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Penguin
282 pages
Rs299
Some authors put in a lot of who they are in the novels they write. After reading Gods Of War, you'll know at least one thing about Ashok Banker: he is a big fan of Pink Floyd. All chapters and sections of this book are named after song or album titles of the British band -- from Ummagumma to The Dark Side Of The Moon. However, their relevance to the book, is lost on the reader.
The kernel of the story is interesting. Five people from planet earthare chosen by Lord Ganesha for a 'peace mission.' Ganesha takes them to Lokaloka, a place outside the space-time continuum, where they join five representatives each from the billions of other planets in the universe. Here they discover that a war is on for heaven, between the "warriors of science" and the "warriors of religion" for the "City of Cities", which is some kind of a stand-in for Heaven. And God is so fed up with this never-ending strife that he is about to shut down all Creation.
The story is set not in the future but in an alternate reality. It borrows liberally from Hindu mythology: the five first take a ride on the rat Akhuratha (Ganesha's mount), and then on Pushpak (mentioned in the Ramayana) to reach Lokaloka. These references are juxtaposed with scientific terms such as "nanoscale computational megastructure", which Ganesha keeps using (and is quite comfortable using them).
Considering that the very existence of the universe is at stake, Banker tries very hard to evoke some sense of the epic, of the grand scale of the unfolding drama. Unfortunately, his preferred tool for this purpose seems to be superlatives, which jar and pall even as they fall flat. Here's a sample: "...the Jewel was still exactly where it had been. Except that it had grown considerably in the interim. Prodigiously. Enormously. Staggeringly."
More fatal for this book is the story's defining conflict, which is prodigiously, enormously, staggeringly banal. Arguments such as how science is religion are old, no ancient, hat. Well, there are still four more volumes to go, and who knows, all might be explained (including the Pink Floyd references) in due course. But with Gods of War, the series is off to a rocky start.
