Tabish Khair’s The Body By The Shore is an oracle of times to come

At the centre of Tabish Khair’s latest book, The Body By The Shore, is an abandoned oil rig that floats in the middle of the ocean like a suspended nightmare. Alongside capturing their personal journeys to confront the horrors that lie caged within the rig-turned-resort’s secret lair, Khair also traces humankind’s seemingly unstoppable passage to the abuse of scientific knowledge. His peace and pace of life is disrupted when one day his estranged daughter, referring to his old police days, asks him, “Are you sure, that you have never discriminated between the crimes to solve?” Thus floats a forgotten body from the past, of a young black man who was found on the shore of the North Sea in Denmark, with his organs removed and a visiting card clenched in his frozen fist. For all the book’s conscientious ambitions, the writing is surprisingly atmospheric, like here when Jens Erik describes his love for the month of November: “You could complain about the darkness stretching into late morning… the slate-coloured clouds weighing down on you all day, the rain that never fell and never stopped.