Perl’s Script
Sample Chapters: XXXXXX
I started this book about six months ago, and it has just been completed. More or less.
This was planned as a Wodehousean humor novel (google for P.G.Wodehouse if you don’t know what the term means), but transposed to Bangalore and based in a typical software company. The final product is vaguely Wodehousean, in that it depends for its humor on wordplay and snappy cross-talk. The plot however is not really Wodehousean, because it relates the tale of Hari, a middle aged middle manager in an IT company (something like myself), who loses his job in the middle of a down turn and starts a web-development company. No earls, missing pigs and stolen amber statuettes here!
In the process of starting this company, he meets a lot of interesting customers, and most of the humor comes out of these interactions: A yoga guru, a condom kingpin, and a German R&D engineer. In stages, the company takes shape.
At some point, Perl enters his life as a business partner. She is extraordinary beautiful and super-competent. Hari falls deliriously in love with her. But he is married, and so is she. At this point the novel becomes faintly autobiographical and just a little bit mushy. The story of Hari and Perl is almost entirely fictional, but some of the emotions and experiences that Hari undergoes are inspired by my own feelings when I fell madly in love with someone. And Perl is VERY loosely based on the woman I loved. Some of the dialogs and events are also based on what had happened between us, but highly fictionalized. Writing about the fictional Perl was important to me personally, as it helped me get over my sense of loss, after my true love left me. I refer to this in another post (TRLGLLH)
Perl is very central to the book, and very important to me personally. Perl’s name is spelled Perl rather than Pearl for obvious reasons: as a play on the Perl scripting language, as this is a book about software developers. The title too is a very obvious play on the same thing.
In the second half, the book keeps teetering between mushiness and humor, and ends on a positive, humorous note. I personally think this mix, which is VERY un-Wodehousean, works well enough. Wodehouse, of course, avoided mush and sentimentality like the plague except in one or two notable exceptions like Heavy Weather, which is sentimental in patches.
A slight disappointment is the German section. When I was plotting the book, I was convinced there was a mine of humor waiting to be excavated in a German gearbox manufacturer. Unfortunately, when I started writing, I couldn’t produce any laugh-aloud comic moments out of it. But it has a kind of gentle underlying humor. After massaging those chapters, I bought in some loud humor using some standard Wodehousean devices, but it is still one of the slower sections. But on the whole, it is nice in other ways, and is critical to the plot, so I have left it in. I was anyway aiming for something a more than straight comedy, unlike Wodehouse. It is something between a straight comedy and literary fiction. Unlike Wodehouse, I hope to win the Booker prize someday J. Literary fiction wins Booker prizes; comedy doesn’t, unfortunately.
Be warned: there are lots and lots of sexual references in the book. VERY un-Wodehousean indeed. No sex scenes however. It is still straight humor, without obscenity or innuendos. It is just that I don’t cringe at talking openly about sex and bowl movements and other personal matters, and joking about it, unlike my mentor PGW.
Actually, even Wodehouse makes occasional references to sex. Two incidents I remember off-hand are firstly in “Pigs Have Wings”, where Beach the butler receives a photograph with the picture of a nude woman, which goes to Earl Emsworth by mistake, and there is some banter about sex. Secondly, in “Uncle Dynamite”, there is some cross-talk about strong silent men taming proud beauties with a flick of the hunting crop on the old spot, and Sally going around in the “nood”. Of course, in typical PGW fashion, it is done in an innocent and childlike manner.
Actually, my references are equally innocuous and childlike. The only difference between me and PGW is that he must have ten such incidents scattered amongst his entire oeuvre of ninety novels, and I probably have fifty such references in the course of a single novel. But my approach towards sex is basically the same as his, playful and childlike. This is not put-on; I genuinely share the same attitude. I consider sex as something pure and beautiful and innocent, and for the life of me cannot understand the nudge-nudge wink-wink furtive attitude towards sex of most of my fellow human beings. If you read TRLGLLH, you will understand my position, that it is the final beautiful culmination of the dance of Yin and Yang, which God has based the central design of the universe upon. But I am moving into the territory of my first book here.
The status today: I had set myself a target of 75000 words, and it is stuck at about 72500 words, and I have run out of plot. It is for all practical purposes complete, were it not for this artificial target that I have set myself. Actually, 72500 is also a fairly decent size.
I have already started sending it out to publishers and agents. The editor, if I am lucky enough to get one, will anyway ask me to make changes, and I can push it past 75000 at that stage.
The great thing about comedy is that you can massage existing dialogs indefinitely and pad the novel with additional incidental dialogs, and push it past any figure you want, as long as you can sustain the humor. Readers accept it in a comedy, and even expect it.
The hard thing about comedy is that it has to be, well, comic. And that requires moments of inspiration.
If I can get a publisher, I may be working on this book for another six months until the editor is satisfied. If I can’t, I will finish it as best as I can myself, and self-publish it. In this case, it should be done in another month or so. I couldn’t possibly work any more on it: I’m already starting to get fatigued and am looking forward to the next project.
Look in again in November/December 2006. It may be available for sale here at that time, if I decide to self-publish it. Until then, you can read the sample chapters.
Sample Chapters: XXXXXX
PS: If you are an agent or a publisher, and would like the full MS, or would like to like to get in touch with me for any other reason, please post a comment. Comments on this blog are moderated, I get to see them and choose if they are to be displayed. Naturally, I will treat such comments in confidence
