Viva My Revolutions
A privileged part of my working week is reading and reviewing books for Radio National. Not that every title to lob in the letterbox is a must-read - some in fact may verge on clunker - but a recent one - My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru is a standout. And standouts, I discovered, can be far more difficult to review as too often the critique is blunted by gush.
You be the judge of my own doe-eyed judgments - this book warrants a Booker nod at least. Or better yet, hunt the book down and be your own judge. If counter-culture is your bag, then bags it. This is a terrorism yarn without a minaret in sight.
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A big tent is going up in Mike Frame’s backyard, a marquee to celebrate the man’s 50 years. But there’s a hitch. Mike isn’t 50 – he’s a few years older. And Mike isn’t Mike. His real name is Chris, the keeper of a secret history.
But that secret has a shelf life. Thanks to re-meeting a dangerous old friend, the false world of Mike is set to collapse, tent-like, the central poles of his fiction a few days from being yanked.
Naturally the birthday boy worries for his wife. “Everything [Miranda] has known or believed about me, her lover, her partner, the man who has been stepfather to her daughter, is untrue. Or if not untrue – for I’ve tried not to tell unnecessary lies – then partial, incomplete.”
The whole truth entails Chris Carver – the man’s birth name. Back in the late 1960s, the economics dropout was an urban guerilla, relying on bombs and sabotage to challenge the system. While never stooping to murder, Carver dealt in terror. Briskly, vividly, we revisit the worst of these crimes, interspersed with the man’s real-time crisis, as the Mike Frame circus starts to topple.
My Revolutions is the third novel by Hari Kunzru. Essex born with Kashmiri heritage, Kunzru delights in tales from the margin. Granta magazine touts him as a novelist on the up. Not yet 40, Kunzru brags a Philosophy masters and a travel-writing trophy from The Observer. But his true gift lies in explosive narrative. Mixing fluid journalism with echoes of Ian McEwan, acid wit with social history, My Revolutions is a powder keg.
Revolutionaries are doomed men, says the original nihilist, Russian rebel Sergei Nechayev. “He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no belongings, not even a name.” This novel is your chance to meet that man, once called Chris, and others like him.
Small actions – like torching an army recruitment office – are seen as putting vital moth-holes in the social fabric. Law-breaking is the moral hobby of the discontent. In order to get rid of the gun, wrote Chairman Mao, a cherished sloganeer, it is necessary to take up the gun.
As a writer, Kunzru takes up the machete, cutting through cliché and acronym. Any trip into counter-culture will come with its usual glut of co-ops and collectives, like the VAG, or the CND, or the PFLP – every mob spouting jargon. Yet we never drown as readers. Or fall asleep. Or sniff propaganda. As much a thriller as a book of ideas, My Revolutions is a dynamic exploration of what creates a political animal.
I must admit, I’m no Bolshevik. Or neo-con Nazi. I vote for the party that mounts the sounder argument. My toes curl when I hear the word infrastructure. At breakfast I prefer the Sports section to the Parliamentary updates. Yet I found this hyper-political story gripping and entirely human.
The tent collapsing, Chris Carver panics. He catches a ferry to France, heads for a mountain village where a lifelong mystery might be solved. Sound like a page-turner? It is. But miles beyond the airport genre. This is a knuckle-chewer of Booker calibre with deep intellect and exquisite phrasing.
“Thatcher’s gone, the Berlin wall’s down, and unless you’re in Bosnia, the most pressing issue of the 90s appears to be interior design.” Generation Y, thinks Chris, is the Age of Shopping. And just as troubling for the old guerilla is how comfortably his alter ego – the older, suburbanite Mike – can exist in such a culture.
Making the story chafe at either end – the feral past, the tidy present. The book is a potent delight. Its structure alone emphasises the Kunzru control for narrative. Not a text break in sight, the story glides between decades, back and forth, using theme and ideas as springboards. A single page, for example, may hold the Three Different Faces of Chris – the young guerilla, the bogus Mike, the desperate fugitive – and seldom lose its balance. Possibly the single glitch is a collage of pamphlets and OpEd waffle that aims to capture a campaign’s mood, but novelists (more than bomb-makers) are allowed one mistake.
Of course, no human enters the world as a guerilla. Chris begins life as a merchant-class lad from outer London, a smart rebel-to-be searching for a cause. Early teens, when most boys listen to football, Chris builds a crystal set and stumbles across the Cuban Missile Crisis. He falls in love with Communism and the do-good leaflets spurning meat and nuclear war. A little older, he falls in love with Anna – the nihilistic Amazon whose myth and charisma haunt the ongoing story.
The third musketeer, sharing the chain of squats, is a mad Irish bastard called Sean – “charmer of the barmaid and the arresting officer”. Full-time radicals, Sean, Chris and Anna form a love triangle, not that love is ever mentioned. Along with fear and guilt and matrimony, emotions are seen as social controls. The group’s common bond is The Cause. The Urgency for Change. Little by little, the trio evolves from rendering mischief to havoc
In a way these three characters underscore Chris Carver’s own three faces – or facets. Sean is Mr Action – fiercely present. The smasher of cages. Anna is a vehicle of the revolution – the queen of self-erasure. “She could always get closer to [being] absolute zero.” While Chris himself is accused of being Mr Theory – the thinker with the pet mottoes. Which temperament embodies the true radical? Who is bound to be the greater agent of change?
Either way, the three gallop for oblivion, all the while racked by the strangest anxiety. “I couldn’t tell what was making me so edgy,” recalls Chris, midway through blowing up a civic asset, “the sense that things were about to change or the fear that they wouldn’t.” Late in the novel, the group fulfilling its most outrageous plot, a nagging dread is expressed in the idiom of trench warfare: [Were we] the poor political Tommies who’d charged over the top with nobody following?” A bomb explodes, but what changes? If a public building falls in a vacuum, does it really make a sound?
But that is not the only fear gnawing Chris Carver, alias Mike Frame, the married, cleanshaven, nearly-50 bookseller from West Sussex. Racing across France, the fugitive confronts the riddle of his convictions. He wonders if his taste for revolution was anchored in a core belief – a genuine hunger for change – or the romance of change, not to mention Anna’s cheekbones? Did he steal gelignite to pass a lover’s test – or to punctuate his manifesto? If freedom begins with the self, as the subway pamphlets say, then which self can he believe?
[MY REVOLUTIONS - Hari Kunzru, 277pp, Hamish Hamilton, 2007 RRP $32.95]