Hari Kunzru Literature Resource Center | Ratcliffe, Sophie. "Hari Kunzru." British Writers: Supplement 14. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Mar. 2012.Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1483000135&v=2.1&u=monroecc&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w | Title: Hari Kunzru British Writer ( 1969 - )Author(s): Sophie RatcliffeSource: British Writers: Supplement 14. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2009. From Scribner Writers Series.Document Type: Biography, Critical essay[Image Omitted: ]Table of Contents:Biographical EssayFurther ReadingsWorks In 2007, visitors encountering Hari Kunzru's website for the first time might have been a little surprised. Those searching for more information about this British author would have come across an old school photograph of a small boy aged perhaps five or six years old. A few lines of curt white typeface gave a few brief details: his current age, the fact that he was born in London in 1969, and, perhaps surprisingly, his blood group (HbAD) and a hyperlink to his genotype (human). Kunzru is joking, here, about the contemporary thirst for biographical details about writers. As he puts it, nowadays, "British journalists seem more interested in your biography or your publishing deal--the British press is interested in writers, but it isn't interested in writing" (Litt, 2004). The starkly playful nature of Kunzru's 2007 website poked fun both at his readers and at the cult of the celebrity author. He is highlighting the idea that it is not the particularities of his individual biography that should be of interest but rather the fact that he is, like all who read the page, a human. Such teasing but morally engaged touches, such concern for equality and justice, and such fondness for unusual technical modes of expression indicate something about this British author's approach. Kunzru's wide-ranging interests and aesthetic skills have always been combined with a commitment to political and moral causes. BIOGRAPHY AND EARLY WORKS Further research yields a few more details about the author's background. The son of a doctor, Krishna Mohan Nath Kunzru, and a nurse, Hilary Ann David, Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru was born of mixed English and Kashmiri Pandit ancestry and raised in Essex near London. After taking a degree in English at Wadham College, Oxford University, in 1991, he received a master's in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick in 1995. Kunzru followed his studies with a varied career. He has been a travel journalist writing pieces for British newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and Time Out; a television presenter, interviewing artists for Sky TV; and an editor, working on the music pages of Wallpapermagazine and also on the pages of Mute, a culture and technology magazine.Kunzru's apparent resistance to biographical revelation on his webpage may be misleading. He is no recluse: the very fact that he maintains a website and has placed a large quantity of his work and interviews online demonstrates his commitment to reaching his public. His work itself has gained considerable public recognition. His first novel, The Impressionist (2002), won two literary awards in the United Kingdom, while his second novel, Transmission (2004), was named as one of the New York Times's notable books of the year. Every decade, the prestigious literary journal Granta gathers together the twenty writers that it deems to be the best of young British novelists. In 1983, the collection included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Kazuo Ishiguro. In 1993, Iain Banks, Louis de Bernières, and Jeannette Winterson were on the list. Kunzru was chosen to appear in the 2003 collection, alongside A. L. Kennedy, Zadie Smith, and David Mitchell. Hari Kunzru is primarily a novelist, but he has also produced a number of pieces of short fiction, five of which are published in his 2005 collection Noise. Many of Noise's themes, ranging from the shrinking of global spaces, to the relation of humans to cyborgs, emerge again in his novels.While Kunzru has always seemed happy to be in the public eye, he also has always been seen to keep his ethical principles firmly at the forefront of what he does. He sits on the executive council of PEN, an international fellowship of writers committed to promote literature and the freedom to write. Meanwhile, in November 2003, Kunzru was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, given to a writer under the age of thirty-five, but Kunzru turned the prize down on the grounds that it was sponsored by the Mail on Sunday newspaper. His agent read a statement in which Kunzru condemned the Mail's editorial policy, particularly the paper's "hostility towards black and Asian people." He went on to add that "as the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line. ...The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it" (quoted in Gibbons and Armitstead). He recommended that the £5,000 prize money should be donated to a U.K. charity, the Refugee Council. This caused a stir in the press, but Kunzru is unafraid of publicity or risk taking, noting that "artistic material that risks embarrassment, risks ridicule, is the only kind that is valuable" (Litt, 2004). THE IMPRESSIONIST Published in 2002, Kunzru's first novel, The Impressionist, takes its epigraph, given above, from Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel, Kim. On the surface, The Impressionist appears to be a picaresque coming-of-age tale, but as the story unfolds, it is revealed to yield much more. The questioning passage touches on a number of the author's abiding concerns--that of the position of the outsider, on questions of justice and injustice; and of issues of race, and mixed-race, on ideas of changing and fixed identity; and of the relations between Britain and India during the nineteenth and twentieth century.Kunzru's hero is the product of an accidental encounter, the child of a white British tree-planter, named (coincidentally enough) Ronald Forrester, and Armita, a high-born Indian nineteen-year-old. Armita is making her passage through the Indian countryside on her way to an arranged marriage. Unstable, addicted to opium, nymphomaniac, and prone to fits of temper, she has been hard to find a match. She is also crafty--crafty enough to escape from those transporting her to her wedding and to find Forrester, prone with illness and sheltering in a cave. As a monsoon devastates the countryside, Armita makes passionate love to this "pearl man": "The unprecedented sensations of each other's bodies make them start again and they do this twice more, roll and claw, then lie exquisitely, drunkenly still. By the last time the fire has guttered, and sweat and dust has turned their skins to an identical red-brown colour. The colour of the earth" (p. 15). The scene is unlikely, comic, slightly magical, and faintly shocking--setting the tone for Kunzru's novel--and it was this sort of writing that