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