Vikas Swarup. The Girl with the Seven Lives. ISBN 9781035924653. UK: Head of Zeus, 2026. 401 pp.
Latest story from author whose book inspired Slumdog Millionaire has one eye on the film rights
I remember once, out of curiosity, picking up a copy of Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was a fascinating experience. Every sentence was an overwritten cliché. Not one simple or straightforward statement could be found in the whole book.
And yet, somehow, it was also terrifically readable. The writing might have been undistinguished – to say the least – but the storytelling drive behind it was quite extraordinary. I began to understand why a whole town, Tarzana, had been named after E.R. Burroughs’ hero, and why Hollywood has made more than 100 films about him.
Vikas Swarup, too, is a writer who thinks mainly in clichés. His heroine of the many names – Devi, Deepa, Deeba, Dasmeet, etc – gabbles her cliffhanger-laden tale into a video recorder as if she were taping an episode of This is Your Life, rather than tied up in a sinister dungeon under threat of immediate death, her life up for sale to the highest bidder.
But the story gallops along, and somehow it draws you along with it. Does it lack the crowd appeal of Q & A – the basis for the movie Slumdog Millionaire – his previous bestseller? Perhaps. Nevertheless, I suspect he already has an unashamed eye on the streaming rights.
The house of fiction has many rooms. Vikas Swarup is clearly most at home in the world of the picaresque – originally sets of tales about the exploits of ethically colour-blind vagabonds (or picaros) – but also, eventually, the inspiration for one of the world’s great masterpieces, Don Quixote.
ODTAA: One damned thing after another – that’s the formula for such stories. They can, at their best, reach complex and fascinating heights: in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, for instance – or Count Jan Potocki’s weird Gothic masterpiece Manuscript Found at Saragossa.
That’s not the case here, but that’s Swarup’s story does have its heartfelt as well as scenic aspects. The lives of slumdwellers in India’s towns and cities is the principal subject matter of his book, and he’s clearly done a lot of research on it – perhaps even explored one or two before retreating to the comfort of his air-conditioned hotel room.
My own memories of India date back over a quarter of a century now, but that doesn’t stop me finding strangely evocative his accounts of Kerala and Goa – not to mention the stultifying vastness of Mumbai. And, while I travelled on a budget as a simple backpacker, I still remember that feeling of being somehow teflon-coated as I walked about the backstreets of Indian towns.
I had a passport. I had (a little) money. I could escape. There was little real sense of vulnerability. I was breathing the same air as the desperate souls who surrounded me, but I had access to resources they seemed unlikely ever to attain.
So I do feel a certain sympathy for Swarup. He’s certainly a well-meaning man, and – as I say – his storytelling ability is beyond question. The swashbuckling tales recounted by his heroine go on and on. But he sounds more like a modern Eugène Sue (The Wandering Jew, The Mysteries of Paris) than a Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance) – let alone a Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children). This despite that the fact that he drops in little jokes about the likes of Rushdie and Arundhati Roy from time to time.
The idea of the frame story – a central narrative framing other secondary narratives – is one of India’s great gifts to world literature. The Arabian Nights may have found their final form in the Islamic Middle East, but the name of their heroine, Shahrazad (Frenchified into “Scheherazade”) is Persian, and her central dilemma, telling a serialised story to delay her own execution, migrated from India to Persia long before it reached Baghdad and Cairo.
Swarup’s feisty heroine is clearly inspired by this. Like the immortal Scheherazade, she’s talking for her life – unlike her original, though, she has only one night rather than a thousand and one to make her point.
I’ve compared Vikas Swarup to E.R. Burroughs and Eugène Sue. I’d like to be able to extend that to Cervantes, Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas. After all, like Swarup, they were essentially great storytellers, able to draw us into their web with consummate ease. But I just can’t.
There’s an extra dimension of mythic seriousness about their masterpieces: Don Quixote, Oliver Twist, The Count of Monte Cristo. These constitute archetypes which continue to tell us varied (and at times bitter) truths about our shared humanity.
I salute Swarup for setting out to add a great new story to this tradition. He hasn’t really succeeded. There’s something too facile and lazy about his prose. There’s an air of cardboard unreality about his settings. It’s pinchbeck, good-enough-for-Hollywood, supermarket bookrack writing.
It’s certainly a rattling good yarn, though – and it’s not really any criticism to say of any entertaining, well put-together novel that it’s not a great classic in the offing (unless, that is, the film adaptation turns out to be utterly amazing). It’s very evocative to those of us who’ve been to some of the places he mentions. It also includes useful information for any of you intending to do so in the near future.
Listener Book of the Day: Vikas Swarup: The Girl With The Seven Lives (3/8/2026)(4-7/7/2026)
NZ Listener, vol.302, no. 4463 (8-14/8/2026): 42-43.
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Vikas Swarup (2022)•
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