It’s such a pleasure watching someone grow as a writer. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist was interesting but leaden in places. Transmission had been done better and earlier as Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs. But My Revolutions, Kunzru’s take on the rise of British radicals, is quite good. It’s his Midnight’s Children, a fictional chronicle of a hinge point in British political history. Like Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, it’s a cinematic potboiler, the tale of a slacker Jason Bourne. If this is what it takes to get you going, Hari, then by all means stop writing South Asian fiction.

The possibility of fiction is to stretch boundaries, to show us alternate possibilities. Kunzru is aflame with a time when people not only opposed the Vietnam War but rethought the structure of British society. His protagonists bring to mind the Angry Brigade, a real-life British group with similarities to the Weather Underground. They move into a squat together, screw without privacy, challenge each other’s political purity, expropriate other people’s property and evolve from blowhards into terrorists. By the end of the book a posse which began by writing earnest slogans and giving away discarded food, hooks up with professional destructionists from Palestine.

Like revolution pr0n throughout the ages (Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, The Dreamers, Dr. Zhivago), the book’s femme fatale is a political babe. True believers can be both attractive and scary. Anna starts out earnest but ends up a British Leila Khaled. It’s shooting fish in a barrel to parody the nihilism and soft-headed bullshit of the time, despite their laudable motives. The flyers the group makes:

Concentration Camp Britain. We are the Jews. Can you smell the smoke?

Subtle. The dogmatic Anna demanded political purification sessions called Criticism-Self-Criticism:

She looked so lonely as she told me that I reached for instinctively… she started to speak to me in the jargon of Criticism-Self-Criticism… It was only through the struggle that we could materialize ourselves in a meaningful way. If I wanted to fuck, she said, we could fuck; but politically she was sick of fucking.

Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled

Protagonist Chris gets used to making love with other people around or trying to sleep while others go at it. Like Bill Clinton, he loses a girl over a blowjob:

Anna gave orders. Hit me. Come on my face. I had the sense… that I was the subject of one of her personal experiments: an analysis of the pathways between violence and sexual arousal in the white male… Sex for Anna was always an assault… on the thing in herself she was trying to eradicate…

One evening I was standing over her as she knelt, naked, on the floor, when we noticed Claire watching us from the doorway… Oh, yes, the woman who’d forced her to cut her hair, who’d reduced her to tears by calling her a slave to patriarchy, had been groveling on her knees to a man… It spelled the end not just of our private meetings but of all intimacy between us… Now she would eradicate her deviation…

Following a gripping, Heart of Darkness-style climax, Chris spends years in the wilderness of drug addiction. It brings to mind the Sunderbans scenes in Midnight’s Children. He drifts through Southeast Asia on the hippie trail, like others:

He was making one of his periodic visits back home to sell the rugs and jewelry (and the charras) he’d picked up in India… With his long, matted hair, his beads and mirror-work waistcoats, he was an alien presence in our increasingly puritanical group…. Anna called him a ‘neocolonialist parasite’ as he was showing off a batch of silver necklaces he’d bought in Ladakh… He’d left behind a scene of genteel Bohemianism, but things had moved on, fast.

Chris spends some time at a monastery in Thailand which specializes in curing drug addicts. It’s the Thai Betty Ford. But he grows disgusted with its moral compromises:

Wat Tham Nok was… a worldly place… I think the last straw was the ceremony the abbot performed to bless a certain Mr. Boonmee’s fleet of taxis. Boonmee was a gangster, as far as I could see, an oleaginous man who owned a brothel and a service station and various other businesses in the nearby town. I remember… the vapid grin in Boonmee’s face as he accepted congratulations on his public act of piety.

The book spends little time on desi references. On Pakistanis in Britain, Chris echoes larger prejudices:

They wre crop-haired mods out of Hoxton or Bethnal Green, kids who beat up on immigrants, put lighted rags through their letterboxes. The police didn’t do much because many were sympathetic to the attackers… I’d hear the same thing everywhere, how the Pakis were moving in, breeding like flies. Historically they’d always stayed farther south, near the Thames in an area the Spitalfields boys called Brown Town, but… suddenly little knots of dark-skinned men were standing on street corners they had no business to stand on…

Kunzru pens some clichéd, film noirish clunkers towards the end…

‘That’s what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by.’

‘How the hell do you face yourself in the morning?’

‘Don’t patronize me. I don’t see you’ve any call to occupy the moral high ground.’

… and you’re waiting for a ‘We’re the same, me and you.’ But the rest is quite good. It was such a pleasure to read fiction for adults again after the daymare of A Thousand Splendid Suns. My Revolutions wraps up with a Gitmo reference and the sense that in Kunzru’s mind, the revolution is not over.

Jabberwock also enjoyed the book.

Related post: Hari’s revolving account, My Revolutions review, and an interview with Hari Kunzru