created considerable prepublication publicity for Kunzru--as did the fact that the author (reportedly) received an advance of £1.25 million. If true, this was, at the time, the largest advance in publishing history.Armita's family swiftly tracks her down, and as she shows "no immediate sign of insanity" (p. 24), they manage to marry her off to her intended husband. Pandit is a harsh man who is interested, primarily, in matters of caste and hygiene. A son is soon born, but Armita dies in childbirth. Here, Kunzru's hero takes on his first name, Pran Nath Razdan, and his first incarnation of the novel--the son and heir of Pandit. Although his skin is lighter than his father's, only Armita's former servant, Anjali, knows the secret of Pran's true origins. The rest of his family admire his unusual looks: Pran Nath is undeniably good-looking. His hair has a hint of copper to it which catches in the sunlight and reminds people of the hills. His eyes contain just a touch of green. His cheekbones are high and prominent, and across them, like an expensive drumhead, is stretched a covering of skin that is not brown or even wheaten-coloured, but white. Pran Nath's skin is a source of pride to everyone. Its whiteness is not the nasty blue-blotched colour of a fresh-off-the-boat Angrezi or the greyish pallor of a dying person, but a perfect milky hue, like that of the marble the craftsmen chip into ornate screens down by the Tajganj. Kashmiris come from the mountains and are always fair, but Pran Nath's colour is exceptional. It is proof, cluck the aunties, of the family's superior blood. Source: (p. 20)As Pran grows up, the servant Anjali becomes more embittered toward the changeling in the household. Then a Spanish flu epidemic strikes the city. Anjali, convinced that the house is cursed by Pran's presence, reveals Pran's true origins. When Pandit succumbs to the Spanish flu, his family evicts his one-time son, Pran. Being of mixed race, he is now considered to be an outcast and is thrown out into the street.In the next stage of Pran's existence, he must manage as a vagabond. Being neither Asian nor white, he cannot find acceptance in early-twentieth-century Agra. The teenage Pran tries to find support by searching out other mixed-race men in the local colonial club, but is rejected. A beggar directs the starving boy to another address, which transpires to be the local brothel. Here, Kunzru's plotting takes on elaborate and dark proportions. Pran is drugged with milky lassis, beaten, dressed as a girl, and renamed "Rukhsana." His job, it appears, is to be a "girl-boy." His mission is to engage one of the visiting English government officials in sexual acts. The Indians, unhappy with the British colonization of their country, plan to frame Major Privett-Clampe in a compromising position, so as to cause scandal and discredit the British government. Rukhsana is to act as bait.Kunzru gives us a number of scenes in which Privett-Clampe rapes the drugged teenage hero--these are handled in a lightly satirical tone. Soon, Privett-Clampe becomes more interested in Rukhsana's mind than his body, and he decides to educate him. Renaming the boy "Clive," the major spends hours teaching his protégé to speak with a British accent and familiarizing him with classic English poetry. Eventually, Clive escapes from the major's care, and in his fourth incarnation, he is adopted by the Reverend Macfarlane, a Scottish vicar, and his wife, who have established an "Independent Scottish Mission among the Heathen." Elspeth Macfarlane has recently lost her sons in World War I, and she becomes fond of Clive, whom she renames "Robert." Meanwhile, the tension between the English and the Indians is growing, as the country asserts its demands for independence. Our hero, now Robert, or "Bobby," is now old enough to fend for himself to a certain extent--and he begins to make his way around the streets of Agra. His training with the major has paid off, and he is able to pass for British with those who are visiting India. Then, a random encounter with a British man gives him the idea and the means to escape. Jonathan Bridgeman is a young alcoholic who befriends Bobby. On a night out, a gang attacks the pair of them, and Bridgeman is killed. Realizing that Bridgeman is without friends or family, Bobby makes a decision; he adopts the other man's identity and passport, and he then makes his way to Britain. On arrival, he finds himself the recipient of a reasonable trust fund, a place in a school, and on track for an Oxford education.The plot of the novel is more picaresque than action driven--and "Jonathan" continues to change roles as the novel draws to a close--studying history, falling in love, and setting off to Africa on an anthropological mission. Our hero's fate is never entirely settled. It drifts off, echoing the title, in an impressionistic blur. QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY One of the central metaphors in this novel is the way in which a person's identity can be formed by societal pressure. Kunzru gives the impression that his hero, as a character, has no central core but instead is the sum of his experiences: what he has learned and what he has adopted from those around them. As the narrator tells us, "Bobby is a creature of surface": Tissue paper held up to the sun. He hints at transparency, as if on the other side, on the inside, there is something to be discovered. Maybe there is, maybe not. Maybe instead of imagining depth, all the people who do not quite know him should accept that Bobby's skin is not a boundary between things but the thing itself, a screen on which certain effects take place. Ephemeral curiosities. Tricks of the light. Stitch a personality together. Calico arms. Wooden head. A hat and a set of overheard opinions. How perfectly impossible it is to grow a good lawn in India. The positive moral effect of team sports. The unspeakable vileness of Mr Gandhi, and the lack of hygiene of just about everything. Lay them out one by one, like playing patience. It does not matter if you believe them. Belief is nothing but a trivial sensation in the stomach. Source: (p. 250)In many ways, in this novel, Kunzru seems to be hinting at a social constructionist view of human nature (as advanced by theorists such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their 1966 treatise The Social Construction of Reality). As he puts it elsewhere, "Our supposedly innermost responses ... are in fact the most mediated" (Litt, 2004). Some might see this as a bleak vision. It seems to oppose the idea that there is any such thing as a human soul or integral personality--and the consequences of this notion of humanity are most clearly demonstrated when our hero comes to England and witnesses a professional impersonator for the very first time: He turns away from the audience, then spins back, a false moustache stuck on his top lip. Holding himself as if he is a very important person, a king or a politician, he gives a speech. A little laughter. Some heckling. He spins round again, comes