The Scion of Ikshvaku

Scion of Ikshvaku by Amish Tripathi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

      As I feared, Amish started concentrating on other Indian Epics after the success of Shiva Trilogy. He started with the re-telling of Ramayana. I had almost zero expectations on the book but made a compulsive purchase of the book while browsing Amazon. As I started reading the book, it started meeting my expectations(zero!). I always disliked his style of writing. Honestly, I have seen many blogs with better English and better sentence structuring.

    In the first two books of Shiva Trilogy, this irksome nature of his writing was shadowed by my ignorance of Shiva's story and my appreciation of the concept(What if Gods were humans). But, in this book, since I am well aware of Ramayana, the bland writing is glaringly visible. I hate the way he writes the philosophical interactions between the characters. I hated it in Shiva Trilogy and it is no good in this book. I also noticed in this book that Amish's style is half-narrative and half-dialogue. I believe a story should be told through dialogue instead of narration. Narrative should only be used for non-story stuff like describing a scenery, at the start of a new story arc etc. But in his case, the story has lot more narration than needed making it more of an essay and less of a novel.

   Coming to the story, the first bad thing is, this is going to be another trilogy and the book ends with Raavan kidnapping Sita. He also made lot of references to the Shiva Trilogy (Nagas, Vayuputras, Malayaputras, Somras, even Meluha), some of which seemed forced instead of part of narrative. The whole episode of Manthara's daughter(I already forgot her name) is unnecessary (Did he incorporate it after Rape became a national issue?) and definitely avoidable. The story arc neither aids the story nor results in character development. The fabled love story of Ram and Sita is horribly under-cooked. They barely interact with each other in the book even though it is love at first sight for Ram.

   It does have its moments like the ending lines of the book hinting that Sita is the real Vishnu not Ram, the ambiguity/mystery in Sita's character  and the reference to Ram's life at his birth, both having troubles in his life and becoming a legendary King. Except a couple more such points, it has nothing else to offer.

Having said all this, I might still buy the next book as my fondness and pride for the Indian epics will nudge me to read the rest of this series. I keep wondering what if Amish was a first rate author. Then Indian Epics would have received the world-wide fame they deserve for their complexity and Epic nature.



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