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India never did recover from postcolonial angst. The place is littered with victims. Delhi especially, where unless you happen to have been to Oxford, you are actually no one in the corridors of intellectual power.

Uma possibly picked up her fixation about a non-colonialist space being an impossibility in the contemporary context during her sojourn at Oxford and she quite obviously never recovered from it. Which is made worse by the fact that her Irish boyfriend while confessing love for her refuses to sleep with her. What is even worse is the fact that she can only think of love in terms of television commercials, films or other samples of popular culture. Sam looks like Daniel Day Lewis doing The Last of the Mohicans, without the glasses and with bottle green Irish eyes.

Uma, like many of the other characters in the novel, could possibly be a caricature but the reader gets confused - or perhaps it's Ghose who gets confused. The book claims to be a comedy of manners set in Delhi's cocktail circuit. However, Ghose seems to hedge her bets. Sometimes she laughs at her characters and sometimes she seems to be one of them. And none of it is deliberate.

The book is a novel about knowledge. The community of gin drinkers, which consists of Oxford and Harvard returnees like Uma, guards this knowledge. Of course, gin has nothing do with transmitting the knowledge "Gin is liquid colonialism" so unless we assume that colonialism is knowledge, we will have to ignore the gin. The real action of the novel takes place around them. A supposed search for a mysterious gang of book thieves who steal books from places like the Government House and not just any book - rare first editions at that. The Wells & Taylor edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Questionings on Criticism and Beauty by Arthur James Balfour. Of course whatever the book thieves get up to ultimately turns out to be a damp squib, but it has the merit of holding our interest till the denouement. Which is more than can be said for characters like Deekay, Uma and Pamela Sen. Or even Madhavi who comes with her baby daughter to India, leaving her American husband behind, hoping for a plum position in the University. Barring Uma's parents everyone in the book is an academic and Oxford-returned to boot. This might have a great deal to do with Ghose's experiences as a Rhodes scholar but it does make her canvas rather limiting unless we start out with the proposition that all the world's Oxford and observe a three hour reverent silence, or however long it takes to read The Gin Drinkers.

Anusuya, Uma's mother had possibilities. She is a lady addicted to prescription drugs and gin - in fact, she is the original gin drinker - and as result floats woozily through life, full of unexplained grievances. 'Anusuya wandered out at sixty degrees shaking her head but turned back into the room like a suddenly rampaging bull and knocked over Uma's bedside lamp. ' But Anusuya seems to belong to another novel altogether and is out of place in this academic confusion.

Occasionally Ghose disconcerts with her sudden descent into the bizarre. Uma decides to earn a living by joining a department store called Aladdin. There she has to stand in the window and dress up in odd ways - one day she's Scheherazade reclining languidly on a Persian rug, on another she's a Banjara gypsy and on a third she's a Naga tribal engrossed in her mat weaving. What makes these episodes strange is the fact that they take place in a novel which is very firmly rooted in everyday reality with not a streak of magical realism. Why should Uma do this, does it have anything to do with her love life - well, that's for the reader to figure out if he or she is interested enough.

Ghose's style is that of a copywriter or journalist. Full of full stops and determined to wring every ounce of drama through those breathless pauses. As in the description of Sam:' This is Sam. Like a sexy Mohican-Mujahideen. Man in all his violence and angst. Man stretched to his limits. Man betrayed by life. Passionate. Wrung out.' Or in the description of gin: 'Gin with angostura bitters. Gin and lime. Gin with soda.' Unfortunately, if you hold your breath through too many sentences the entire effort gets rather deflated. It might work if you were a journalist, which is Ghose's profession, but many journalists have written novels without getting entangled in their craft, Pico Iyer for one. Ghose does have the gift of observation, but is unkind to her own gift because of the pace in which she dashes through the novel.

In the end we really aren't bothered why the kitab chors steal rare books, who gets the post of Head of the Department or even whether Uma goes to bed with Sam. But yes, two minutes' reverent silence for all those who can't forget Oxford, or their firang universities, is probably advisable.

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