back without the moustache. His voice thin and reedy, he quavers through a few words, his face held in a lopsided rictus. Jonathan does not understand what he is saying, but he cannot take his eyes away from the man. One after the other, characters appear. One with a deep baritone voice. Another with a little cap and a hectoring way of talking. Each lasts a few seconds, a minute. Each erases the last. The man becomes these other people so completely that nothing of his own is visible ... There is no escaping it. In between each impression just at the moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank. There is nothing there at all. Source: (p. 418–419)Identity, Kunzru's novel seems to be suggesting, may simply be a series of impersonations--the notion of personality is a mere fiction. Kunzru's examination of ideas of identity connects with his interest in questions surrounding ideas of mimicry. His hero is also a deft impersonator: He can reduce British Other Ranks to fits by imitating regional accents. Oroight there, mate? Och, ye dinnae wanna worrit yersel'. Now then, sirs, if you please to follow me I know a very good place.... Bobby deals in stereotypes, sharply drawn. Sometimes he hangs around near the doorways of expensive places, paying the doormen to let him stay [...] Bobby is a ghost, haunting thresholds [...] He hovers at the limit of perception. Source: (p. 237)Kunzru's hero's ability to transform and impersonate different cultures chimes with current theoretical works about the way impersonation and mimicry work on an anthropological level. In many ways, the act of mimicry has often been perceived, anthropologically, as a primitive and unsophisticated act. When Charles Darwin, in his 1839 work, The Voyage of the Beagle, commented that the native tribe he visited would do an astute impersonation of any European, repeating words and gestures "with perfect correctness," his praise was mixed with the confidence that the Fuegians were, in some way, inferior and that mimicry was a lower form of understanding. However, as the theorists Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1993) and Linda Hutcheon (A Theory of Parody, 2000) have pointed out, mimicry and parody can be both subversive and sophisticated, unsettling the boundaries of power. As it becomes increasingly difficult to tell an original from a copy, mimicry can be, Bhabha points out, "at once resemblance and menace" (Bhabha, p. 86). There is a fine line, as Hari Kunzru knows, between mimicry and mockery.Kunzru's novel is set at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time of enormous importance for India, during the period of British colonial rule but at a time of increasing Indian nationalism. As a reviewer notes, Kunzru is not so much interested in "Raj bashing," that is, attacking the British Empire in India, as in pointing out the way in which both British and Indian societies are upheld by controlling and divisive structures of class and race--from his hero's "adoptive" father, who spends his time attending societies "for the promotion of cast" (p. 23), to the Scottish vicar, who, like the phrenologist Cesare Lombroso, tries to categorize people's mental capacity according to the structure of their skull. For all of these characters, Kunzru's hero is an enigma, or, in their words, "a mongrel."The Impressionist also offers a deft exploration of the ways in which ideas of nation and nationhood are formed more through fictional representations than through reality--an idea that is described in more depth by Benedict Anderson in his 1991 study of nationalism,Imagined Communities. When Kunzru's hero reaches England, he is struck by the fact that though he has studied England obsessively, he has never really believed in it. The place had always retained an abstract quality, like a philosophical hypothesis or a problem in geometry. ...Imagine the Lake District, and the Norfolk Broads and the white cliffs rising up out of the green-grey water, circled over by gulls. He tries to feel what the others feel, and wonders nervously what he has become. Source: (p. 293)This idea of a nation being a fictional construct is an important one to Kunzru--and in many ways it enables him to separate himself from political arguments over land rights, which, for him, are the cause of needless violence. As he has said elsewhere, he believes that "the idea of a natural connection to a place or a natural connection with a society is false. It is a constructed thing and we build 'home.' Home is something you make, you build relationships with people and you build relationships with 'place.' There isn't this fascist type of blood and soil connection" (Book Club, 2001).The question of impressionism, and doing impressions, is borne out by Hari Kunzru himself. The Impressionist is, in itself, a collage of pastiches, echoing, by turns, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Charles Dickens, Lawrence Sterne, Evelyn Waugh, and the popular Carry On movies of 1958-1978 that are often considered the epitome of British comedy. In fact, this novel is such an allusive work that it is hard, at times, to find its central core. The parodic imitative quality of both the novel and its hero meant that some reviewers accused Kunzru of hollowness. This is, perhaps, the point; Kunzru is offering a novel that both describes and enacts the idea that identity is something one adopts, rather than inhabits.Nevertheless, Kunzru's first novel does demonstrate some particular stylistic features that can be seen to run through his fiction as it develops. The first of these is the way in which he moves into his characters' thoughts--confidently handling the free indirect style, as when, for example, he imagines the mind of an opium-hazed Amrita: Fire and water. Earth and air. Meditate on these oppositions and reconcile them. Collapse them in on themselves, send them spiralling down a tunnel of blackness to re-emerge whole, one with the all, mere aspects of the great unity of things whose name is God. Thought can travel in this manner, from part to whole, smooth as the touch of the masseur's oiled hands in the hamman. Source: (p. 6)Another of Kunzru's stylistic trademarks is also notable here--namely, a fondness for unusual similes, which are often used for ironic effect, as when an upper-class mixed-race man is described as being of "the same blood" as the "street urchin," our hero, "topped up to more or less the same degree, like two glasses of chai" (p. 49). The use of a simile from Indian culture allows Kunzru to mock the self-hating, racist, upper-class man, who would like to consider himself purely British. The third stylistic element that one could see as typical of Kunzru's work is his use of grotesque comedy and farce. Pandit, in an attempt to cure his Spanish flu, dies in a bath full of near-boiling water and onion; the major crouches over our hero in an ungainly sexual act, whooping chants from his hunting days. Such a fondness for the tragicomic mode allows Kunzru to engage his readers' emotions slantwise, keeping painful subjects at a satiric distance. As he has said in interview: I think it is foolish to imagine that you can deploy language in order to create emotional states in the reader. I'm often most interested in my own writing when I have no idea what kind of reaction it is going to produce. If a situation is on a cusp between the tragic and the comic, I can simultaneously be attempting quite a sincere statement and a heavily ironised context for that statement. Source: (Litt, 2004)Kunzru's next novel, Transmission, shows an increasing interest in the question, and handling, of emotion. TRANSMISSION Kunzru's second novel, published in 2004, provides a subtle exploration of the relations between feeling, fiction, and modern technology. The novel opens with what it claims is "a simple message": Hi. I saw this and thought of you
