The Chessmaster Analysis

… I confess to a reservation about his last novel, The Chessmaster, for some his crowning achievement. Crowning, I admit, in his perception of Reality or what Coomaraswamy calls ‘percept of the concept.’ But I fear I must admit to a reservation in respect of its enactment as a work of art, the way the material organizes itself as the novel’s texture, that is , in the manner that the novelist makes his apprehensions comprehensible – the latter being the privilege of the art form. Does Art preclude a vision of the Beatitude? Perhaps the difficulty surfaces in keeping a balance between the demands of philosophy and of art which made T. S. Eliot long ago complain against the increasing secularisation of the English novel and D. H. Lawrence fear

Secondly, she is not as elaborate as the main content, so the postscript remains a kind of brief introductory review-type essay. At the onset, she complains about the structure of the novel:
The Chessmaster and His Moves is a formidable assemblage of written matter with 708 pages of close print followed by 25 pages of Translations and Glossary, presents a vast mosaic of narration, reminiscences, confession, allusions and above all, what he terms “cogitation” generated by loosely associative principles revolving round a thematic centre that is, the protagonist’s quest for a lost age through encounters with men, women and himself. (Dey: 234)
She clarifies that though the centre is held firmly by not allowing the protagonist’s metaphysical ideations to effect on the fragile framework of the novel, one obviously notices the repetition of the narrative presented in The Serpent and the Rope. There are a lot of similarities of relationships, locales, events, and even the use of symbols. She is not happy with the ‘unabashed repetition of the earlier creation’. (Dey: 235) Somehow, Dey feels, Raja Rao falls short to satisfy the expectations of readers, as the etymology of the word ‘novel’

The novelist successfully handles the narrative which has a panoramic mode of expression. In his praise, Esha Dey declares:
Rao’s style alone holds together the disjointed patterns of narration and meditation by infusing opacity, that peculiar dense quality which demands the participation of the reader and at the same time resists communication. (Dey: 244)
She compares the style with the modern art in which men and events are treated like abstractions of shapes and colours, cut and repeated with a central point somehow connecting vaguely the dissimilarities. So both the Chessmaster and His game are created by the writer who is unable to believe in the objective validity of meaning and yet cannot do without meaning. An obvious element of linguistic realism assimilates mainly through items of spoken French as well as some Sanskrit-based words, on the other hand the literary fabrication in careful rhetoric, luxuriant imagery and allusiveness poetic expression stand firmly in the pages of the