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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Essay |
All the King’s Men
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| Our world, in the imagination of postmodern novelists, is fragmented. Can writers of Hari Kunzru’s calibre put it back together again? |
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Published : 1 November 2011 |
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SIDDHARTHA TRIPATHI FOR THE CARAVAN |
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S A TEEN I WAS INFATUATED for a while with the inspirational American writer Richard Bach—not so much his multimillion-copy bestseller about how birds learn to fly, but more The Bridge Across Forever, in which the author meets his soulmate-to-be. To test their love, he sells his Florida home and she turns her back on Hollywood. The two camp out
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in a trailer in the Mojave desert—a blank, featureless background from which the occasional rattlesnake glides out. Leslie and Dick spend time flying their sailplanes, working on their egos and coming around to accepting the ‘made for each other’ conclusion.
Hari Kunzru’s new novel, Gods Without Men (2011), is set in the same desert and he’s obviously taken with a similar idea—the sands as a setting against which you test yourself, the desert starkness that makes your own reality starker. But if the desert of Bach’s memoir is, to use a crude dichotomy, nature, then the one in Gods is culture. Were Kunzru to meet Leslie and Dick, having a candlelit dinner under the desert stars, he’d paint them, as he paints the dozens of characters in his populous novel, as representatives of their era, in this case men without gods—ageing American adventurers who spend too much time on their mental couches trying to work out the truth about themselves.
Kunzru is a master at the postmodern art of creating an authentic world and then undercutting the tangibility of this singular reality with the simultaneity of multiple realities. His novel teems with crisscrossing American histories and stories, all of them played out against the looming, three-fingered Pinnacle Rocks in the desert. The cast includes: early Cold War spiritualists communing with the extraterrestrial Space Brothers who are anxious to prevent planet earth from blowing itself up; an 18th-century Spanish Franciscan missionary-explorer cleaving to his outpost in the desert; a 19th-century Mormon miner fleeing Gentile persecution, mixing spirit with matter by hailing the precious quicksilver as “the very light of Jesus”; an early 20th-century self-taught anthropologist harbouring a painfully conflicted relationship with the natives; the beatniks and hippies starting out with Interdimensional Unity and ending with drugs, paranoia and violence; and today’s US Marines, enacting the battles they will play out for real in the sands of Iraq.
Given this plethora, the large brushstrokes are inevitable. But Kunzru also does the opposite—he piles up embellishments. Seven pages into the book, describing the retired aircraft mechanic who sets up home near the Pinnacles to capture extraterrestrials, he writes:
Schmidt had built a vortical condenser to store and concentrate the paraphysical energies flowing through the rocks. A crystal was set into a gimbal on the tip of the tallest stack, angled towards Venus. He was developing a parallel piezo-electric system, based on his study of Tesla, but for now was sending signals using an old Morse key, with an aetheric converter to transform the physical clicks into modulations of the paraphysical carrier wave.
Kunzru has a flair for such technical detailing—how silver is mined, how the stock markets work. Unfortunately, we don’t always spend enough time with the characters to whose worlds these details belong. And so, such facts often remain ornamental: there to jazz up the atmosphere rather than help us enter an imagination. A nine-page fragment about a dying Mormon, Nephi Parr, is one example. Kunzru, in those few pages, tries to do both—give us a glimpse of a history and tell us a story. But he is impatient to move on and we are eager to know more. The end result is a blurry and easily-forgotten Nephi Parr. The same is true of Schmidt; he too is a victim of the novel’s tumult. Kunzru’s description of him appears to capture a life but actually only gives us information about it.
To his credit, many of Kunzru’s characters survive this tumult. Their back stories do bear down on us at great speed but then come the small dramas and the inner voices that permit us to understand, for instance, the dilemmas of a white man whose interest in a decimated Native American community its members inevitably consider quaint, or the growing attraction of a bored, small-town American girl for the beatnik camp.
This two-way approach holds good of Lisa and Jaz Matharu too, the prosperous Indo-American couple from New York, whose story is at the centre of Gods. Kunzru’s account of their married life feels like a speed read of a lifestyle magazine. “Married life was good”… “classic Mercedes sports car”… “weekend excursions”… “dive vacations”… “book parties”… “summer rental in Amagansett”… “mid-century modern furniture”… “Lower East Side Gallery”, and so on. And yet once we’re done with the curriculum vitae, their story unfolds delicately, switching back and forth between his point of view and hers.
Lisa and Jaz are on vacation in the Californian desert when Raj, their autistic child, goes missing. His disappearance is the last straw in an already-crumbling marriage. Up to the time Raj is born, Lisa and Jaz confront recognisable, if not stereotypical, problems. His parents are conservative and hardworking Punjabi immigrants, displeased about their son marrying a white woman. Her parents just want her to be happy. The differences are illustrated in quick visits to the two parental homes. While the Schwartzmans are kind to Jaz, “asking questions about his family and his ‘culture’, a word they used as if it denoted something fragile that might break if roughly handled”, the Matharus are reserved and rude: “His dad offered Lisa a whiskey and was displeased to see she accepted … Jaz shuffled his feet and tried to keep the conversation from petering out. In vain he translated some of Lisa’s approaches to his mother, questions about her house, compliments on the food. She wouldn’t respond…”
Nevertheless, the couple have a happy marriage till Raj arrives. His disability breaks down stereotypes about Western rationalism and Eastern faith. More importantly, we are for the first time able to see the couple as uncertain human beings, observe the shifting patterns of their responses to each other and to their unloveable child. Lisa and Jaz’s conflicts over Raj before he disappeared and the further unravelling of the relationship afterwards are captured with intimate focus; this is the heart of this novel. It could, quite easily, have made up the whole of it except that—on the evidence of this novel and others—the supremely ambitious Kunzru is unlikely to write a work of fiction centred on a single drama.