[...]
Maybe you obeyed the instruction to check it out! and there she was: Leela Zahir, dancing in jerky quicktime in a pop-up window on your screen. Even at that size you could see she was beautiful, this little pixelated dancer, smiling as the subject line promised, a radiant 21-year-old smile just for you
That smile. The start of all your problems.
It's not as if you had asked for Leela to come and break your heart. There you were, doing whatever you normally do online: filling in form fields, downloading porn,interacting, when suddenly up she flounced and everything went to pieces.
For a moment, even in the midst of your panic, you probably felt special. Which was Leela's talent. Making you believe it was all just for you. Source: (p. 3)We are ostensibly looking at a computer screen, but this is, in fact, a Pandora's inbox, where signs of affection and infection look the same, now a familiar part of the twenty-first-century spam-filled day. In Kunzru's hands, however, the idea of the computer virus becomes a postmodern morality tale, suggesting something about the vanity of contemporary consumer desire. Leela looks as if she has been sent especially for you, but she is, it seems, everyone's and anyone's. What is more, there is, in fact, no such thing as a "simple message." Pressing on the idea of the increasing confusion between sender and receiver in today's society, as Kunzru's narrator puts it, there is always "a chance for noise to corrupt the signal" (p. 147). There is something plangent about Kunzru's address to the implied reader. The use of "you"--the intimate second-person pronoun--is an act of consciously false dialogue, guardedly aware of the realms of cyberspace that lie between. Interacting, as the arch italics imply, is a fiction that our various machines, from the novel to the web, virtually sustain.The novel follows Arjun, a geeky comp-sci graduate from New Delhi, who is recruited by the Americans, employed by a Silicon Valley "computer-security specialist" firm, and unfairly fired. He takes revenge on the firm, and the world, by starting a computer virus that disables entire office networks, collapses company systems, and spreads "cybernetic gloom" (p. 148). The virus is transmitted by e-mail, and even the virus-combating company Virugenix, with its "Splat! product suite" (p. 52), cannot stop its progress. One click on an innocuous-looking attachment produces a JPEG file of Arjun's pinup, a Bollywood starlet named Leela. The host machine is infiltrated and the virus passed on to other computers, causing an informational disaster. Kunzru's narrative moves between the life of Arjun, in Unit 12, Bilberry Nook, California, and those affected by the virus, including Guy Swift ("Young British Market Visionary of the Year"), Guy's girlfriend, and the contagious celebrity herself, Leela Zahir, who is on location (in a wet sari) in the Highlands.Kunzru is obviously demonstrating the way in which technology changes us, but there is nothing Luddite about this novel. One of the pleasures of Transmission is the way in which Kunzru finds music in words usually relegated to the margins of literature. Ready-made compounds such as "downloading," "online," "form fields," and "reboot" are given a sort of organic existence, flowering like the "messy blooms of ASCII text" that signal fatal error. In Kunzru's prose, Leela's "jerky quicktime" (p. 3) (a reference to her file format) sounds like a new sort of dance step; her "pixelated" state captures her high spirits as well as her technical animation. As a whole, the novel engages with questions of globalization--particularly the increasing power of the United States in the world. When asked in an interview with Toby Litt about his feelings toward the United States and the spread of "American" language, Kunzru has replied: I don't have any "citadel/barbarians" kind of feelings. When I read American prose the thing I like about it is its Americanness--I enjoy the rhythms and the vocabulary. I'm interested in the ebbs and flows of language ... I'm also interested in globalised English. There is a kind of averaging out that happens in business English. I quite like the international blankness of certain sorts of things, the loss of localisation not just in language but in culture as well ... I find it telling about our culture now. Liking it or not liking it seems beside the point. Think about duty-free areas in airports; the brands by and large are similar, so that where you actually are is restricted to the tourist trinkets in the shop; the shape of the small wooden items and the imprint on the silver jewellery are the only clues to your location in the world. So I think a linguistic averaging is quite interesting [or] maybe interesting is the wrong word. I think allowing the blankness to rise up and reveal its horror is what is useful for writers to do. There is something terrifying about the loss of place and the death of location, the death of particularity and the total dominance of global culture by a very small section of cultural producers. Leaving aside the specific politics of the situation, I think it is very difficult to write outside that; deciding to oppose and asserting your resistance is vital, but writing against that blank corporate world in the name of passion and particularity is quite hard. Source: (Litt, 2004)Kunzru's mixed feelings about globalization and branding are demonstrated in his use of language in the novel. Arjun, on his first flight, admires the "ergonomic rigour of his meal tray ... designed with his lifestyle preferences in mind" (p. 32). Kunzru has carefully picked words such as "ergonomic," and "lifestyle preferences," and as the novel progresses, one gets the feeling that Kunzru enjoys this jargon, as "doughy and compacted" as the airplane food that his hero eats. Leela bangras "her way around the world, and disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step" (p. 4). The engines of an airplane roar "like a distant sports crowd," while the "damp polymer smell of microwaved food slowly permeated the fug of the cabin" (p. 32).Kunzru is aware, however, that one can take such blankness too far. This is what has happened to Guy Swift, the