When Chris Was Mike

Hari Kunzru8217;s novel about the post-8217;68 generation is also a chilling psychological thriller

My Revolutions
Hari kunzru
Hamish Hamilton, 4.50 pounds

Hari kunzru8217;s new novel forms a neat trilogy with the other two novels reviewed on this page. All three are set firmly in the midst of Britain8217;s twentieth century. Nikita Lalwani uses an Indian child prodigy in the seventies to look at the making of multiculturalism. Penelope Lively moves from the 1930s to the end of the century, in a consideration of what it meant to be a woman at different points of time. Kunzru moves between the angry late sixties/early seventies and 1998 to find how a former radical could rehabilitate himself in gentler surroundings.

Kunzru, by the evidence of his previous novels, is a habitual inquirer into the ways in which identities are formed and changed. In The Impressionist he used this to gain a narrative framework to examine colonialism. In Transmissions the subjects were migration and cyber space. In My Revolutions the dual identities are more concrete and more clearly explained.

Mike Frame is on the verge of fifty, and he is preparing to run from his suburban oasis. On a fine spring day, as he rummages hysterically in his study for his passport, outside workmen are finalising preparations for his birthday party organised by his wife and stepdaughter. Mike is rattled because this neat, comfortable life is built upon a fraud. He has been lying to his wife Miranda, owner of a thriving herbal cosmetics business, and by extension to her daughter Sam, a college student who derives inner balance from their marital harmony.

Mike is actually somebody else 8212; Chris Carver, who was a student at the London School of Economics in 1968 when the anti-establishment movement struck a high note with the youth. And Mike fears he8217;s been found out, when somebody on the suspiciously double-dealing fringes of that eventually violent protest calls on his family. Thrown into deep panic, Mike flees.

He is, of course, running away from the possible consequences of his duplicity being revealed. He is, also, racing back into the far reaches of memory, to return to his other self, to walk through the intellectual and subcultural paces that took him away from a possibly brilliant academic career.

Kunzru slips into too many stereotypes to show how Chris got radicalised. There are just too many set pieces in the rendition of those underground years. But the passages set in Mike8217;s present are chilling. In the most everyday encounters with acquaintances, real and imagined, from the past, Kunzru conveys immense menace. The feeling of menace is consolidated by the way in which Mike8217;s sense of self collapses silently.

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This is, also, the question of rehabilitation. For each of the characters there appears to be no easy way of reconciling the past and the present. Will Mike/Chris manage it? Will Mike arrive at the realisation that his present 8212; and supposedly constructed 8212; self is as much a part of his composite, real self as Chris was? Kunzru keeps the story charged and suspenseful to the very end.