HARI KUNZRU IS A MULTIPLE- choice question to which the answer is always (d)
all of the above.
Is he, (a) the fêted author of playful, multicultural romps starring Asian
men? (b) the writer of a deeply serious new novel about white terrorists in
1960s London? (c) a thirtysomething club kid who looks too fashionable to
have written a word?
Well, that would have to be (d) And, I have to tell you, the riddle of Kunzru
does not get any easier when you meet him for lunch in Central London to
talk about his new novel. Yes, you can ask him questions: he is by turns
earnest, funny and eager to help. So, yes, you get answers. But just so many
of them.
Let’s turn first to his book, My Revolutions. Kunzru has always been a bold
writer: his sweeping historical novel, The Impressionist, made his name both
in the headlines, for its whopping advance, and in literary circles, for its
clutch of awards.
Then followed Transmission, another cross-continental satire following an
Indian hero. But My Revolutions is his most daring move to date, because it
is nothing like his previous work. Sombre, political and with not a single
Asian character.
“The Impressionist was an extremely different animal, a big picaresque
imperial romp, now this is a less satirical book, with nothing special to
say on the issue of race,” he says.
“In a way, I really needed to do it, because I started feeling like. . .” he
tails off.
“The important thing is, if people have been reading your work before, you
keep expanding their horizons of what they can expect from you rather than
narrowing them down.”
The second daring thing about My Revolutions — a contemporary story of a man
slowly revealed to have a past as an extremist terrorist — is that it
engages with the 1960s without flippancy or flares jokes. As a reader, one
is never sure whether to take the book’s gang of revolutionaries as absurd,
inspiring, or frightening. Which are they?
“All of the above,” Kunzru says, rather typically.
“It is those simultaneous reactions that interest me, in that I have them
myself. A lot of currents of thought in the Sixties and Seventies are
treated as entirely ridiculous now, and of course everyone can point to one
hundred absurdities about things they thought were important and did and
said.”
“There is the self-righteousness of a bunch of 21-year-olds doing politics,
mixed in with ego and sex, the fact that people are ridiculous and venal and
stupid and noble and extraordinary all at once. But my own view is that
there is something to be rescued from the revolutionary politics of the
Sixties.
“It doesn’t look anything like getting an AK47 and smashing up the State, it’s
an intellectual courage in trying to think outside the terms in which you
are given. That’s very interesting to me. There is a listlessness and a
hopelessness around in the culture at the moment, which contrasts very
strongly with then.”
It is this that he is drawn to, the courage to break with form. Although there
is a revival of groovy Sixties fashions, we have forgotten the — often
violent — transgression of the era’s politics.
“It feels so, so, distant, geologically distant. There was a generation of
educated middle-class people who were trying to build a violent revolution
in Western Europe, and the idea that they would wish to entirely reject the
premises of the previous generation is kind of breathtaking, given the level
of acquiescence to the status quo that we have now.”
Without mentioning race, it is obliquely present in My Revolutions. Its tale
of a boy becoming politicised to the extent that he can begin bombing
high-profile London targets can be read on one level as a kind of parable
about current British domestic terrorism. This he sees as the unwelcome
inheritance of the 1960s.
“It’s become a truism when talking about al-Qaeda that it’s this radical
rupture with the past. I don’t see that,” he says.
“This idea that 21st-century terrorism has emerged from nothing, actually,
there is a lineage of revolutionary theory and practice that goes back into
the 1960s and further back, this is all 19th-century stuff, Russian attempts
to bring down the Tsar.”
A common theme to both al- Qaeda and the violent revolutionaries of the 1960s
is that their leaders were nicely brought up kids: educated and affluent.
“It’s interesting that it’s such a middle-class phenomenon, these educated
middle-class Saudis that don’t have any chance of effecting any kind of
political change in their own country because they live in an absolute
monarchy, and the gap between their aspirations for change and the reality
is filled by a kind of religious millennarianism.”
Why has our politics become so listless, compared to three decades ago?
"Politics here is a kind of managerial thing, because people have lost
the feeling that political participation produces results . . . whereas the
story of the City of God being built on earth is what is coming out of the
Middle East.”
So what of his own politics? He talks for a while about the experience of
growing up in white 1980s Essex, with attitudes of Conservative politicians
such as Norman Tebbit fuelling the racist abuse he endured.
“It scared the shit out of me, to be quite honest, it would filter down to
what people said to you on the street . . . had to run away from the
Chingford Skins. I remember running for my life down a subway tunnel at one
point.”
But, worse for Kunzru’s spirit was that the 1980s was a time when there was a
great “sense of possibilities closing down”. He likes possibilities — and
contradictions.
During one impassioned speech about consumerism and branding, he actually
thumps his hand on his heart, where there also happens to be a Fred Perry
logo on his shirt. When I point this out, he smiles.
“I’m not claiming any kind of purity . . . yes, it’s not consistent.”
My Revolutions is dedicated to “all at 34”, a coded reference to the café near
his East London home. It is here that, during the writing of My Revolutions,
Kunzru also got involved in a fierce local battle against regeneration. In
the spirit of 1968, Kunzru “spent a lot of nights barricaded in this café
with a really extraordinary collection of people”.
But is he not also part of the problem, having moved, with his artist
girlfriend, into the kind of home those locals could not afford? “Exactly.
I’m part of the phenomenon of gentrification, but the local story is a bit
more complicated . . .”
In one way, his latest novel is entirely consistent with his oeuvre, in that
it has an inconsistent central figure. All his heroes are masters of
disguise and frequent name-changers. Has he changed his name?
“No, I never have. Even in online situations I find it very difficult to think
up aliases I want to be inside. It’s quite funny that, because, yes, I am
obsessed with shape-shifting and the fantasy of disappearance.”
It is here that we inch a little closer to Kunzru the chameleon. Partly this
is an accident of birth — he has a British mother and an Indian father. But
it’s deeper than that. He once wrote of himself: “I am the least authentic
person I know.”
“For one reason or another, I’ve found myself in the middle of various
identities, and I think I’ve developed that into sort of an ethical
position,” he says, laughing.
“I’ve found it very useful in my life to have a habit of not fully identifying
with what was going on, because sometimes it allowed me to see things more
clearly.
“It means that I would have been a terrible Seventies revolutionary. I would
have always have been: ‘Well, shall we look at it another way?’ But what
makes you a bad activist probably makes you a better artist.”
I ask him the downside of this. “Loneliness,” he replies.
The other downside, which is my problem, not his, is that it is hard to
identify Kunzru; hard, even sitting before him, to see him clearly.
“To call myself a revolutionary would be pretentious and not true. But, at the
same time, to think that things might be otherwise . . . I’m interested in
doing that, but I don’t have those kind of answers,” he says.
“I’m kind of disgusted by a lot of what I see, and I play along a lot, and I
have fun playing along sometimes but it feels like fooling around in the
ruins.”
What is Hari Kunzru? He is all of the above.
MY REVOLUTIONS by Hari Kunzru
Hamish Mailton, £16.99; 288pp
Buy
the book here for the offer price of £15.29 (free p&p)
- Hari Kunzru is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today at
3.30pm. Call 0845 3735888 www.edbookfest.co.uk