novel's villain, who is both the propagator and the victim of his own rhetoric. Guy, who has helped to sell "an unknown quantity of sporting footwear, alcopops, games consoles and snowboarding holidays," has been taken in by that most deceptive of internet technology phrases, "solutions" (p. 20). Umbilically attached to his PowerPoint presentations, Guy spends his time "convincing people to channel their emotions, relationships and sense of self through the purchase of products and services" (p. 116). We learn that his "communication facilitation stood out from the crowd. Engaging and impactful, for some years he had also been consistently cohesive, integrated and effective over a spread spectrum" (p. 19). None of this helps him write to his girlfriend: "Switching his laptop on, he tried in a half-hearted way to compose a mail to Gabriella, but, confronted by the blank white screen, he could think of nothing to say" (p. 13). Kunzru himself has a great deal to say about the problems of "global culture"--and a large part of this comic novel exposes the way in which immigrants such as Arjun are exploited by large Western companies. Beneath the slick language of the global product lies the stories of people such as Arjun, working long hours for little money and no credit--trying to escape the poverty of the countries from which they have come. KUNZRU AND EMOTION The fact that Guy is "half-hearted" is important, for Transmission is concerned with the place of the heart in the technological universe where bodies and machines are curiously intertwined, and touching people becomes increasingly difficult. Like Guy, Arjun has problems with expressing himself. When his mother cries on hearing that he is leaving to work in America, he makes "the gestures you make when you are trying to comfort someone" (p. 16). Later, he meets a girl called Chris and falls in love with her, experiencing "set[s] of emotions" in which he finds himself moving from sadness to happiness with astonishing speed (p. 49).Transmission offers another opportunity for Kunzru to explore his ideas about social constructionist theories through the medium of cinema. Arjun relies on movies to explain his feelings of love and sadness. As he puts it, only "song lyrics have a purchase on such reversals of fortune. What a difference a day, etc. Lyrics also teach (joy/pain, sunshine/rain) that you can only know how good up feels when you have tasted down" (p. 49). The implication is that it is these movies that also create such feelings. Arjun is a Bollywood devotee, and as he travels to America, he watches the box-office hit Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely on the in-flight Hindi channel, communing with "his innermost hopes and dreams." Kunzru recounts the movie's climax in wry summary: Spurning the advances of Bigshot's beautiful daughter, he [Dilip] decides the time has come to make himself known to Aparna, who has been passing the time in a montage of demure praying and chewing a pencil at her desk. As a boring meeting comes to a climax, Dilip strides in, buys the company and sings to Aparna of his undying love. She is bowled over and agrees to be his. ...They go walking by the Thames, on the white cliffs of Dover, on the battlements of Windsor castle and briefly in the Swiss Alps, wearing a variety of outfits and describing the life they will lead together once they are united in marriage. Source: (p. 35)Kunzru is, in part, satirizing the Indian commercial cinema industry here. As Salman Rushdie has commented, this is fairly easy to do--and has been often done in films such as Bollywood Calling (2001) and The Guru (2002). However, there is nothing unequivocally satirical, nor easy, about Kunzru's relations with Indian cinema. Dark parts of the novel are concerned with exposing the industry's machinations and exploitation. Meanwhile, Kunzru's tenderness for the vision of love, or pyaar, which these screen romances project is evident. It provides one of the ideals around which the fractured actualities of transmission and communication cluster.When Arjun is exposed as the originator of the Leela virus, Kunzru's plot gathers pace, moving between locations at a speed that would put Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely to shame. But those questions about love, feeling, and communication trail cloudily behind. As with The Impressionist, it is difficult to isolate an emotional center to Transmission. Kunzru slips between the interior lives of his various characters, setting their sincerity against a heavily ironized context. Kunzru has written that it would be intriguing to rediscover "the novel of sentiment as a rigorous literary thing" (Litt, 2004). Transmission is not such a novel, but it is certainly a novel about sentiment; it thinks about why and how our emotional lives are formed. While a number of other contemporary novelists have attempted to write convincingly about cyberspace--from William Gibson, who coined the term in Neuromancer (1984), to Jeannette Winterson in The Powerbook (2001)--Kunzru's attempt seems unusually successful. Responses to Transmissionwere almost overwhelmingly positive, recognizing both the novel's complexity, its comedy, and its carefully balanced emotional tenor--"successful and intelligent," "compelling"--or, as Christopher Hart puts it, "for all its modishness," the novel puts its "finger knowingly on the jittery pulse of our times. ...The post-modern world is a highly detailed chaos, something which art should convey, not simply mirror. But there is so much to admire in this taut, dense, scintillating novel." MY REVOLUTIONS Hari Kunzru's third novel, published in 2007, is a first-person thriller concerning questions of justice, terrorism, and love. The antihero of My Revolutions is Mike Frame, a man who is just approaching his fiftieth birthday and who is hiding a terrible secret. He is not the man that anyone thinks he is. Although he lives happily with his common-law wife, Miranda, and his stepdaughter, he is living a lie. Mike Frame is, in truth, Chris Carver, a former terrorist. He has changed his name and his identity because during the 1970s he was involved in a communist countercultural revolutionary group that had planned a terrorist attack on the Post Office Tower building in London. Responses and reviews of the novel have been fairly positive--critics viewing it as "a quick-witted, memorable book" and "an intelligent development of Kunzru's abiding preoccupation with the making and dismantling of personal identity" (Mattin, 2007).My Revolutions is, in part, a historical novel. As Kunzru points out in the book's closing historical note, "The Post Office Tower was bombed on 31 October 1971. No claim of responsibility was made" (p. 278). It is also, however, a psychological thriller, in which Kunzru shows a density and complexity of characterization unseen in his earlier works.Chris Carver's involvement in political activism begins when he joins an activist group called the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. "I was twenty years old," he reveals. "I thought about history a lot" (p. 17). He soon becomes a participant in demonstrations, protesting against the Vietnam War, then becomes part of a commune determined to overthrow global capitalism. As Mike looks back on his former self, "Chris," he does it with a combination of sympathy and satire: "I tended to rely on a small storehouse of slogans. