Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru, has a wonderful short story in the latest New Yorker, see here. The story was very well written, with a smooth pace and a strong indictment of adverting in Capitalist societies. Here is a taste.

There was Joe and his new running shoes. Razia’s bike. All my friends seemed to be dropping snippets of advertising copy into their conversation, short messages from their sponsors. They were constantly stating preferences for particular brands, dishing out free samples.

Perhaps nothing had changed. We’d always shared new music with one another or recommended places to eat. But now there was something different. A tone? It was hard to say. I found myself wondering if Sasha was telling me that the sushi at Bar Fugu was “to die for” because he meant it or because it was a snappy slogan. Vikram started talking to me at nauseating length about tires. Steel radials, depth of tread. I hadn’t even known that Vikram had a car. When Wei Lin began rhapsodizing about the streaming capabilities of his new video projector, I snapped.

“Don’t start this shit on me, Wei. I’m sick of it.”

“What?”

“This sales patter. I can’t take it anymore. Frankly, you disgust me.”

“I what?”


He also has a book out, titled My Revolutions, which seems very interesting.

Hari Kunzru has impeccably "Cool Britannia" credentials. His first novel, The Impressionist, a post-colonial romp through India under the Raj, reflected his Kashmiri ancestry and was so critically successful he threatened to beat Salman Rushdie at his own game. Politically active, Kunzru is on the executive of London PEN, the writers' advocacy organisation, and he also has a hand in with the digerati, as an editor of the online magazine Mute. In 2003 he was named one of Granta's Best Young British novelists.

Not only does he win awards, in the tradition of Sartre and John Lennon he also knocks them back, rejecting the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2003 because it was sponsored by the migrant-unfriendly tabloid The Mail on Sunday.

All this would be gratingly politically correct if Kunzru weren't such a terrific novelist. Fortunately he is, as his latest effort, My Revolutions, demonstrates. Set mainly in the late 1960s and early '70s, this tale of flower power's violent sibling, the extreme left, follows Mike Frame, an angry young man whose forays into radical politics form the basis for an often brilliant psychological study of the counter-culture's sanctimonious socialism.

Mike's narrative arc is familiar enough. Intelligent, sensitive lower-middle class boy reads a little too much Mao, falls in with the wrong crowd at the London School of Economics and, before you know it, he's graduated from the local co-op to weapons training in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

It soon becomes clear, however, that our hero is unhappy about swapping organic carrots for Kalashnikovs and with the same absolutism that shaped his leftist convictions he trades them in - first for heroin, then Buddhism. After years of drug-fuelled travels and travails, he returns to England, where he promptly slumps into suburban middle age with Miranda, '60s hippie turned '90s entrepreneur, purveyor of natural cosmetics brand Bountessence, which under Blair's New Labour is doing great business.

This return of a wandering dropout is familiar enough material but out of it Kunzru fashions a political thriller that fascinatingly explores the fallout when the personal, the political and the use of violence for social change become intertwined.

These strands converge on the novel's main love interest, Anna, the fire-and-ice revolutionary goddess who captures young Mike's heart but who, in accordance with collective principles, refuses to restrict her affections to any one member of the tribe. If Mike is standing on high moral ground, Anna is on its Himalayan peak: she becomes a driving force that takes a disaffected group of university dropouts and forges them into a revolutionary cell committed to bombings, murder and armed insurrection. Kunzru's ability to make us experience the values of his characters is ruthlessly effective. Police are pigs, property is theft, the state is the unconditional enemy. Every breathing moment under capitalism is a kind of asphyxiation and only revolutionary acts provide the gasps of air that make life bearable. Particularly compelling are the sessions of self-criticism in which members of the collective critique every aspect of their existence, from their political principles to their shared sex lives.

Of course, it can't last. Before he quite knows it, at age 23 Mike finds himself burnt out and feeling more like one of the children of irresolution than the harbinger of a utopian society.

In recent times, the norms of the market have become internalised as the core values of our Western societies. From such a perspective it's easy to dismiss the antics of the loony left as, at best, pie-in-the-sky idealism or at worst destructive narcissistic posturing. In My Revolutions, Kunzru isn't so reductive. The uncomfortable feeling lingers that, despite his characters' deluded beliefs and the long-term ineffectuality of their methods, the problem remains of how to build a fairer society, one that is not so harshly divided between the haves and the have-nots.

Reviewer Anthony Macris is chairman of research in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong.