Literary Review - August 2007

Page 49

FICTION

SAMLEITH

THE ANGRY BRIGADE

MYREVOLUTIONS

★By Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton 288pp £16.99)

THEDEDICATIONTOHari Kunzru’s third novel is cryptic. It says: ‘To all at 34.’ Is Kunzru (who I guess is that age or thereabouts) offering fraternal solidarity to his contemporaries? Is he alluding to a smart bar with a numerical name? To the inhabitants of a shared house in which he once lived? Or, perhaps, to the code number for a cell of revolutionary terrorists? My Revolutions is just the sort of book to make you wonder. Michael Frame, whom we meet as preparations are underway for his 50th birthday party, is living a life of bourgeois ease. His partner Miranda is a successful entrepreneur with a range of hippyish Body Shop-type potions called, with horrible plausibility, ‘Bountessence’. He marinates in candid affection for his grown-up stepdaughter. Everything in the garden seems to be rosy; except that Mike Frame is an assumed identity, and he is – with no explanation to his unsuspecting partner and stepdaughter – about to go on the run. In the 1970s, Chris Carver was a member of a radical group (modelled, as an afterword suggests, on the Angry Brigade) that went beyond bedsit theorising into terrorism. Chris, living out his middle age as Michael Frame, thought he had escaped his past. But then, while holidaying in a little village in the Languedoc, he catches sight of Anna Addison, his sometime lover and comrade in the struggle – a woman he believed had been killed in 1975. Meanwhile, another friend from the old days turns up as if at random, wanting to talk. The structure of the novel effectively embeds past in present, Chris in Mike. As the story’s present tense follows Mike in flight – orbiting the Paris péériphéérique in a hire car; heading back to the Languedoc – his mind flashes back by turns to the 1970s, and to the more recent encounters with his past that have precipitated disappearance. This triple thread of narrative lines, each seeming to move towards some sort of revelation or crisis, gives Kunzru’s novel the torque of a good thriller. My Revolutions is also, pleasingly, funny. Kunzru is interested in the darker absurdities of Chris/Mike’s revolutionary transformation of identity – in the ways it triangulates with the disciplines of the junkie and of the Buddhist monk (both are also features of his past). But he isn’t so high-minded as to deny himself the fun of vamping about in period colour – afghan coats; men in frocks; speed ‘n’ acid; horrible furnishings in orange,

Kunzru: light of touch

brown and purple; hippies and happenings, and so forth. He has a lovely ear, above all, for the earnest absurdities of 1970s post-Marxist and trad-Marxist theoretical bullshit. Chris’s induction into revolutionary nihilism begins in a strong comic set piece: a rooftop talking-shop in which a collection of self-righteous and increasingly stoned strangers compete to be more right-on than the previous speaker. What’s clever is the way Kunzru charts Chris’s move both socially and rhetorically into much, much deeper waters. The book isn’t without faults. If Kunzru has a weakness, it is occasional heavy-handedness, particularly in the contemptuous sending-up of Mike and Miranda’s dinner-party world of ‘cheek-kissing and coat-finding and insincere expressions of concern about driving over the limit’. Likewise, a late-1960s liberal home with ‘a jar of spaghetti on the counter and poster of a Picasso dove pinned above the hob’, a mental hospital smelling of ‘urine and boiled cabbage’, a prison smelling of, again, ‘boiled cabbage’, are more received than properly imagined. And at times dialogue clunks: Everyone in the cell was listening to me now. I felt I had the upper hand. ‘No one else is going to do it, if we don’t. No one else is going to build the revolution. I think we owe it to the future.’ ‘But what kind of future will it be?’ he asked, leaning across again and gripping my arm. ‘What exactly? That’s the question.’ But My Revolutionspicks up pace exceptionally well, and there are passages of bravura writing – not least the most evocative and exact description of an acid trip I have ever read. The way unacknowledged sexual competition, the thrill of transgression, and the very adolescent desire to find a theory for everything sends its characters out of their depth is thoroughly understood, and carefully described. And in Anna Addison – Chris’s nutty, sexy, ruthless Rosa Luxemburg – Kunzru creates a memorable and persuasive fanatic. Most importantly, Kunzru is light of touch where heavy-handedness would be fatal not just to the odd paragraph, but to the whole project. This is, joy to report, a novel about terrorism that doesn’t insist on, or even suggest, its relevance to the events of today. In fact, reading about murderous Maoist wackoes in loon pants is, if anything, a delightful holiday from the fear of being set on fire by Scottish junior doctors. So, to all at 34, whoever or whenever you are: thank you. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

