Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

Published: Hamish Hamilton (2007)

Having mentioned the Man Booker Prize in my previous post, I now come to the first of my annual read through of the short list. And it is a good one too: I'd rank this a better than any of last year's short list, and probably as the best novel about how 9/11 has changed the world that I have yet read.

At a café in Lahore, a Pakistani man tells his story to a sinister Westerner: how he left his home to study at Princeton, took a prestigious job as a management consultant in Manhattan, fell in love with an American girl; and became a figure of hate in the streets after the attacks, facing uneasy looks everywhere until returning to his home. The story is told just as it would be in such circumstances as a first person narrative with the odd interruption (to order food, or comment on passers by). It is a conversation, even though we only hear the words of one participant. This is really convincing, and gives the story an intimate quality beyond that gained from just the use of the first person perspective.

In some ways, The Reluctant Fundamentalist reads like a first novel, particularly given the parallels with Hamid's own life as evidenced by the biographical details on the book jacket. However, it is in fact his second, and there are deeper possibilities in the construction of the novel than the simple use of autobiographical elements. To Hamid's protagonist, America still seems to be the land of plenty, where his intellectual gifts receive the rewards he deserves; but it is never somewhere to which he is emotionally attached: his girlfriend is too unstable, the affection he has for New York is closely connected to the Pakistani element in the cosmopolitan city (the taxi drivers speak Urdu, and he can live near a café which service authentic cuisine from his home). In other words, he fails the infamous "cricket test". His outsider status goes the other way too: there are just two people in America who seem to care for him at all: a colleague, and their boss. Even there, it just leads to a handshake and an offer of a drink when he leaves the company, which is contrased with the general fear and loathing that his "Arabic" features generate in everybody else.

There are nice small touches, such as the first mention of fundamentals, which comes from the management consultancy: "focus on the fundamentals" is described as the company's guiding principle. The reader is left to decide the implications of this for him or herself. Similarly, given the reaction caused by the narrator's appearance in New York, the reader is aware that the Western man in the Lahore café fits the stereotyped appearance of a CIA agent, just as the narrator's appearance is that of an Islamic fundamentalist. Just because he wears a black suit which bulges in places that might cover a hidden holster, doesn't mean that he is an agent. If nothing else, the message of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that appearances can be deceptive.

While the style of the writing is deliberately anti-rhetorical, there are clearly rhetorical elements. Just how much is not clear (and it is another issue that readers can decide for themselves): the narrator could be almost entirely truthful, or almost completely mendacious, or anything in between. However, taken at face value, his story is a gentle criticism of extremism, whether Islamic, capitalist, or just plain xenophobic.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a compelling story, a mature reflection on the times in which we live - and may well turn out to be the classic novel of the aftermath of 9/11.

Chris Verrill: Is For Good Men to Do Nothing (2004)

Edition: XLibris, 2004
Review number: 1286

What was your initial reaction to the September 11th atrocity? Watching it in California at a communal breakfast with other Americans (as Chris Verrill did) is likely to have had a very different feel from the experience I had of seeing it happen in mid-afternoon. To many, it was shock and grief (with perhaps a tinge of guilty thrill at the drama of the collapsing towers - I remember some comments at the time that the news coverage had something of the air of a Hollywood film stunt) or a desire for revenge; in other circles, it was glee at the humbling of American power. For me, too, my reaction was somewhat conditioned by previous near involvement with a terrorist attack: I was within earshot of an IRA bomb in the City of London, and it damaged the church I was attending at the time. As an aside, something that has irritated me since 9/11 is the way that Americans seem to suggest it was the only terrorist attack that ever happened. For Chris Verrill, the first reaction of shock was quickly followed by a burning desire to do something constructive; Is For Good Men to Do Nothing is the story of what he did.

There were two sides to what he did: first, he travelled the world to try to understand how people who were not Americans thought about the attack and the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq; at the same time, he worked to get a Rotary Club sponsored educational project under way in Afghanistan. There is a shared motive for both: the idea that ignorance is one of the main issues which led to the attack and which helped define the American response and the way in which the rest of the world percieved it. Verrill readily admits that education on both sides is necessary; there are still many Americans who have never been outside the forty eight continental states and who live in appalling ignorance of the rest of the world.

Now, Chris Verrill is also happy to acknowledge that Americans have made mistakes, most notably in their flauting of international law (in company with the UK) in the attack on Iraq which was unsanctioned by the United Nations. My feeling is that he perhaps doesn't go far enough in this, though he meets many people who are willing to tell him so far more forcefully than I would. This feeling is partly one that I have in response to George W. Bush, who comes across as the epitome of the stereotypical American: arrogant, dumb, ignorant, loud, and under the thumb of the interests of cynical businessmen. A recurrent theme of the discussions in the book is argument over just how much sincerity there has been in the stated US war aims in Iraq, as opposed to how much the conflict is over control of oil reserves.

