Hari Kunzru’s New Novel My Revolutions Fails to Inspire

Modern thrillers seem to demand that something tangible, something researched and historical, legitimizes the exposition of their characters. Hari Kunzru knows this tactic well: his first two novels, The Impressionist and Transmission, incorporated Kunzru’s Anglo-Indian background as the mainstay of their plots. Unexpectedly, in his latest book, My Revolutions, any trace of Kunzru’s South Asian heritage is absent in favor of a primarily white cast living in a time period the author never experienced firsthand. As Kunzru attempts to dodge the label of “non-resident Indian” writer, however, the reader is forced to ask whether he has simply traded a mildly predictable path for an even less original theme: sixties counterculture.

My Revolutions is a book of extremes in which too many “isms” find literary manifestation all at once. An illustration of the nineties as a decade defined by paper-thin consumerism and materialism-induced indifference is juxtaposed with the leftist culture of the sixties—which, in turn, is depicted as rebellious to the point of self-destruction.

The reader follows Michael Frame, a suburban British stepfather and stay-at-home husband who predictably has a hidden past that returns to haunt him. It turns out that innocuously stereotyped Michael Frame is none other than Chris Carver, a leading member of an underground terrorist group during the sixties and an ex-lover of many revolutionary-minded women. On a trip back in time, the reader meets Anna Addison, who is perhaps the most interesting and well-developed character in the novel. As Carver’s bedmate in the sixties, Anna single-handedly drives Kunzru’s plot—she becomes the very ideology of the revolution for Carver and for the reader.

Kunzru has stated in interviews that one of the messages of My Revolutions is that ideas can be dangerous when they are not grounded in anything material. He certainly conveys this notion effectively, and the reader must give him credit for the seamless way he shuffles parallel themes back and forth across time periods. My Revolutions also achieves a semblance of fast-paced, gritty international drama that evokes le Carré or Forsyth. Sorely lacking, however, is the stylistic flourish to back this up: Kunzru’s in-depth research and intricate story lines are often lost in the over-simplified, clichéd sentences he uses to encapsulate them, and the dialogue feels weak and stunted.

Worst of all, the main character, Carver-come-Frame, is left uneasily uncharacterized—at the end of the novel, the reader has the feeling that Carver contributed little of his own to the development of the book, and was instead simply pushed along by a powerful tide of revolutionary sentiment.

Ultimately, the only thing with which 50-year-old Frame presents the reader is a vague disdain of all things capitalist, a realization of his inability to relate to a world in which his own daughter wants to “do corporate” and his wife turns her home-grown venture into a thriving business. It is in describing the vulnerability of Frame’s situation as an aging, alienated victim of modern society that Kunzru’s satire hits home. Arguably, Frame’s own past as the sometimes-imprisoned, sometimes drug-abusing Chris Carver does not elicit pathos nearly as efficiently.

The heart of the problem seems to be that Kunzru expects the reader to delve into the novel with a specific mind-set—a certain automatic tendency to cringe at the idea of living in his somewhat exaggerated portrayal of the nineties and a belief that all desire for change has been eradicated completely from modern society. Case in point: the novel’s chief villain is a polite, educated dandy who hopes that “it’ll be a new millennium and, with luck, nothing will bloody happen anywhere, nothing at all.” This absurdly unthreatening antagonist believes that a good society is “not perfect ... not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other ... just mildly bored people, getting by.”

No wonder Kunzru’s ability to jump-start the reader into questioning modern society is so very stunted.