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude" (p. 41), he notes. He reflects back on the manifestos that he produced, with the help of Anna, his sometime lover and fellow activist: CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION dramatizes our condition, which is struggle. CONFRONTATION gives a lead to the apathetic. CONFRONTATION is a revolutionary role model for disaffected youth. CONFRONTATION is a bridge from protest to resistance [...] We worked together, scrawling phrases, calling them out to one another, little fragments of polemic we delivered like orators, taking pleasure in the force of the words, their potential to make change. Source: (pp. 44–45)After Chris is arrested during a riot in London outside the American Embassy, he determines to give up his place at university and commit himself to the revolutionary cause. Chris's group are initially peaceable. They march in silence and drop food on people's doorsteps, with notes promising that "[a]fter the Revolution there will be enough for all" (p. 118). Eventually they become convinced that more radical action is called for, and they plant a bomb outside the American bank in London, posting "copies of our communiqué to mainstream newspapers and the underground press." "A BOMB TO HALT THE MONEY MACHINE," it reads in stacked phrases. "Nixon invades Cambodia. More blood on his hands. Bankers and arms companies pull the levers. THEY profit. WE die. ...RISE UP!" (pp.183-184). Although this bomb explodes, the media and government cover the story up. Disappointed, but not cowed, the group splits up and goes underground, before their final strike--planting another bomb in The Post Office tower. The bomb also explodes, and although nobody is injured, this time the story hits the headlines. Mike goes on the run, making his way to Iran and then Bangkok, where he becomes addicted to drugs; he recovers in a monastery before returning to England.As Mike Frame continues to reminisce about his days as a revolutionary, and his love for Anna, we learn more of his life in contemporary England. He is becoming increasingly distanced from his partner Miranda--partly because she is starting up a new business, and her increasing interest in commerce rides uneasily with Mike's (hidden) communist leanings. The distance is also caused, however, by the fact that a former member of the communist group is threatening to reveal his true origins--a revelation that would involve Mike's arrest and the loss of the new life that he has built. HISTORY, JOURNALISM, TERRORISM As Kunzru records in the historical note at the end of the novel, Chris Carver and his activist friends have some resemblance to certain real-life activist groups in the 1970s, such as the Baader Meinhof Gang (a militant left-wing terrorist group active in the former West Germany), the Weathermen (a radical terrorist group responsible for bombings in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s), and the Angry Brigade (a British terrorist group active around 1970 to 1972). However, Kunzru notes that My Revolutions "is not a representation of the politics of personalities of the Angry Brigade, who carried out a series of bomb attacks on targets including the Police National Computer and the Employment Secretary's house in the early seventies" (p. 278). What Kunzru does attempt to do in this novel, however, is to probe the idea of hidden histories. He imaginatively reconstructs the stories that might have happened but never made the news--he allows us to imagine things that might have been unseen, but nevertheless occurred, in past history. Much of the fictional group's actions go unreported; Kunzru's implication is that the government has stifled the media for a variety of reasons: a fear of creating panic, to prevent copycat actions, or even to preserve its own appearance of power. Peopled as it is with politicians and journalists, the novel seems to ask its readers to engage with the question "Does something exist if it's unobserved? Does something happen if it is not reported?" Once again, Kunzru seems to be suggesting that our reality is not something that exists "out there" but that rather it may be something that is constructed by ourselves or, more dangerously, by others.Set as it is in the late 1990s, Kunzru's novel about terrorism in the 1970s cannot but reflect the infamous terrorist acts against the United States that took place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He even allows himself some dramatic irony, as one of his characters claims: "There's no real conflict anymore. ...In a couple of years it'll be a new millennium and, with luck, nothing will bloody happen anywhere, nothing at all" (p. 259). Since the jetliner attacks on the World Trade Center and other U.S. targets on September 11, 2001, there have been a spate of novels about terrorism--including those by Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan, and John Updike. Although Kunzru's novel is set over thirty years earlier, it is impossible not to draw parallels between Mike Frame and more recent terrorists. Kunzru's own handling of Mike, who is both the hero and, in some ways, the villain of this novel, is complex--and perhaps best summed up by the novel's conclusion. As plans for his birthday party ensue, Mike wonders whether to start running again--leaving Miranda and his stepdaughter behind--or to give himself up to the police. As the novel ends, he heads toward the airport, but hesitates, and thinks about the consequences of what he may do next. Understanding morality, and legality, for Mike, is hard. He thinks: Because legality is just the name for everything that's not dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve when the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give out our previous interiority and join the dance and because just round the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn't enough, not by a long way, because there'll come a time when any amount of love will be too late. Source: (pp. 276–277)From the tone of this speech, it seems, initially, as if Mike (or Chris) has learned almost nothing from his life experiences. The long repetitive sentences form yet another "storehouse of slogans," reminiscent of his early manifestos. These are the same slogans that caused Mike to act but to refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions and the loss of human life that they might involve. One imagines that this speech is building up to yet another piece of radical violent action. But on closer examination, there seems to be something more complex going on here. The passage is allusive--the phrase "we must love