Book review: 'The Storyteller '

Book: The Storyteller
Author: Jodi Picoult
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 460
Price: Rs695

Jodi Picoult is an expert at taking larger-than-life themes — autism, school shooting, medical controversies — and wrapping them into the pleasing format of a page-turner.

Picoult is an accomplished writer so her formulaic approach, complete with Law and Order-style twists and turns, has always been tolerable in the past. But with The Storyteller, her formula has worn thin.

The book opens with the narration of Sage Singer, a lonely young baker who befriends a 95-year-old man in her grief support group. Josef, a former teacher and sports coach,  is the heart and soul of the local community. He seems to be the one person who can provide Sage with the social contact she so deeply craves.

But this is a Picoult novel.

Josef presents Sage with a moral quandary — he is a former SS officer who confesses to killing thousands of Jews. Since Sage’s family is Jewish, he begs her to kill him for his sins. Shocked and repulsed, Sage contacts the police.

The story unspools through multiple narrators after this. Sage’s past continues to remain shadowy for some time as the book shifts focus to the story of her grandmother Minka, who survived Auschwitz and who has, till now, avoided talking about her past. The grandmother’s riveting tale of survival comprises 300 pages of the 460-page tome. It’s also the most emotionally authentic part.

Minka sparingly but powerfully narrates how she slowly lost everyone close to her — her father was sent to the gas chambers, her sister killed herself before she could be taken to a concentration camp, and her mother was packed off to the camp weeks before Minka joined the ranks.

The horrors of the Holocaust are in themselves powerful enough to propel Picoult’s narration past the mediocre, a feat she is unable to replicate while dealing with the details of Sage’s unfortunate love life.

Minka, her family, and her best friend, are the most identifiable characters in The Storyteller. Sage is a singularly unsympathetic character. This is perhaps because her dilemma of whether she should forgive a mass murderer pales alongside a story as powerful as that of Minka’s.

Sage grapples with the larger questions — should she forgive a mass murderer? Is it even her place to do so? And if she doesn’t, does she ‘sink to his level’? And when Josef asks her for forgiveness because she is a Jew, is he still displaying the same prejudice in which every Jew is the same?

The story is interspersed with a somewhat bizarre attempt at a Holocaust allegory told through vampire fiction. Maybe it’s just unfortunate timing, but there’s something Twilight-y about the hunky Polish vampire who must control his blood-lust to be with the heroine.

The twists at the end are mildly surprising but fail to rescue the book since after Minka’s voice goes silent, the rest of the book seems irrelevant.

Despite that, Picoult’s book is still a page-turner, which maintains the right balance of suspense and comforting tropes. But she would have done better by amputating her main character out of it.