Choice by Neel Mukherjee review – parables for our times

In the middle ages, morality would be transmitted in images. Churchgoers would commonly find above the altar a panel of three paintings relating a biblical parable or commandment. Such altarpieces could be found in Buddhist shrines, too, which might be adorned with three scenes from the path of enlightenment. A knack for envisioning moral precepts has seen the triptych translated across many cultures and now, with the UK-based Indian writer Neel Mukherjee’s formally daring new novel, even from image to text.

Composed of three narratives about 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas, Choice has been termed a triptych by its author and, like its visual forebears, the novel needles our moral impulses. The issues in question, from climate change to global poverty, are modern, but the novel’s interest in sin and virtue is redolent of the triptych’s medieval preoccupations. Where Choice differs is that, in its world, there are no unambiguous rights or wrongs. As one character observes of another: “No escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice.” This is a triptych for a secular age – without hope of salvation, however hard humans try.

Ayush, protagonist of the first narrative, certainly tries. An academic turned editor at a London publisher, he lives with Luke, his economist husband, and their children. So haunted is he by their human footprint that he has a plumber cut off the water supply beyond the meagre amount he considers acceptable, and installs timers on all the lights – measures taken unilaterally, and causing rows. Luke’s worldview is different. His motto, referenced repeatedly, is: “Economics is life, life is economics.”

This is the principle under scrutiny in Choice. At home with neoliberal Luke and at the offices of his multinational, Ayush encounters an outlook defined by “the centrality of money, its foundationalness”, which crushes the humane values he reveres as a scholar and publisher. Ayush’s interior monologue is compelling, especially the satirical vignettes from a publishing industry mired in “white mediocrity”.

But there’s no straightforward side-taking in Choice. For one thing, long-suffering Luke, his supposedly inhumane worldview denounced by Ayush, seems the more humane character, and it’s Ayush’s treatment of his fellow humans that is most dubious. In the novel’s astonishing opening, Ayush is depicted showing his children what seems to be a cute animal video before bed. It turns out to be a graphic vegan propaganda film of pigs being butchered.

While judging Luke for reducing the world to a numbers game, Ayush is the one who spends his life obsessively quantifying it. He is constantly doing equations to reduce, say, the profligacy of his showers. His moral compass, consulted daily, appears to be a virtual “kill counter” tallying animals slaughtered worldwide. Ayush loses the children’s education fund, giving it all away to environmental causes. Ultimately, he is himself guilty of a crudely utilitarian moral calculus. Mukherjee shows capitalism to be so pervasive that even its opponents cannot escape its modes of thought.

Two details link this narrative with the other two. In a short fiction collection that Ayush publishes is a story about an academic who, wasted in the back of an Uber, witnesses the taxi hit a boy, before driving off. Choice’s second section, it transpires, is this very story, recounting how the woman unburdens her guilt about the incident by getting uncomfortably close to the driver, an Eritrean migrant, and his family. At another moment, Ayush learns from an economist (one of many in this book) about a scheme that donates cows to poor Indian women. Most make a success of monetising the cow, but Ayush ponders the failures. The third section is the tale of one such family – imagined by Ayush – falling apart after receiving this well-meant gift.

Both narratives recall somewhat those thought experiments invoked by philosophy lecturers to tease out who bears responsibility for actions and their unforeseen consequences. We come to consider in a similarly abstract way the ethical dilemmas encapsulated by these stories-within-stories, since Mukherjee has drawn attention to their fictionality, and even to his own authorial intentions. A rich editorial exchange between Ayush and the author he publishes commends the “philosophical fiction” of late Coetzee and poses the revealing question: “Can ideas be discussed openly as ideas, or do they always need to be disguised under drama and action and emotional development and all that rubbish, like vegetables smuggled into food for children?”

Mukherjee’s award-winning debut, A Life Apart, contained a novel within a novel, but Choice represents another order of self-referential metafiction. It succeeds, though, because it’s never without fiction’s traditional pleasures, from the close social observation of rural Bengal to delicate evocations of London. Here he is on the way flowers on Herne Hill look more vibrant in the dark: “more intense, more liberated, more obscene, somehow, than their polite, corseted daytime selves”.

Like many contemporary writers, Mukherjee is anxious about injustice. But in this brilliant, bleak moral maze of a novel, where every right turn is a wrong one, we will find no lessons about what is to be done – even if Lenin lurks in the epigraphs. Choice is more like the tale of the enlightenment of Buddha, the awakened one (the woke one, we’d say today), which Ayush fixates on: it rouses our moral intuitions from privileged slumber and spurs us not to action, but to intricate contemplation of what actions mean.

• Choice by Neel Mukherjee is published by Atlantic (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.