Review | Neel Mukherjee’s vital new novel winds five stories into one moving whole

A State of Freedom
by Neel Mukherjee
Chatto & Windus

A State of Freedom, the follow-up to Neel Mukherjee’s breathtaking Man Booker-shortlisted The Lives of Others (2014) employs that coolest of modern literary forms: interlinked short stories.

This most playful of genres was made famous by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), and has since been used by everyone from Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad [2010]) to David Szalay, in his Man Booker finalist,All That Man Is (2016) – even if some critics remained uncertain just how interlinked his stories really were.

Mukherjee leaves no room for doubt. Characters, motifs, images and situations occur and develop across five sections, all set in India. These resonances are sometimes explicit, as in the case of twin brothers Lakshman and Ramlal, who have a section each and are glimpsed in others.

Just as often, the associations feel more coincidental: can the boy glimpsed beside his father in an upmarket car possibly be the same as the one in the opening section? The reader learns to join the dots while Mukherjee’s narrative licence makes sense of his title: such constant flouting of formal constraints is indeed a kind of freedom. Such liberties work for and, with deliberate irony, against the content, which (to put it crudely) concerns the state of India: “state” being both the condition of the country and India as body politic.