BOOKS: DOWN AND REALLY OUT

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At the heart of Rohinton Mistry's monumental new novel lie questions as essential as breathing. How can hope and dignity be maintained in the face of daily atrocity? And atrocity that comes not with the sudden violence of a Holocaust but in a steady, relentless drip-drip-drip of degradation and disappointment. What is the price of forbearance in the challenging of injustice, and when does stoicism turn into fatalism? Cities like Bombay are routinely given tags like "City of Hope" or "City of Dreadful Night"; Mistry digs beneath the comfort of such abstractions to a level of complexity where murderers command our sympathy and philanthropists live off beggars. The fine balance that gives the title to his book asks us, unforgettably, where we draw the line "between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness."

Mistry, a Bombay-born Zoroastrian, or Parsi, who moved to Toronto in 1975, has long distinguished himself as a rigorous humanitarian who can re-create from afar every last rending detail of his clamorous hometown. His books are living rooms that open up onto whole worlds. And with characteristic deliberation, he has steadily moved from a first collection of stories (Swimming Lessons) to a prizewinning mid-length novel (Such a Long Journey) to this new epic, which is worthy of the 19th century masters of tragic realism, from Hardy to Balzac. In response, perhaps, to a world that has "a phobia about anything in slow motion," it restores the old-fashioned virtues of attention and compassion.

As a testament to patience, A Fine Balance (Knopf; 603 pages; $26) is also a test of it: its first 250 pages merely introduce the four main characters and the sorrows of their pasts. Dina is a Parsi widow in her early 40s who runs a small apartment in Bombay; Maneck is a student from the mountains who takes a room with her; and Ishvar and Om are two village tailors, uncle and nephew, who long to pull themselves up from their Untouchable status. All four, with their habits of impatience and loss, hopefulness and resignation, find their lives intertwined when Indira Gandhi announces her State of Emergency--her absolute rule--in 1975.