A little under a quarter of the way into the novel, there is a scene recalled by the first person narrator that is both poignant and horrific. Out of sight of the boy and his mother, the narrator's father alone in his study is burning the boy's paintings.
"There's a smell of burning around the house," I remarked.
"Burning?" My mother was silent for a while, then she said: "No, I don't think so. It must be your imagination, Masuji."
"I smelt burning," I said. "There, I just caught it again. Is Father still in the reception room?"
"Yes, He's working on something."
"Whatever he's doing in there," I said, "it doesn't bother me in the least."
From that scene, the force of the novel springs, but as a narrator relating his own story the deliberate inclusion of that scene comes across as an obvious ploy to elicit sympathy, a psychological tool or weapon wielded by the narrator to justify his every action and every mistake.
This in itself is not a flaw.
However, unwilling or unable to confront his pain, his artist's soul fatally wounded, the main character suppresses his feelings from that moment on. The adult narrator that relates the rest of the novel has removed himself from his own life and since this is told in the first person, the reader also ends up stuck in this frozen sterile limbo. The narrator is indeed drifting in a floating world finding pride only in pleasing the father replacement in his life, the patriarchal imperialistic regime. Nothing else matters to him and so recounting the story from first person it is difficult to convey anything beyond his narrow and damaged vision.
As readers, we are never allowed to witness any of the art he created, not the works destroyed and not the problematic political art he hangs his reputation on later. If he learns, grows, changes or even fails to change, he can barely express it. Ultimately and regretfully, I could not care about his journey and thus for me the novel was a failure.
