As much as I enjoyed reading Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis from the US hardcover, with its tidy black jacket, I would have liked reading it from the UK hardcover much more. That version has got gorgeous cover art by illustrator Jimmy Zombie, in a semi-abstract street-smart graphic style reminiscent of 1960’s psychedelic album and poster art. The book tracks the lives of a transvestite prostitute, an over-the-hill poet, a Chinese soldier, a serial killer, a college-age burn-out, and a boy, as their paths cross in an Bombay opium den in the 1970’s. Thayil uses water imagery (floods, rains, pools, oceans) to get at the encompassing, all-over, force of the drug, which suspends users inside seductive, restful hallucinations. Then, as the characters begin to experiment with heroin, their drug-induced fantasies darken, and ghosts and demons emerge from the waters to pull them below.
Iovine’s dense, decentered composition (which leaves broad blank pools of black) and strange, acrid palette (bruise pink and mold green) conjure the airless, sunless Shuklaji Street rooms where the story unfolds. And the wavering lines and lettering are, at once, the smoke from the pipe and the abstract, shifting, see-in-it-what-you-wish visions fueled by the drugs. The American publishers remade this cover with banal, formal graphics, so it looks like the marketing prospectus for a new cough syrup. Unlike most contemporary novels set in India, whose covers celebrate subcontinental cliches (mangoes, sari borders, hennaed hands) Narcopolis, in both its story and language, is deeply exotic, describing a small, hidden, ruinous world. Zombie’s cover art moves to the pulse of it.
