“The Pinnacle” by Abir Mukherjee
Once a major Hollywood star, George Abercrombie’s career has quietly cratered after a string of box-office flops. He has moved to Mumbai to be near his wife, Sweety Sahota, India’s biggest actress. George is accustomed to having things under control. Mumbai in Abir Mukherjee’s new novel, The Pinnacle, has other plans for him.
During his first weeks in the city, he goes out for a jog and quickly discovers that Mumbai is not the right place for such activities. For once, it isn’t his knees that stop him. It’s the air, thick enough to choke on, the traffic that shows no mercy to anyone on foot, and the basic fact that the city seems to treat pedestrians as targets rather than people with somewhere to be. He never tries again. Now his SUV crawls through those same streets at the pace of a herd of lethargic cows, with twenty million people pressing around him, all apparently headed nowhere in particular. For George, culture shock arrives daily in small, undignified doses. Mumbai refuses to organise itself around him as his old life did, and he never quite recovers from the insult.
His apartment tower supplies its own running joke. The express elevator is marketed as a straight shot to the penthouse floors with no stops, except that it stops at more than a dozen apartments anyway. Residents ten floors below have learned that it’s faster to take the stairs than to wait. The staff use separate elevators, cramped tin boxes stripped of the marble and smoked glass found in the residents’ elevators. George’s habit of letting his errand runner, Amit, ride with him strikes Sweety as a small act of anarchy and prompts a lecture about boundaries that George doesn’t entirely accept.
That impatience carries into the scene that opens the novel proper. George is shooting a commercial for Glen Doone, an Indian whisky brand trying to overtake its rival as the country’s top domestically produced label. It is a humiliating comedown from the movies that made him famous. For the day, he is arm candy for a Bollywood actress, with stunt goons sprawled at his feet pretending to be unconscious, while a director named Shankar, a man barely over five feet tall even in Cuban heels, runs him through take after take of the same three beats: smile, smile wider, now sip. The whisky tastes like industrial solvent, like whatever powers the auto-rickshaws outside, and George forces it down each time, telling himself he is still professional enough to sell a lie this bad. Between takes, he watches Shankar grope the actress as she walks off set and decides that it isn’t his country, so it isn’t his problem.
George nevertheless treats the Indian stopover as a temporary indignity on the way back to greatness. His dream project, Fragments of a Forgotten Soul, has been languishing for a decade, but he remains certain it will restore his reputation and carry him to Cannes and the Oscars. A recently divorced tech billionaire has even promised him $20 million, provided George introduces him to Jennifer Lopez. The details are both funny and pathetic. George’s grand artistic comeback depends on his ability to arrange a celebrity introduction.
George’s indifference also points to one of the novel’s sharpest jokes: his status in India has little to do with his fading career. In Mumbai, he has a driver, household staff, and a security detail that calls him “sir” without irony. An entire small economy is devoted to making his life frictionless. Being a moneyed white American in this rarefied corner of Mumbai opens doors that his career stopped opening years ago. He belongs to a recognisable type of western expatriate, anonymous at home but treated as somebody abroad. Within the social world Mukherjee depicts, George’s nationality and wealth grant him a degree of prestige he could no longer command in Hollywood. For some expats, that borrowed importance is reason enough to stay. George mistakes it for proof that he is still a star.
Then, after a night of heavy drinking, George wakes from a blackout. He stumbles into the bedroom to make peace with his wife and finds her murdered. Her phone and laptop are gone. He is the obvious suspect, with only a hazy memory of a bloodstained shirt, but instead of calling the police, he tries to reconstruct the night himself. Sweety once told him that in India, you don’t call the cops unless you have no other choice.
From there, the novel moves among three narrators. George tells his story like a man determined to turn his own decline into one more tale of triumph. Gemma, his former assistant, is an American who now works for Sweety. Amit is a member of the household staff, an errand runner who has been skimming cash from George and Sweety for months. He disappears the night Sweety dies, owing money to a pawnbroker and running from a debt that has nothing to do with the murder but everything to do with why he looks guilty. Everyone is hiding something, and the mystery advances as the reader pieces together what each character knows and what each refuses to say.
The rotating structure allows Mukherjee to keep revising our understanding of the crime without bringing the plot to a halt. Each narrator sees the same world from a different rung of its social ladder, and the gaps between their accounts produce much of the novel’s suspense and comedy. The plotting is brisk, although the book is most interesting when it pauses long enough to expose the vanities and resentments beneath the machinery of the mystery.
In one of Amit’s chapters, a small-time gangster named Gullu offers the opposite interpretation of George’s place in India. Obsessed with Sweety, he cannot understand why the country’s biggest star married a washed-up foreigner. As far as Gullu is concerned, she married down, badly, and it should never have been allowed.
The mystery resolves cleanly, but the novel’s real subject is the stories people tell themselves about their own worth, George most of all. He persuades himself that servitude is celebrity, desperation is ambition, and one unlikely film will restore everything he has lost. The other characters have their own private myths, their own secrets, and their own distorted measures of who matters. By the end, everyone has misread someone, including themselves. The joke is on all of them.