A lot of reviews of this book are likely, I suspect, to do what I have started doing: put together a review which is really an essay entitled "What I think about 9/11 and the war in Iraq". While such thoughts may be of interest (and it is important to set out how the reviewer's perspective differs from the authors, if readers are going to be able to evaluate the review), the purpose of a review is not to make a political speech but to help a potential reader decide whether they will like a book. I suspect that there are many people who will be put off by the subject and would not even consider picking up Is For Good Men to Do Nothing, either because they just aren't interested in politics or because they feel that there is nothing more worth reading about 9/11. In fact, this is a really interesting story, mainly because Verrill comes across as genuinely interested in the opinions he hears, even when they are very different from his own. More than that, this book gives hope that there are Americans not caught up in mindless jingoism and above all shows that determination to make a difference is important.

In one way, this is a book which has changed my opinions. Not about Bush or Bin Laden, but about the Rotarians. The Rotary Club is not an organisation I knew much about, but the impression I had was that it was sort of like the Freemasons, but for those who couldn't be bothered about stupid rituals. I thought it was a mutual aid organisation for members of the establishment, the kind of place where the behind the scenes machinations of minor right wing politicians might occur. But now I know more, and it turns out that it is a worldwide charitable organisation full of people who want to make a difference.

There is one thing I feel I need to mention, even though it is rather pedantic. The quotation that supplies the title (in case anyone doesn't know, the rest of it basically says that this is the way for evil to triumph) is popularly attributed to eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke (perhaps best known for his protests against the restrictions placed on the American colonies which led to independence), and Verrill follows this. However, if you look it up in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, this is listed under "Misquotations", and turns out to be a popular version of a less memorable statement made by Burke.

This may be just a little piece of pedantry, but there's something else I didn't like much, which comes near the end. It is not that a speech made by George W. Bush is praised; given the quotations, I too thought it admirable. But then Verrill uses the speech as the basis of a patriotic appeal: not only does it make him proud to be an American (fair enough), but it should make the reader proud to be an American. This jarred - because I'm not an American; and it felt as though Chris Verrill was committing the very kind of unthinking chauvinism that he is writing the book to combat. I was unfortunately left feeling uncomfortable for the final twenty or so pages.

Despite this, I enjoyed Is For Good Men to Do Nothing, which is an excellent piece of journalistic writing. It makes the reader think, and in the current climate that can never be a bad thing.

Iain Banks: Dead Air (2002)

Edition: Little, Brown, 2002
Review number: 1192

Published just about a year after 9/11, Dead Air must have been one of the first serious attempts at a novel in which the tragic events of that day played a part. That being said, it doesn't play that important a role in the plot, being more significant in the emotional background to the novel. It is hard to think of a novel that has survived any length of time which is quite so firmly rooted in identifiable and important near contemporary events; the best known examples I can think of are the panic about anarchists which prompted Conrad's The Secret Agent and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday about a century ago. There are many more novels which were prompted by events which seemed more ephemeral even at the time and which are now only remembered because of the literature they inspired - the story of Alexander Selkirk which was the basis of Robinson Crusoe, for example. Usually, novelists seem to choose events which are far enough in the past that their importance is clear, if they want to anchor a novel to a specific historical time, or events which are so important and wide-ranging in their effects that time has to be taken to digest even part of their meaning - people don't tend to write the best war stories during the conflict.

The tone of Dead Air is set by the first chapter, in which a wedding celebration turns into a game of dropping superfluous foodstuffs and possessions from a loft apartment into the car park far below, wanton destruction which is interrupted as everyone's mobiles go off to tell them to turn on the TV and see the attack on the World Trade Center. The novel is full of small unexpected ironies, twists and unusual ways of looking at the world (picking up on the phenomenon of everyone's phone going off more or less simultaneously is an example). In Canal Dreams, Banks has written about people more directly involved as victims of terrorist attacks; 9/11 seems to have been an event which was more than usually able to touch those who were not themselves physically harmed.

The story is about "shock jock" Ken Nott, who makes a pretty good living being outrageous on a London radio station. There are several events which form foci to the novel as well as 9/11 - the difficulties which arise from a love affair with the wife of a gangster, a series of death threats, a TV interview in which Nott confronts a Holocaust denier. The plot does rather come across as the setting for Banks to get the series of rants which he makes the main feature of Nott's radio show out of his system.

Dead Air came across to me as the least interesting of Banks' novels to date; there is nothing in it which reaches out and grabs the reader (or if there is, it missed me completely). That is not to say that it isn't well written and enjoyable, more that it is less individual and unusual than his earlier novels.