My Revolutions

Author - Hari Kunzru ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Dutton Adult was reviewed on 10-Aug-2008.

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1) Hardcover Book My Revolutions by Dutton Adult. After seeing a recommendation on Amazon, I picked this book up and it sat on the shelf for a while. However, after finally giving it a read, I was pleasantly surprised by the very effortless read. The story was a nice juxtaposition of 3 different times in the protagonist´s life, and the transitions were easy to follow and always wanted me to keep on reading. Kunzru´s prose was never wordy but described the time, the moment, the energy of the revolutionary 1960s in the UK with precision. But instead of focusing on just that point in time, he presents one man´s account of the ramifications of his actions, the turmoil, heartbreak, and joy that follows.¤

2) Hardcover Book My Revolutions by Dutton Adult. I read this book b/c Junot Diaz recommended it for its sizzling prose. In some ways I agree with him, but mainly I don´t. For sure, the highly imaginative story Kunzru´s come up with allows Chris, his main character, to riff on the perversity of the post-WWII class system from a unique perspective and it´s done very well. And the plot´s well done. The idealistic antiwar group Chris joins as a young man seeking an end to war becomes too radical, forcing a choice between staying on with the group to its inevitable demise or leaving them (and his identity) behind. Thirty years later, hiding under an assumed name amongst British nouveau riche, events force Chris to revisit the past he´s been suppressing. This was very cool and new stuff. The story´s believable for its excellent research on the times and the different counter-culture groups in Britain.

However, for all of that attention to the times, Kunzru doesn´t breathe life into the characters. But for Chris (and to a far lesser extent, Anna), most of the characters we meet are rather flat "types" who serve some narrative function behind a thin layer of description. Fair enough since this is Chris´ story, but Kunzru falls short of the mark with his treatment of Chris, too.

I understand that Chris has had to suppress his revolutionary past and, thus, his emotions. So the reader can expect the studied calmness of Chris´s narrative voice as he recollects his past. But even when the story takes us through events occurring when Chris was a young revolutionary, completely immersed in the wildness of the times, Kunzru also keeps him too far removed from the reader. As a revolutionary, Chris is rough-and-ready, has deep political beliefs which he acts upon, and is as passionate for Anna as anything else in his life. So why not tell his story with the same verve that he felt at the time? Instead, the story comes from too chilly a remove to connect with. Chris´s dilemmas and passions weren´t told closely enough for me to feel them through the character. In fact, Kunzru frequently chronicles Chris´s downfalls through ragged physical descriptions of him in lieu of telling us what´s happening in his head.

Kunzru blocks large parts of Chris´s internal struggles away from view. This is evident in the telling of Chris´s love for Anna. It´s as though Kunzru was writing and simultaneously checking off a list from an MFA seminar on How to Show a Character in Love: Describe beautiful object of desire, check; relate the hero´s hyperactive respiratory and/or circulatory system upon sight of said object of desire, e.g., "I felt a deep thumping in my chest," check; describe a tiny physical detail only someone truly in love would notice (hair tightly pulled back in a bun), check; and make her unavailable to the hero, check. Kunzru sometimes relies too much on the reader to buy into well-settled narrative formulas.

I really wanted to like My Revolutions more. The premise of the story is wonderful. But the book failed to deliver the goods of a really good novel. I liked it enough. And I may read Kunzru´s next book, but I probably won´t recommend My Revolutions to a wide audience of friends.
¤

3) Hardcover Book My Revolutions by Dutton Adult. We´re going to blast our way through here
We´ve got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution´s here, and you know its right." Thunderclap Newman

For many the revolution of the 60s (such as it was) was played out in song. Whether the Beatles, the Who, or Thunderclap Newman, there was a lot of talk, a lot of song, and plenty of demos and marches. But for the most part talk about revolution was just talk. There were some notable exceptions. Paris, Mexico and the Prague Spring in 1968 were a few. In the U.S. some elements of the anti-war movement, most notably the Weather Underground morphed into violence. The U.K. had the "Angry Brigade" and it is that group that provides the historical background for Hari Kunzru´s new work, "My Revolutions".

