Poor, rationalist Raman, drowned in Daisy-ism! That's R.K. Narayan's novel The Painter of Signs in a nutshell, but the whole is greater, I think, than the sum of its parts. It would be easy to dismiss this short book as slight, fairly funny, illustrative of a period (late 1960s/ early '70s) and place (provincial India), but only mildly diverting. Looking at it more closely though, it's a bittersweet romance between a bickering Beatrice and Benedict, an intimate, domestic and parochial setting for a global issue (birth control), and a picture of emancipated attitudes and the tension between the devout and the pragmatic. Its scale is pleasingly small and contained and its charm lies not just in all of the above but in its details - easy to miss or overlook, but carefully, cleverly placed and speaking of a shrewd understanding and a great deal of thought on the part of the writer.
Sign-painter Raman meets family planner Daisy and is truly smitten by this fiercely independent young woman whose devotion to her cause proves too strong for love to get any more than a look in. Could they have been happy together? Well, probably not, though I'd like to think that perhaps they might have had a future eventually if the proselytising Daisy were to cool her internal "furnace of conviction" and recognise that there's more to life than the "well-defined purpose from which [she] will not swerve".
I was very interested in Raman's feelings about his work as a painter of signs which acts as a leitmotif; for instance, he says, "... I loved calligraphy; loved letters, their shapes, their stance and shade", and he bemoans the fact that others fail to appreciate the value and significance of what he does. He believes "a sign-board pinned things down to a sort of permanency - it gave things an air of being established", so it's all the more poignant when his relationship with Daisy has developed to the point of marriage and he is contemplating giving her a 'No Admission' sign as a wedding gift, one to ensure their mutual separateness, rather than to keep out the rest of the world.
Although I shan't be pressing this book on everyone I meet, it was a very enjoyable read and I'd like to return to Narayan and revisit his fictitious town, Malgudi, which struck me rather as an Indian Camberwick Green for grown-ups! I admired his precision, his simplicity and economy, his craftsmanship generally, and there's a warmth about the book which is attractive, too.
Lindsay has been reading another Narayan novel, though he fared better with some short stories, but how did everyone else get on with this book?
(The Painter of Signs' cake is here).