Kunzru’s project in Gods appears to be about palimpsests. The solitary Pinnacles have always inspired awe but the nature of that awe has, over the quick-changing American centuries, naturally changed too. The rocks have gone from being a symbol of the Holy Trinity, to being an imagined conduit to life on other planets, to today’s more amorphous fascination for something not manmade and yet seeming to symbolise a hidden truth about the manmade world. Once we grasp this idea, our interest in this layering of contrasts becomes a polite one—there is only so much pleasure to be had, after all, from a flurry of historical juxtapositions. What is more impressive is the suppleness of Kunzru’s imagination. He pulls off the attitudes and worldviews, the biographies, the lingo—the ‘culture’ in other words—of so many different characters that it sometimes appears as if this creative frenzy, rather than any larger plot or narrative idea, drives the novel. Is this what Kunzru hoped to achieve with this many-tentacled creation—multifariousness?
The cover plug for Gods is from David Mitchell, whose own novel, Cloud Atlas (2003), was a similar attempt to fit a universe into a book. What that novel achieved and where this one falters is that even though each section of the onion-structured Cloud Atlas is, to use Mitchell’s word for Gods, an ‘echo’ of the other sections, each in itself is a more or less consummated work of fiction. To me this proves that while there are passing thrills to be had from reading a playfully structured Babel of a novel, one can only love it, if inclined to, for old-fashioned reasons—compelling characters, great storytelling, moral drama, wit, tragedy, redemption.
The other reason why Cloud Atlas scores better than Gods is that our fascination for Mitchell’s stories is matched by our inability to say exactly why the author has chosen to narrate specifically these ones. The postmodern experiment is evident in the stringing together of stories from the beginning to the end of time and across a range of literary styles and genres. (Obviously no lack of ambition there!) But it’s never clear why we’re reading about the adventures of an English amanuensis to a composer in 1930s Belgium or a 1970s Californian thriller. As a result, there is something irreducible and highly intriguing about Cloud Atlas. As often happens in fiction, the less a story expresses an agenda, the more it seems to have an inner reason for existence.
With Gods, Kunzru’s aim—to present a layered account of the big movements the American desert has witnessed, from the coming of the Europeans to the Marines playing war games—is all too clear. This can sometimes make his novel, well-researched and superbly written as it is, come across like an in-your-face history lesson. The fact that all his stories are located against the same desert is great for historical perspective but historical perspective all by itself does not a novel make.
One wishes, then, that Kunzru had taken a leaf out of Richard Bach’s book—forgotten about playing god and just focussed on finding out what it is about the American desert that so compels him.
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UNZRU'S FIRST NOVEL, The Impressionist (2002), came with some of the same pleasures and problems. Pran Nath, its Anglo-Indian protagonist, is a mute witness to the events of the first half of the 20th century. Ghostly, in the author’s own words, he becomes little more than a pair of eyes with which to view certain historical set pieces—the excesses |
at the court of a degenerate raja, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the hotchpotch theories of the Theosophists. Our shapeshifting hero has little subjectivity; we struggle to catch any emotion behind his all-seeing eyes except the primitive one of self-preservation. The impressionist starts coming to life only when he tries to achieve Englishness—that is, when he does a Tom Ripley and lands in England under the assumed identity of Jonathan Bridgeman, on his way to an Oxford education.
It’s not a coincidence that the more engaging parts of this novel are not just set in England but are about being English. In earlier sections too, the characters Kunzru writes about with the greatest feeling are Englishmen, more specifically Englishmen labouring under the White Man’s burden. Inverting the standard tale about the natives suffering under imperialist rule, Kunzru draws attention time and again to the suffering of imperialists in pursuit of their mission. And there’s nothing notional about this pain either. A British Resident on parade is, for all the outwardly show of power and control, feeling seasick on his elephant, worried about his kleptomaniac wife and uncertain about his ability to control “the runaway madness” of India. A once daring British major, now wracked by an unconsummated marriage and an inappropriate desk job, is drinking himself to death. A Scottish missionary has given in to illicit sexual craving and is tortured by jealousy and guilt. And so on. Even the notorious General Dyer of Jallianwala Bagh has a secret pain; his “sclerotic twice-shattered legs” are giving him hell even as, in the pursuit of duty, he orders his Sikhs and Gurkhas to fire on the crowd.
Concealed within The Impressionist is a potentially powerful novel about the trials of the English in India—the skewered private lives of individuals schooled to be forever in pursuit of a lofty public goal. As far as the Anglo-Indian aspect of the novel goes, The Impressionist conveys, at best, the anxiety of not being British enough, not the complexity of being of mixed race. Other novels have conveyed that position with greater artistry: I Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama, for instance, or Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. Common to both books is their drollery—that recognisably arch way of dealing with the confusion. Tucked away in Eugene Aloysius Trotter’s roundabout introduction of himself are possibly the most telling lines on being “half and half”: “I’m white here, but I’m brown back there…It starts to happen in the airport so I wait in the toilet till the change is complete.” Rushdie’s Moor, of mixed Portuguese, Moorish and Spanish Jewish descent, tries to sum himself up too. Surveying the village where his Moorish ancestors came from centuries ago, he tries on different self-definitions but none fit. Finally he says, “I was a nobody from nowhere, like no-one, belonging to nothing. That sounded better. That felt true.”
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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NARENDRA PAI
21 November 2011
07:01 PM
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A write up which is backed by in depth study and analysis. We rarely find such a conviction in the review articles of date. Thank you very much for this piece. Very happy to be a regular subscriber of Caravan!
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