Page 50

FICTION

JOHNDUGDALE GO WEST

AWAY

★By Amy Bloom (Granta Books 224pp £10.99)

AMYBLOOM’S SECONDnovel begins with promising brilliance. Around 150 young women are queuing outside the Goldfadn Theatre in New York in 1924, hoping for jobs sewing costumes. The party atmosphere of this ‘all-girl Ellis Island’ reminds Lillian Leyb, who arrived in America thirty-five days ago, of market day in Turov, the nearest town to her village in Russia. She thrusts her way to the front to speak to the theatre’s owner, Reuben Burstein, and his matinee idol son, Meyer, in Yiddish; her rivals are scornful (it’s ‘as if she just hoisted her skirt to the waist ... that vulgar, that embarrassing, that effective’), but her potential employers are impressed (‘Bold is good,’ says Reuben). She smiles at them and their scowling assistant, Miss Morris: Lillian has endured the murder of her family, the loss of her daughter, Sophie, an ocean crossing like a death march, intimate life with strangers in her cousin Frieda’s two rooms, smelling of men and urine and fried food and uncertainty and need. Just so, she thinks, and smiles at the new king and queen and prince of her life, as if she has now risen from a soft, high feather bed to enjoy an especially pretty morning. This bravura conclusion to the opening set piece is Bloom’s own equivalent of her heroine’s outrageous gambit, subtler and more graceful but possessing a similar chutzpah. She smiles at the reader, just as Lillian smiles at the Bursteins. I could have begun with a grim chapter telling the Russian back story, runs the subtext, but instead I’ve condensed it into a single lovely sentence. And aren’t you happy I did? More about the dreadful events that caused Lillian to flee is gradually revealed piecemeal as she gets the job and starts dating Meyer, who sets her up in a love nest. His sexual needs, though, are unconventional, and she becomes his father’s mistress too. Thus far a scarily selfish figure prepared to do whatever’s required in order to survive, Lillian is transformed when a new arrival from Turov reports that her daughter – who she thought had drowned after escaping when the rest of her family were killed – is still alive. Desperate to be reunited with Sophie, she destroys her arrangement with the Bursteins by asking for money to return to Russia. So begins an odyssey in which her ultimate goal is to continue her westward passage all the way around the

Bloom: bravura

world: crossing the USA to the West Coast, heading north to Alaska, sailing to Russia via the Bering Strait, then crossing it too (Turov, aka Turaw, is in the south of present-day Belarus). She gets to Seattle by railroad, and then to northern Alaska by sea and mule train. But along the way she’s required again to provide sexual favours, is beaten up and left for dead, gets involved in killing the pimp of a hooker who rescues her, and does time in a women’s prison. Picaresque novels are notoriously prone to lose energy once they pass the halfway point, and Awayis no exception: although many later episodes are strong, nothing that follows equals the early chapters in New York. The ending is affecting and accomplished, however, and the falling-off is by no means as marked as in Defoe’s Moll Flanders(which it frequently recalls). Lillian never ceases to be a beguilingly contradictory figure: flexible and protean yet as fixed of purpose as a migrating bird; mythical (with typical deftness, Bloom implies a parallel with Ceres descending into the underworld in search of her daughter Proserpina) yet as messily real as the grubby, stinking, cacophonous country she travels through. And while the narrative momentum is reduced in the novel’s later chapters, they importantly fill out its depiction of her adopted country, which eventually encompasses transport, prisons, the police, prostitution, communications, fashion, entertainment, several ethnic groups and a plurality of landscapes and cityscapes. Although Awayis set in the Jazz Age, such clichéés as speakeasies, Broadway showgirls or indeed jazz are completely absent. Instead it delineates 1920s America’s underbelly, as Dreiser and others did at the time – but from a woman’s perspective, and with no restrictions on sex scenes and a stylistic verve that is in sharp contrast to the plodding prose of Dreiserian naturalism. Bloom can be seen, alongside Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and Gary Shteyngart, as evincing a resurgent willingness among Jewish-American writers to put Jewish themes at the centre of their novels: an attitude which sets them apart both from the late-period output (with obvious exceptions) of Bellow and Roth, and the fiction of an intervening generation also intent on universality. Like Safran Foer and Shteyngart, she is drawn to exploring American Jews’ roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, but she differs from them in what she takes from the old maestros. All three male novelists follow Bellow and Roth in making one man’s extraordinary voice what you remember most about their novels – Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated,

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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