Accidental Magic is a richly layered novel that, on the surface, is about the intricate world of online fandom of the Harry Potter books. A reader who has not read a single Potter book, nor has any intention of doing so may, therefore, hesitate to pick up Keshava Guha’s debut novel. But that hesitation soon evaporates, for while the book does open up a fascinating world of online Pottermania and fandom, Guha uses online fandom as a device by which to examine the relationships, moral choices and lives of four very different Potterheads living across continents and spanning considerable divides in age, social milieus and experience. Three of them initially meet online, and then in real life. The fourth meets Kannan, the protagonist, in real life, the slender thread connecting them being a shared love for Harry Potter. It is in the interstices of these two worlds that the characters come alive.
The architecture of the novel almost has a touch of Greek tragedy, in which the seeds of each character’s actions are sown well before a particular story begins. By giving the reader short cameos of each of the four principal characters – Kannan, Grimmett, Malati and Rebecca – Guha sets the stage; in their background, family dynamics and upbringing, lie the trajectory of their future actions.
Keshava Guha
Accidental Magic
HarperCollins India, November 2019
It is easy to judge Kannan as passive or despicable, but in the end, one can hark back to his origins and understand where he’s coming from, given the emotional paucity of his middle-class Tamil Brahmin upbringing, the ethos of which Guha captures so well. Kannan’s older brother Santhanam is the star of the family, having studied at Carnegie Mellon and now an engineer with Dell, in Austin. Kannan follows in his brother’s footsteps, attempting to fulfil the family’s hopes of achieving the American dream, but no one remotely believes he will better his brother’s performance.
Kannan manages to get a scholarship to a middling American university, and is ‘on a knock-off version of the same path, the imitation as pitiful as a low-budget Tamil remake of a Hollywood action film.’ Rather than feeling low expectations and dislocation isolating, Kannan revels in ‘the utterly new and blissful sensation of aloneness’ the minute he arrives in Boston, for, in his crowded two-bedroom family home in Bangalore, he had never been really alone ‘other than those few minutes bathing or on the toilet…and even that time was penetrated by his mother, mindful of the rising price of water, yelling at him to hurry up.’
This aloneness, and the fact that the only books that Kannan has read apart from his course books are the Harry Potter series, enables him to find a unique and independent identity in the online world of Potter fandom, a comfort zone he wants to limit himself to rather than encounter reality. When he makes his first real friend in Boston, he wonders whether he may be making ‘the sad journey from aloneness to loneliness’.
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The other characters
Malati, of similar Tamil middle-class background, is the cherished younger daughter of a widower who indulges her passion for books. Although her childhood is sheltered, she reads voraciously, shaping her thoughts and sense of self in the world of books.
Grimmett, the elder statesman of Potter fandom, runs a late night radio show, The Lonely Hour, listeners of which are drawn to Potter fandom. He is a closet anglophile whose most vibrant years were spent in multi-cultural Britain as a young man. Now middle-aged, he tries to bring back some of that colour into his lonely life in a homeland he perceives as vacuous, by delving into the Harry Potter books, magical and British in origin, and striking a friendship with Kannan. It is this friendship that is at the heart of this book, and ‘Harry Potter, the key their friendship was played in.’
Rebecca, the fourth of this quartet, is the daughter of liberal, white, Anglo-Saxon academics. She attempts rebellion against this privileged and cerebral upbringing by joining the online Potter fan club and encounters unanticipated associations.
Keshava Guha. Photo: Twitter
Rich metaphors and references
Like a good fiction writer, Guha lets the story tell itself in impeccable language, rich metaphors and references, an innate understanding of human nature and a tangible sense of place – all handled with a lightness of touch and understated humour. There are one or two points at which the author/narrator’s voice overpowers the character’s, but the insights offered are meaningful, and this reader received it not as an intrusion, but an expansion of thought.
Guha succeeds in making the novel feel like a vivid lived experience especially for anyone who has been through dislocation, disjuncts between family expectations and the formation of one’s identity, or has lived in Bangalore, Madras or Boston. He also flags an unstated but timely caution about the dangers of living too much in the clouds, in this instance, the online world.
The ending of the novel signals parallels with online fan fiction, intentional or not. Kannan ‘posit(s) a theory of Harry Potter in which J.K. Rowling was not the last word but merely the first, the prime mover, the originating genius…’ Fanfiction thereafter allows fans the liberty to create stories of their own, redefining relationships between characters, without incurring the wrath of the originating genius. Similarly, Guha leaves it to the reader’s imagination and understanding of the protagonists to carry the story forward much after he has concluded it.
Accidental Magic is an impressive and imaginative debut.
Anuradha Rao retired as executive director of the International Women’s Rights Action Watch, Asia Pacific. She earned a Masters in Literature from Middlebury college, Vermont at the ripe old age of 55, after spending five summers at the Bread Loaf School of English studying creative writing and theatre.