Half of this erudite mish-mash of a novel could be described as a challenging read. The other 50 percent makes the heavy lifting worthwhile by giving brilliant insights into modern Indian society. The mastery of slang in English and Indian languages define this work.

The half-and-half notion might be applied to the author, Anil Menon, himself. He has divided his life between computer science and literary endeavors and is often billed as a science or speculative fiction writer. However, this novel, despite its endorsement by Ursula Le Guin, has only a small sci-fi element. It also includes a love triangle, crime-solving, political analysis, literary theory and musings on the impact of technology which somehow hang together as a satirical thriller.

Based in Delhi, the action follows Vyas, an inspector in the fictional Lokshakti anti-corruption police, who has sent a compromising love letter to his wife. In his attempts to retrieve it, Vyas crosses paths with an entrepreneur, Anand Dixit, who is bringing technology to India's villages, and a Bollywood actress who once starred in Ajaya, a subversive retelling of the Ramayana. When one of Dixit's dissatisfied employees posts Ajaya, which was never meant for release, on the internet, Vyas himself becomes implicated in the conspiracy with near fatal results.

The narrative is delivered from the point of view of at least eight characters, some of whom switch from third to first person. While the publisher likes to call this "polyphonic", it could equally be labelled "confusing", especially when there is, on occasion, no clear tagging of which character is talking.

Similarly the reader is subjected to a bombardment of fascinating ideas which are merely touched upon before rushing on to the next glittering theory. For example, Dixit's business partner, Eshwar Pillai, has this to say about their venture to bring the rural poor online: "The voiceless will be in the loop now. They own the means of communication. Did you see my TED talk on how digital tech is Marxism done right?"

While Menon wonderfully punctures Pillai's self-importance, an interesting idea gets sacrificed along the way. This is typical of the novel's magpie style which tosses out tantalizing tidbits of philosophy without exploring them fully, almost as if they were irrelevant facts.

This is frustrating for the reader, but it may also be the point. Throughout the text there are several conflicts between data and meaning, in particular dramatized by the surveys of countrywomen carried out by Dixit's market research company. During the interviews, the women's poignant, resonant real-life stories are dismissed in favor of more "valuable" information about their buying patterns of consumer goods.

Menon devotes a great deal of attention to a similar friction between reality and fiction. His main concerns revolve around the idea that humanity craves to understand the world through stories, which is a fallacy as stories are not truths but fabrications. Understanding who controls those stories and how they are created can be revolutionary, as Tanaz, who is involved in the roll-out of Dixit's project, acknowledges: "The village girls are going to encounter Lady Gaga and Gangnam style. The boys are going to fry their eyes watching porn ... They're going to realize everything they've believed in is just made up ... I'm coming to take away all their stories."

This interplay between truth and story is one theme which Menon does allow himself to examine at length. He extends it even to semiotics, including a long section which bemoans the incomplete transfer of exact meaning between author and reader and from which the novel's title is derived (half of what I say is lost).

This kind of intellectualizing can sometimes obscure what is actually a snappy story with sympathetic characters and well-paced action. For such a complex novel, its message is simple: life doesn't work out like the movies, or any other mythology you may choose to believe in. "What if it did?" is one of the many questions on this subject that lingers in the mind after the final page.

Jane Wallace is a Hong Kong-born journalist and author living in London

Reprinted with permission from The Asian Review of Books