one another or die" is taken from W. H. Auden's poem "1 September 1939"--a poem that was circulated on the internet as a poem of consolation soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Although many found Auden's sentiment reassuring, as Kunzru would know, this line was rejected from collections of Auden's later verse, and the poem was eventually eliminated entirely. Auden commented that this line was, in the end, a meaningless thing to say--that it was, in fact, precisely these sorts of meaningless statements that encouraged violent and unthinking action.The case of W. H. Auden offers an interesting parallel with Kunzru's hero. Auden was once extremely interested in communist politics, but in his later years, he rejected the idea that the artist should attempt to write about politics at all. There was, for Auden, a fine line between authorial tyranny--the idea that an author could sway his public--and political tyranny itself. Kunzru's allusion to Auden tacitly acknowledges this.My Revolutions ends with a change of tone and a movement toward something new. Mike's speech does conclude with another action of sorts but it is not necessarily a violent one. After pulling the car over, he picks up the phone. He reflects that "it's something, love, not nothing, and that's why I pull over and find a callbox in a lay-by and punch a number into the phone" (p. 277). We know this phone call will be a turnaround for Mike--another revolution of sorts. Whether it will take him into the light, or keep him underground, is left for the reader to find out. ASSESSMENT The most obvious difference between My Revolutions and Kunzru's earlier works is the way in which it handles questions of characterization. Kunzru's third novel is a far more conventionally realist work. It also shows the author moving clearly away from the comic and satiric genre. In many ways, one could see this movement as appropriate for Kunzru's subject matter. As this is, at heart, a "post-9/11" novel, he is, like Clare Messud, Zadie Smith, and Ian McEwan, concerned with questions of empathy: how one might empathize with the mind of a terrorist, whether or not there are minds that are lacking in empathy for others--and whether the novelist can play a role in developing or shaping our empathetic skills. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a number of contemporary novelists have been seen to be placing new importance on their own role in shaping the imagination and sharpening the reader's powers of empathy. Such concerns with empathy necessarily require a deeper level of psychological realism, as is evident in the novel's characterization.The softening of Kunzu's satire and comedy is also in line with his aesthetic and ethical concerns.Transmission made a strong case for the dangers of globalization. However, there is always a danger that Kunzru will make his case too strongly--a leaning towards caricature, as was seen inThe Impressionist. It is easy to make political points if one draws on sharply defined characters. However, stereotyping is, essentially, at odds with Kunzru's emerging focus on empathy and the particularity of individuals. For Chris Carver as a character, the danger came from his commitment to ideas rather than individuals. His recognition, at the novel's close, in the importance of individual relationships rather than ideas and causes, is born out by Kunzru's own stylistic trajectory. It is a trajectory that is influenced, itself, by the times in which he writes.As Kunzru's website and his career as a journalist writing about new technology would both suggest, this is an author who is highly alert to the way in which the media, and mediums, may change us and shape us. He has said that he is interested in knowing "whether all media is a form of pollution, or whether it's just the mass media, which makes the viewer or listener passive. I am interested in the possibility of two way media, two way means of communication, an interactive form" (Serres, 1995). Kunzru is particularly alert to the new media--interested in the ways in which the power of the Internet may alert us to a number of questions: whether we are, as the journalist Jon Katz puts it in the December 1997 cover story of Wired magazine ("The Digital Citizen"), "a powerful new kind of community or just a mass of people hooked up to machine? ... Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings" or are we merely "a great wired babble, pissing into the digital wind?" Whether he is writing about the way in which humans are becoming overly reliant on machines or about the way in which Internet viruses and hackers may cause mayhem, Kunzru illuminates the way in which, as Marshall McLuhan famously wrote in 1967, "The medium is the message."Delivering things straight, and true, may be Kunzru's practical concern, but when it comes to sending messages, we are, Kunzru seems to say, no angels. And while much of his writing is concerned with pragmatic questions, beneath all this, one can sense an idealism about Kunzru's writing which is often expressed by the motif of the angel. It is no coincidence that Guy's girlfriend, who works in public relations, is called Gabriella, or that Guy lunches in a restaurant named Seraphim. The angel appears earlier, in The Impressionist, as "Bobby" acts as an intermediary between the estranged Reverend MacFarlane and his wife, Elspeth, and again in the short story "Deus Ex-Machina," in his 2005 collection, Noise. As Kunzru discusses with the philosopher Michel Serres, an angel is an important symbol "for someone thinking about new media and communications," because an angel would be the ideal communicator--a messenger who would never displace or pollute the message. Although Kunzru is not a spiritual writer, he is deeply concerned with ethics--and is convinced that we "should approach ethics not in terms of some a priori sense of the spiritual, but framed in terms of transmission and communication." As Serres puts it in the same interview, "The problem of disappearing as myself to give way to the message itself is the ethics of the messenger" (Serres, 1995). This ethical determination in some ways has an impact on the quality of Kunzru's prose--which seems to aim both for transparency and to deliver a clear message. Kunzru may be resisting the idea that there is such a thing as a human "soul." After all, as Kenneth Gergen points out, "We don't easily want to part with such a belief, let's say trading it for a view of ourselves as so many robots or the victims of our genes" (p. 6). Kunzru is not a soulless writer--his belief is in human rights.Although one of Kunzru's most committed causes is that of clear communication, regardless of the message being communicated, his oeuvre does reveal his commitment as a writer to large political themes and a refusal to retire into a world of pure aesthetics. As he writes in an interview with Toby Litt, "The lack of a moral stance...the affectless quality of a lot of prose by young British, American and French writers seems to be something that