which Rohinton Mistry deals with the lives of poor people.
What’s the book A Fine Balance about?
A Fine Balance is a great romp of a novel, set in western India. In a way, it’s a precursor of Slumdog Millionaire, but much darker, and without the all-singing all-dancing ending. I’ve included it in my pick of five books because of the Dickensian richness with which Rohinton Mistry deals with the lives of poor people. It reminds us microfinanciers of an important truth: that microfinance has to find a way to adapt itself to the enormous complexity found in the lives of poor people, and not the other way around. Rigid microfinance that seeks to impose behaviour on borrowers and savers simply won’t work. It’s no good telling a woman that she must invest her loan in a business when the truth is that her husband has fallen desperately sick with jaundice and what she really needs to do with the money is to buy drugs and get in enough rice to feed her family until he’s back at work.
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Stuart Rutherford, author of The Poor and their Money, is interested in the way in which poor people manage their money. He has spent the last 30 years travelling the world, researching the different financial strategies of the less well-off in a variety of different cultures. This has led him to an interest in microfinance, the practice of issuing small loans in poor communities, with the aim of empowering individuals to invest as they choose. In the 1990s he set up SafeSave, his own microfinance co-operative in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and later in Hrishipara, a rural area. SafeSave is an alternative to the popular microfinance schemes, based on saving rather than loans (you can find out about SafeSave on his website).
Tell me about your last book, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance.
He’s an Indian-born Canadian writer. I left this till last because I don’t think I’ve read a better book when it comes to capturing life in a big, messy place which can be very hard and yet has some redeeming qualities. It’s set in India at the time of Mrs Gandhi’s quasi-dictatorship and state of emergency. The ‘fine balance’ of the title is the fine balance between hope and despair, which is explored by all the individuals in the story. They are all trying to make their fortune in a huge, unruly city which reminded me of Lagos. What’s striking about this book is that it is unsparingly and brutally honest. All sorts of terrible things happen to the main characters, from evictions to forced sterilisation. The book is full of these terrible moments and yet at the end of it you feel strangely uplifted. It’s the oddest thing.
It’s a great corrective to the notion of the nobility of poverty. That’s not what the book is saying at all. It’s just telling the human story and pointing out that there’s nothing more sophisticated for any of us, in the end, than the fact that life goes on, every situation has some possibility of redemption, even if it’s far into the future. I remember being extremely moved by it.
Essentially, you are an optimist on Nigeria, aren’t you? I get the impression you have huge hopes.
It’s not for an outsider to pronounce a situation hopeless, but I wouldn’t want to do that anyway, I don’t feel like that. My glib one-liner is that it’s almost impossible to be anything other than pessimistic about Nigeria in the short term, but in the long term there is that greater hope that does burn on. There’s just something about the place. I would contrast it with somewhere like Equatorial Guinea, where there’s a truly nasty dictatorship which has been in power for 30 years, people are nervous of talking on the street, and you have a real sense of a society cowed. Nigeria may be many things, but it’s not cowed. The fact that within two minutes of buying a pen in ‘God’s Time is the Best Ventures Ltd’ shop the proprietor will be berating the government and telling you how awful everything is, tells you something. A place that has that spirit can’t be kept down.
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In 2002 Michael Peel moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to become the Financial Times’s West Africa correspondent. His first book, A Swamp Full of Dollars, published by I B Tauris, is the story of how Nigeria was shaped by the oil that pumps through western cities. A mixture of reportage, oral history and investigative journalism, it exposes the unseen consequences of reckless resource extraction. It was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and has been nominated for the Orwell Prize. Peel returned to London in 2005 to become the newspaper’s legal correspondent, covering, amongst other topics, corporate corruption and financial crime.
