Ever since this book came out, I have been dying to read it. Janice Pariat is a Khasi author who has made it in the publishing industry. And it gives people like me hope that someday I can make it too. I read her collection of short stories titled Boats on Land two years ago. You can read my review of it by clicking here. I loved her work, so naturally, I wanted to read a full-length novel. I don’t know if my expectations were too high, but unfortunately, this novel felt subpar to her previous work.

Everything The Light Touches by Janice Pariat follows four people who, separated by time and place, share a love for travel and ecology. Their connection transcends time. And yet their common purpose adds weight to the knowledge that people, like plants, must find their roots.

After I completed the book, I sat with my thoughts. I love Janice’s work, but unfortunately, not this. It was a very mixed reading experience. I enjoyed parts of the book. But the majority of it was a huge letdown.   

Everything The Light Touches by Janice Pariat follows four characters: Shai, Evelyn, Johann and Carl. The book starts off with Shai, a Khasi woman who lost her job in Delhi and is forced to move back home to Shillong to figure things out. Out of the four, her story was the most interesting. I was so happy to see Khasi representation in an internationally published novel. It felt so good to be able to relate to the things the characters talked about and know the places mentioned. The writing, as always, was excellent. Unfortunately, that’s as good as it gets. Just as I was getting into the story, the story stops abruptly, and we are transported to England, where Evelyn’s story begins.

The sudden change made me so mad. I don’t want to read about some white woman struggling to become a botanist in a male-dominated field. That story can be told by so many other people. Janice crafted such an interesting character out of Shai. She had the chance to showcase the rich Khasi culture, the customs and the social intricacies. Instead, Janice decided to drop it and replace it with whitewashing the characters. I have failed to comprehend why she made such a decision. The change was jarring, and the story took a sharp nosedive. The once unique story now became bland. I struggled to complete Evelyn’s part. The only thing that kept me going was hoping that Johann’s story would improve. However, it only got worse. I will club Johann and Carl together because they are the most forgettable characters. Once I completed the book, the two characters were erased from my memory. I cannot recall their significance to the story, let alone their complete story arc. All I remember is a lot of name-dropping happened, and the one name that keeps popping up is Goethe. According to the book, he is highly revered in Botany. Although I could not find anything interesting about him. He’s just another dead person who once said something interesting. It was a slog getting past the whole mid-section of the novel. Not only does Janice keep name-dropping him, but she also drops numerous scientific names of plants, and I fail to see how that adds to the story. If anything, it only reminded me of how boring Botany is and how much I hated studying it. No offence to the botanists. I don’t want to study botany from a book in the fiction genre. If I had wanted to study the scientific classification of plants, I would have picked up a botanical book instead. Maybe she was trying to impress the intellects of the world. But this whole section reeks of pretentiousness. The story picks up again when we’re left with only one-third of the book. Once again, it becomes interesting when Evelyn moves to Shillong to search for the legendary Diengiei. And luckily, it ends with Shai’s story, which is the best of the four. You would think that since there are four characters, their stories would interconnect somewhere, but unfortunately, that does not happen. Their stories aren’t strongly connected. They’re more like mentions. One book that did the interconnected storyline well was Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. And that novel had twelve characters. I highly recommend giving that book a read. With such a disjointed narrative, the pacing was all over the place, but mostly, it was slow and sluggish in the middle of the book. The only thing that remained consistent throughout the novel was the writing.

Everything The Light Touches by Janice Pariat is a mighty book with 500+ pages. Unfortunately, the bland parts of the novel fall in the majority, so the struggle is real. Getting past that whole mid-section was a task. I wish Janice would have stuck to Shai’s story arc and written a complete novel-length story. It would have been a more coherent and touching story. Everything The Light Touches could have done without 300 pages of material, and that is a lot. Maybe Janice was too ambitious with this one because it was not worth 500 pages. My rating for Everything The Light Touches by Janice Pariat is 2.5 out of 5. I really hope that whatever work Janice comes out with next will be much better than this. She is a great writer and has the potential to write something exceptional.