Book Review (Fiction) In The Valley OF Shadows

In The Valley Of Shadows

Abhay Narayan Sapru

Chlorophyll Books 2017                                             170 Pages

The long guerrilla war waged against the British state by the IRA in Northern Ireland spawned a new literary sub-genre, “the troubles thriller” as practiced by authors such as Chris Petit (The Psalm Killer), Stephen Leather (The Chinaman, The Bombmaker)  and Gerald Seymour (Harry’s Game, Field Of Blood). The current conflict in Kashmir, with Pakistan-sponsored terrorist proxies attempting to wrest the state away from India, seems all set to follow suit. Some of the growing tribe of authors in this nascent sub-genre have backgrounds in journalism covering the valley or have actually served in the Indian Army there.

Major Abhay Narayan Sapru, late of the Indian Army Special Forces, belongs to the latter group. That’s what gives In The Valley Of Shadows it’s you-are-there ring of authenticity. The techniques and procedures used by both sides and the descriptions of what is essentially a war zone are spot on. This helps flesh out and give a feel of actions all too often palmed off in dry telegraphic newspaper headlines of the “Four Killed In Kashmir Firing” kind.

In a preface, former Major Sapru points out that Sher Khan, his fictional antagonist, was based on a real-life Pakistani Jihadi whose arrogance and over-confident carelessness eventually cost him his life. “Sher Khan” – not to be confused with the villainous tiger of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book – is a common nom de guerre used by Pakistani infiltrators. As soon as  a “Sher Khan” was eliminated by the security forces, another fresh one usually took his place.

In The Valley Of Shadows traces the short, exciting career of one such Sher Khan, from insertion over the Line of Control separating Pakistan-occupied Kashmir from India, to his eventual demise in a fire fight with the Indian Army on a mountain trail in Kashmir. This last ambush, I feel, was narrated much better in Shashi Warrier’s The Sniper that also featured gunfights between two very different marksmen, Lieutenant-Colonel Easwaran and one Gul Mohammed in Kashmir – and in Kerala!

As someone who spent a lot of his childhood in naval bases in southern India, there was a sustained typo in this book that I found particularly irritating. The protagonist is referred throughout this novel as Major Hari Haran when, in fact, that name is rendered in English as “Hariharan”.

While the author of In The Valley Of Shadows has clearly been there and done that, his prose style and compositional skills could do with much more polishing. The narrative pacing plods along in far too many places.  Sapru all too frequently violates the old literary rule of “show, don’t tell”. There is also a love triangle of sorts featuring a local Kashmiri woman Sahira, which appears to be perfunctorily tacked on – and quite out of synch with the general tenor of the novel.

Each chapter of this novel is prefaced by excerpts from far superior literary works, drawn from both prose and poetry. It is to be hoped that this promising author will draw inspiration from earlier literary models such as these to improve on his future output.