Viva la revolucion
Hari
Kunzru made a bit of a splash with his first novel The Impressionist,
and was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists
in 2003. The Impressionist was a fine book, rich in detail
and witty flourishes, and showed Kunzru to have a knack of producing
fleeting characters with a real sense of identity to them. This
was balanced by the conscious decision not to give the protagonist
(’the impressionist’) a character of his own, which
may explain why the book hasn’t become a more widespread
success. His second novel Transmission, had a wonderful
buzz to its first half, but after the central plot point had unfolded
- a computer virus released on the world which did everything
the Millennium Bug didn’t - Kunzru seemed not to know where
to take his story, and the horribly rushed ending put the tin
hat on Transmission as an honourable failure, or an example
of difficult second book syndrome.
My Revolutions unfortunately shows a further
decline. It was pure ploddery from start to finish, and the most
striking and disappointing aspect was that none of the characters
came alive, which is extraordinary from the author of The Impressionist.
The concept of the book is an interesting one. Mike
Frame is a 50 year old Englishman living a comfortable life with
his partner Miranda; together they run an upmarket toiletries
business called Bountessence. However Mike is not really Mike,
but had a former life in the 1970s as a left-wing rioter and bomber
called Chris Carver. As the book begins, on the eve of his 50th
birthday celebrations, he is about to be uncovered:
I have to be clear. It’s already over.
All this - the house, my family, this ridiculous party - no
longer exists. But accepting that doesn’t mean I know
what to do next, and even if I choose to do nothing, events
will carry on unfolding, and very soon now, days or even hours,
my life here will be over.
His life - his new life - will be over because his
old life is still there, waiting in the shadows. Identity then
is central to this book as it was in The Impressionist, but this
book never really gets properly into the issue. We are supposed
to wonder whether the central character, is really his ‘now’
self - Mike Frame, prosperous suburbanite - or his ‘then’
self - Chris Carver, Vietnam war protestor turned agitprop revolutionary.
“What, I wonder, if we were what we appear to be?”
So the central drama of the story should be how Chris, and more
importantly those around him, deal with the revelation of his
hidden past.
Unfortunately - spoiler for a book the author pre-spoiled
for you - this never happens, as he’s just about to tell
his wife as the book ends. Instead Kunzru concentrates mostly
on Mike/Chris’s past, and his slow development from anti-war
campaigner into Leftist bomber in 1970s England. (Kunzru in the
acknowledgements emphasises that the story is not a representation
of the Angry Brigade, though some of their bombings match. Why
so cagey? Can you libel terrorists?) As a reader never that interested
in ‘backstory,’ it’s uninvolving and not even
particularly illuminating: why tell us what made a person who
he is when we never find out much about who he is? I have no doubt
Kunzru researched his people and milieu thoroughly, so it’s
a shame that so many of the characters seem types and the details
feel like stock background (”…a flophouse in Naples
where you could hear cockroaches scuttling about on the tiled
floor after they turned out the lights … I sat around in
my bedroll on main squares, listening to long-haired kids playing
guitars and hustling one another for dope…”).
There is the odd hint of the old Kunzru’s
talent for smart phrasemaking (a town centre with Starbucks and
other ubiquitous brands is “a wipe-clean playpen for the
consuming classes”) but overall the impression My Revolutions
gave me was that it was beginning to look worryingly as though,
with three books behind him, it was the good one that was the
anomaly. There’s an interesting story to be told about an
Englishman’s involvement in leftist terrorism in the 70s,
and it’s the last third of William Boyd’s Any
Human Heart. There’s an interesting story to be told,
too, about living a dual identity in politically violent times,
and the trauma of hiding your past from your family, and it’s
by William Boyd too: Restless. Either would be a better investment
of time than this.
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
