Main Review:

Summertime is meant to be just around the corner, but given that the weather outside seems inclined to do anything other than rain, rain and rain some more, it seemed an appropriate time to sink my literary teeth into an adaptation of Shakespeare that’s been on my radar for over a year. Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young.

Even if it didn’t openly declare its literary roots in its blurb – no-one who gets more than 20 pages into We That Are Young can manage to miss that although it’s set half a world and more than a millennium away from the Celtic kingdoms of England, the story it tells is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Devraj Singh is an ageing titan of industry, a forceful man who is beloved, respected and feared in equal measure. Beginning to tire, he seeks to divide his empire up between his three daughters – the eldest Gargi, the middle child Radha and the youngest, Sita (okay that one doesn’t match) , who is the apple of her father’s eye. Devraj’s inheritance plan, like its play counterpart, rapidly falls to pieces, and the fallout of the factional family cuts a swathe across the length and breadth of the country.

As someone with a penchant for Shakespearean adaptation, the whole piece of work is a master class in adaptation and intertextuality. Whilst its strongest influence rests with Lear, there’s also gleanings of the Great Gatsby in the lofty heights and the baseless excess of the first third of the novel. Going beyond the literary, with its international focus, the constant tension, the grey on grey morality and the focus on the criminal and the immoral, I started to think of the book as an Indian Narcos – and was pleasantly excited to find out that the company behind Narcos are in talks to adapt We That Are Young into a TV series.

It’s with the Shakespearean allusions that the book’s intertextuality shines. His pop cultural position as a literary meridian means that many books, films and shows have some homages to the bard in their storylines. Hell, that’s St Trinian’s 2’s whole deal! But given that the author is Dr Taneja, and her thesis was focussed on the politics of adapting Shakespeare, I quickly became aware that subtle allusions to Shakespeare were deliberately sprinkled throughout the book. Characters, lines of dialogues, similarities of plot – it became somewhat of a game to try and keep tabs on them all. I managed to find allusions to Macbeth, Henry VI, Othello and even Hamlet as I went through – and I’m more than confident that I missed a bunch of them. What struck me is that each one feels deliberate, carefully sculpted to be there, tucked away in the text. The entire book is a masterclass in Bardic referencing and allusion.

But having admired the book academically – how does it stand on its own feet as a story in its own right? One downside to its being unashamedly an adaptation of King Lear, is that it does rely upon the audience having a deep familiarity with the plot-line of the play. The story jumps around between 5 different narrators, often travelling forwards and backwards in time with little to no warning. I do worry that people unfamiliar with the play would end up lost in all this switch-a-roo. It also influences the way that the characters come across. For example, a reader with Lear in the back of their pocket will quickly tell that Jivan is Edmund and therefore the ‘baddy’ of the piece, but this doesn’t come across clearly in the story itself. Perhaps I was biased by my knowledge of the play, but I was convinced that he was conniving and scheming all through the book to fulfil his evil desires, but it was all subtext and implications in Taneja’s version – I could have been completely off kilter. And whilst this could be considered artistic, it just confused me a little.

It’s not just Edmund that gets a different treatment under Taneja than with Shakespeare. In particular Gargi, the eldest daughter of Babuji and heir apparent to the company was much less intense than her on stage version. She was a much kinder, gentler Goneril than I was expecting to meet going in. Being one of the first characters we spend a considerable amount of time with – I found myself sympathising with her as a character trying her best in a world set out to judge her – a little like Daenerys Targaryen (we don’t talk about series 8). As the book progresses, we get a lot of other characters decrying Gargi and listing her many flaws and evil ways – but it’s all reported, and I was still rather a fan of hers as the story started wrapping up. And whilst we’re this point – Babuji (the lifelong corporate monster) presenting himself as a “Man of the People” fighting the crooked establishment whilst mostly yelling about Muslims and empowered women definitely did NOT make me think of any current political figures. None at all.

There were some elements of Taneja’s story-telling that did confuse me. The main thing that jumped out is just how many references to breasts and butts there are throughout the book. It starts almost right away with Babuji commenting on Sita’s breasts and I was like “oh cool – Dad’s clearly not a pleasant guy from the get-go – we’re meant to be judge-y of this” but then Gargi kept talking about breasts, and then Radha came along and kept talking about butts and even Jeet and Sita got in on the action too. It but me in mind of those terrible male authors who can only introduce female characters boob-first.

Another issue with We That Are Young, and the one that was the biggest shame was that it just sort of peters out. The opening is so strong, so engaging that I could barely stop myself from devouring chapter after chapter. The voice in the back of my head warning me that the infamous blinding scene could be just around the next corner. When that scene finally came, it was just as gruesome and riveting as I expected (when it makes its way to the small screen, I fully expect it to be on par with Oberyn Martell’s death in GoT). Taneja adding in extra plot elements in the lead-up, particularly the idea of Radha having been groomed by Ranjit Singh (The Gloucester of the book) really pays off in this scene, and the pandemonium as it plays it is beautifully harrowing to read. But with this scene being so visceral, such a show-stealer, it makes everything afterwards seem to pale in comparison. Once the book shifts onto its third narrator in 300 pages, things get a little vague and it seems to run out of juice. There’s lots of things being reported without being seen, and it never really picks up the momentum and tension that the first half of the book had. Which is a real shame.

So overall, if you like King Lear, you should read this book – you’ll enjoy how strong an adaptation it is. If you didn’t like King Lear – you should read this book – it might actually make you enjoy it. And if you haven’t read King Lear… you probably need to before you get started on this – or don’t – I’d be interested to see whether you can still follow along with what’s happening.

We’ve been on a run of fiction recently – so it’s time to change gears a little. Expect some Norse mythology coming to you very soon.

If you read We That Are Young – or any of the books I’ve reviewed so far – please get in touch and let me know what you think. I’d love to know what you think.