Walking into the prize ceremony for the Man Booker Prize in the knowledge that you could win one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world should be the crowning moment in the career of any novelist writing in English.
But ask Neel Mukherjee whether he's looking forward to his book, The Lives of Others, battling with works from the feted American author Joshua Ferris or the venerable past winner Howard Jacobson on Tuesday, and the response is close to total bafflement.
“What kind of question is that anyway?” he counters. “Of course I’m not. It’s going to be completely stressful.”
Thankfully, Mukherjee – who was born in India and now lives in the United Kingdom – is being playful. The tinge of nerves only comes from the fact that he feels "stunned" that The Lives of Others could even be in the same company as Ali Smith's How to Be Both, a book he's not afraid to call "absolutely sublime".
Mukherjee shouldn't be so bashful: his follow-up to the award-winning Past Continuous (retitled A Life Apart in some countries) is a wonderfully rich novel taking on Indian family history and politics in the late 1960s.
All human life is present in the various dealings of the middle-class, but struggling, Ghosh family in Calcutta — from birth to decrepitude, the workplace to weddings – and, most notably, the dealings of the eldest grandson, Supratik, with the Communist Party of India, the Naxalites.
Indeed, in some places it's the favourite to become the first India-set novel since Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger in 2008 to win the Man Booker Prize.
“I don’t know whether I started this book because I wanted to write about a giant family in the late 1960s and therefore I needed to deal head-on with the Naxalite movement, or whether I thought I wanted to write about the Naxalite movement and built a family around it,” laughs Mukherjee. “Whatever it was, I wanted to look at the natural human impulse towards making life better.
“It was a time of great optimism and idealism,” he continues. “People really thought they could intervene in the march of history, and make it move onto a more equal, less iniquitous path. I find that very affecting, especially when it failed as the Naxalite movement kind of did.”
You can see, then, why the lazy tagging of The Lives of Others as an Indian family saga irritates Mukherjee so much. There are so many more ideas bubbling below the surface of this book.
The 44-year-old says he also wanted to look at “the triangulation of labour, capital and income, and how that informs every single unit of civilisation”. While that might sound impossibly dry, he handles the world of work with deft ease.
"What sort of work you do directly affects what you eat and where you live, and yet with the exception of books like Philip Roth's American Pastoral or Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, there is so little of work in the contemporary novel," he says. "Work characterises lives, and I was trying to look at that on many different scales with this book."
And yet, as Mukherjee admits himself, theory is useless in a novel without narrative. He still felt he needed to tell a story, above all, of a Calcutta family dealing with change in its many forms.
“I wanted to write my Bengali novel,” he says. “And most Indians who have read it have instantly recognised the Ghosh family and their jealousies and squabbles, the back-stabbing, the tensions, the hierarchies. The high dramas where people stop talking to each other and go on passive-aggressive fasts because their daughter is seeing someone they don’t approve of.”
All of which does sound just a little like a family saga ...
“Well, I guess a lot of western readers might think it hysterically melodramatic but it’s exactly the tenor of family life in India,” he says. “Calcutta, in the end, was the city I was born in. I understand it, and I wanted to render it truthfully.”
• The Man Booker Prize will be announced on Tuesday. See www.themanbookerprize.com
• The Lives of Others (Chatto & Windus) is out now. Visit www.neelmukherjee.com for more information
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