A fig tree that is just a fig tree

The plants in this are wallpaper, I think that is deliberate, and it still irritated me. There is a mango grove, there is a fig tree, there is a banyan, and none of them behaves the way a real one would. The famous scene has him sitting under the mango in what reads as a single continuous season while the grove flowers and fruits and drops around him like a stage set (Mangifera indica flowers in the dry season and fruits months afterwards, so you do not get both over one man's afternoon).

I know, I know. It is a parable. Parables are allowed a fig tree that is only a fig tree, and I am the wrong reader for a book where the landscape is scenery.

What actually costs it points with me is the women. Kamala exists to be a stage of his development and then to die usefully, and the ferryman is a lovely creation who is also a device. The river material is genuinely beautiful, and the last stretch nearly won me round; it has the quality of something being said properly for the first time.

Six. Beautifully written, thin underneath, and I suspect it lands hardest on people who meet it at exactly the right moment. I didn't. My book group adored it and I sat there being the difficult one, a role I am extremely comfortable in.