Skip to main content

Book Review: The Dogfight and the Lone Peacekeeper by Suyog Ketkar

The Dogfight and the Lone Peacekeeper by Suyog Ketkar is a terrific war fiction staged against the 2nd World War epoch. Often world war novels are placed abroad in countries like France, Germany, England…or mainly Europe. However, this one is an untold story from homefront: India. The cause and effects of the war are rooted in Germany and England but a lot of drama, espionage action and adventure takes place in India.


Wing Commander Vasant Kale is posted at Agra airbase. He is nothing less than a star in the Royal Air Force, and a favourite candidate of the Group Leader Boyle. Initially, readers will be loaded with the nitty-gritty of air force mechanism and how these jet fighters communicate and practice. The story develops gradually. For many characters that leave an influence in the story are credited with a good amount of family history. Indianism runs deep in the novel like banter.

When Vasant’s fighter plane was shot down, he is dragged to the hideouts of enemies. He not only recognizes the enemy instantly but also bows to find out the killers of his group people that were murdered cold blooded.

The novel gains an investigative skin as the story shuttles between past and present. Subplots are convincingly built on sweeps, family history, and back stories. A few pages in the book – you may feel that the action is camped within the Indian map. Contrastingly, to put the story on the fringes of holistic hooks, Suyog takes us to the seething German side as well.

The other side of the story features Vincent – one of the formidable characters. He and his elder brother Walter were ideal Nazi-inspired citizens of Germany. Walter was killed while being posted on U-boat 624, which was attacked by the Britain Royal Air Force. Vincent is obsessed for revenge. He invents a chemical weapon. And that fad brings him to India, where he is secretly paving his ways while causing mortal damage to the squadron of Boyle and Vasant. Can someone stop this mad German? Can someone find antidote to the bio weapon?

Though based on true life events but fictionalized, the novel probes deep into the events and the nature of war and offers a peace-loving soldier’s view as how unwittingly a war entraps and affects common people.

The World War novels are mostly a roller coaster ride of emotions, aspirations, obsession, longing, conspiracies and much more. Readers got to see a side of people that they never knew could exist on the face of earth. The good, the bad, the angels, the demons…one comes to believe after reading war books.

The novel holds a substantial plot and storyline, narration is superb. Characters have in-depth portrayal and scenes and settings too are described vividly. From time and again, the author rotates the story from one aspect to another. At times it’s about Vasant’s love affair with Shakuntala, while in the end he discusses the fate of Prabhat’s unwed bride. The novel never drops its social element, which makes the story look totally Indian.

Buy the novel from Amazon/Kindle.

Comments

  1. Thank you for writing a review for my book. I am glad to see that you liked it and would recommend it to your circle of friends.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem Summary: Where The Mind Is Without Fear by Rabindranath Tagore

Poem by Rabindranath Tagore: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Short Summary: This poem is written by Rabindranath Tagore during pre-independence days, when India was a colony of the British. The underlying theme of the poem is absolute freedom; the poet wants the citizens of his country to be living in a free state. According to the poem, we see that the poet is expressing his views there should be a country, like where people live without any sort of fear and with pure dignity…they should

Book Review: The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond

Among all Ruskin Bond books, The Blue Umbrella has, so far, gathered immense applaud from readers and critics alike.  This is a short novel, but the kind of moral lessons it teaches to us are simply overwhelming. This is a story of Binya, a poor little girl living with her mother and an elder brother, Bijju, in a small hilly village of Garhwal. One day while herding her two cows back home, she stumbles upon some city people enjoying the picnic in the valley. She is enthralled to see them well-groomed and rich. She craves to be one like them and among many other things of their, a blue frilly umbrella catches her attention. She begins craving for it. On the other hand, the city people get attracted by her innocent beauty and the pendant in her neck. The pendant consists of leopard’s claw – which is considered a mascot widely in the hills. Binya trades her pendant off with the blue umbrella. The blue umbrella is so much beautiful that soon it becomes a topic of conversation fo

Poem Summary: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias is a short poem of fourteen lines written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The concurrent theme of the poem is that nothing remains intact and same forever in this world. Even the brightest of metal, one day decays with passage of time. The throne name of Egyptian King Ramesses is Ozymandias. It was his dearest desire to preserve himself forever by building a huge statue that he thought would never tumble down. Stanza 1: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; Summary: The poet narrates the poem through the eyes of a traveler who seems to have come back from a remote and far-away land, referring to Egypt. The traveler r