a lot of people head towards as an appropriate stance to take on the world." For Kunzru, such a stance is inappropriate, and he repeatedly returns, in his novels, to questions of race, identity, and political injustice. Kunzru has spoken articulately about the manner in which the media may distort and shape questions of race, either positively or negatively. He notes The whole multi-ethnic British thing seems to be incredibly cool at the moment. ...This year is the year of the Trendy Asian in London! ... There's this sort of sense that it's cool to be South Asian. That's an amazing feeling because when I grew up there were no Asian people on TV. ...Some people are being a bit sneery about the trend factor at the moment. But I know what it has been like. I just think it is great, it is so cool that there is finally people who are South Asian doing a lot of different things. ...You can't underestimate the effect of that on young kids. Source: (Anon, 2001)However, he points out that although cultural differences may be "celebrated and seen as good" in London, "In other parts of Britain it is not like that. Last September we had old-fashioned race riots with Pakistanis up against whites. There is a national Far Right movement...all that hasn't gone away. There are parts of Britain, sadly, where things are just as divided as they ever were." His concern with keeping such matters a live in the media are demonstrated by his 2003 attack on the Mail newspaper.A number of Kunzru's influences are philosophical rather than literary--they include the philosophers Michel Serres and Giles Deleuze and theorists such as Donna Harraway. In literary terms, one can see the imprint on Kunzru's work of other British Indian writers, in particular Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands, 1992), and British Asian writers, such as Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2001). Transmission demonstrates the ways in which the twentieth-century novelist Martin Amis is a clear influence on Kunzru--the two share the same commitment to political satire, comedy, and caricature for moral means. Meanwhile there are many grotesque moments in Kunzru's work that recall the style of the postmodern American writer Thomas Pynchon, the author of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Against the Day (2006).Kunzru may have many dark passages in his writing, but he is nonetheless essentially a positive writer--one who appears to believe that his writing can do some good in today's society. In this sense, he can be seen to be part of a cluster of young British and American writers who, turning away from postmodernist fiction, are determined to use their literary skill to make a difference. Kunzru has responded that while "it is very nice being compared to somebody like Zadie who people are very excited about ... as to whether we constitute any kind of movement or tendency, I don't know" (Book Club). It is obviously difficult to place a living author within any particular "movement," but another contemporary who seems to work along similarly politically engaged lines as Kunzru is Dave Eggers--the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius(2000) and What Is the What (2006). Eggers is also the founder of the literary magazine The Believer, and the title is an optimistic one--intended to evoke not so much ideas of spiritual belief but rather a strong sense of humanism (as its manifesto puts it, "We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt"). Like Eggers and Smith, one could see Hari Kunzru as a believer of sorts. He writes, powerfully, about human nature, and he, too, gives people the benefit of the doubt. As he told Toby Litt, I come back to the fact that assuming the status of artists is a valuable way of looking at the world--the kind of thing that a lot of writers could very usefully do, and which would improve the quality of debate. ...I think we should really look at the level of debate about books, because debate and contention should be doing good and useful things. The spotlight is there, it's now a question of upping the level of conversation and taking it a bit more seriously, a bit more passionately. People should take risks with what they say and what is possible. Source: (Litt, 2004)WORKS: Selected BibliographyWORKS OF HARI KUNZRU * The Impressionist.London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002. * "Lila.exe." In Best of Young British Novelists 2003. Edited by Ian Jack. London: Granta, 2003. * Transmission. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. * Noise. London: Penguin, 2005. * My Revolutions. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. * "Aisha." In Four Letter Word: New Love Letters. Edited by Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter. Toronto: Knopf, 2008. FURTHER READINGS: CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES * Adams, Tim. "Many Unhappy Returns for a Teenage Terrorist." Guardian(http://books.guardian.co.uk), September 2, 2007. * Chaudhuri, Amit. "The Revenger's Tragedy." Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk), May 29, 2004. * Dirda, Michael. "Things Fall Apart." Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com), June 20, 2004. * Duffy, Carol-Ann. "Our Planet, Speeded Up." Daily Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk), July 6, 2004. * Hart, Christopher. "A Virus Called Love." Independent on Sunday (http://findarticles.com) May 30, 2004. * Kipen, David. "Incarnations of Kunzru's Part-Indian, Part-British Hero." San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com), April 7, 2002. * Mars-Jones, Adam. "East Meets West." Observer (http://books.guardian.co.uk), March 31, 2002. * Mattin, David. "Twenty Years After Going Underground." The Independent(http://www.independent.co.uk), September 2, 2007 * Meadow, Susannah. "Son of a Sort of Goddess." New York Times(http://query.nytimes.com), May 12, 2002. * Mukherjee, Neel. "Not a Cosy Novel." Daily Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk), August 30, 2007. * Sooke, Alistair. "Signs of the Times." New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com), September 6, 2007.Interviews and News Coverage * "A Conversation with Hari Kunzru." Book Club (http://www.book-club.co.nz/features/harikunzru.htm). * Gibbons, Fiachra, and Claire Armitstead. "Author Rejects Prize from 'Anti-migrant' Newspaper." Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk/), November 21, 2003. * Kinson, Sarah. "Hari Kunzru." Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk), July 11, 2007. * Litt, Toby. "When Hari Met Toby." Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk), January 27, 2004. * Mudge, Alden. "Identity Crisis: The Many Faces of an Amazing Traveler." BookPage(www.bookpage.com). Source CitationRatcliffe, Sophie. "Hari Kunzru." British Writers: Supplement 14. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Mar. 2012.Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1483000135&v=2.1&u=monroecc&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w |