"My Revolutions" takes us back to a time when something was in the air, but makes the reader question what that something actually was. Kunzru takes us down this path with one Mike Frame, a man approaching 50, leading a quiet, comfortable suburban life with his partner of 16-years, Miranda. We soon discover that Mike Frame is not at all what he seems to be. Rather, his real name is Chris Carver, a radical in the 60s who went underground after a series of robberies and bombings at the height of the anti-war movement in the UK. After a vacation on the continent Frame´s life begins to unravel. He spots a woman there who appears to be one of his old comrades in arms. He is then approached by a second old comrade, one who seeks to blackmail Frame/Carver into revealing that yet another comrade, now a highly placed government official, was once part of the violent fringe of the anti-war movement in the UK. The novel alternates between the unraveling of Frame´s life and the back story of Carver´s. Kunzru does an excellent job in keeping the narrative going while jumping between Carver´s story and that of his alter ego, Frame. Each story is laid out in such a way that the book´s climax arrives just when the old and new identities are fully revealed to the reader.

Kunzru, who is too young to have lived through this time, gets the details perfectly. His description of the social and political life at University during that time was spot on. (Carver was at the London School of Economics at around the same time I was in Manchester.) The endlessly morphing student political groups, each a variant of the other, each claiming to the true interpreter of the genius of Marx and Lenin (International Marxist Group, International Socialists, the old-line CP, etc.) and each peopled by earnest students eager to change the world. The dead seriousness was matched by the same sort of endless conversations, the self-critical examinations and random anger set out perfectly by Kunzru. So to were Carver´s recollections of random couplings as a political act, as a way of distancing oneself from the mores of the bourgeoisie. The book is filled with little snippets that really capture the time and Kunzru had me nodding nostalgically (if ruefully) time and time again.

At the same time, though, this spot-on accuracy did have one unintended side effect. Kunzru not only got the atmospherics right, he got the personalities right. As much as the characters made me wax nostalgic for the days of free love it also reminded of just how utterly self-important and devoid of humor this all was. The International Marxist Group and all its various and sundry splinters would never be confused with International Groucho Marxists. Consequently, Frame/Carver and his contemporaries are not exactly the sort of people a reader is likely to feel any great deal of empathy for. While Kunzru treats his characters´ underlying idealism with no little bit of respect the sheer utter futility of their efforts marks them come across as little more than amateur, middle-class nihilists earnestly trying to make the world a better place by convincing themselves that destruction is a prerequisite to building a just society. That is not to criticize the book or the story in any way, I very much enjoyed the characters for the flawed, once-well-intended beings they were in their callow youth. But a reader who needs to feel some sort of emotional investment in a fictional character may be disappointed. I don´t think that is an essential prerequisite for a successful novel but different readers may not feel that way.

"My Revolutions" is a worthy successor to Kunzru´s earlier book, Transmission. It also made a nice companion book to His Illegal Self

Recommended. L Fleisig
¤

4) Hardcover Book My Revolutions by Dutton Adult. I was quite enthralled with this book, mostly since it really appears that Hari Kunzru has done his homework. He really paints a vibrant picture of the era of a sixties revolutionary hell bent on change. You can picture every row house brick in the burroughs, and the cramped in meetings of the characters he picks up along the way.

The best success is the feelings he gives to the reader in wanting to know what really makes these activists in his story tick, they really are off the deep end in politicizing even the most single trivial decisions. Kunzru also manages to stay away from stupid plot devices and from the nicely wrapped up ending. You really get a sense of wanting to know what happens next, and never feel cheated in the end.¤

5) Hardcover Book My Revolutions by Dutton Adult. So goes one memorable line from a leaflet in this fictional account conjuring up days and years of real rage. Joseph Conrad´s "The Secret Agent," a century ago, plotted the machinations of a cruel alliance of anarchists in London, and how they used idealists and malcontents to further, and then botch, and later eliminate, their mistakes as their act of violence consumed innocents and guilty. Kunzru´s new novel explores the English radical underground, with similar ties to internationalist factions and increasing violence, in the early 70s. It´s inspired, he explains in an afterword, by the Angry Brigade which had operated then; "countercultural support for terrorist tactics" (279) lost its allure for Britain, unlike parts of Western Europe still enthralled by radical chic, when England was hit by a mainland bombing campaign by the Provisional IRA which killed forty-four people in 1974.

"Human being or pig. You make your choice." (245) So the narrator, Chris Carter who´s gone underground as Mike Frame since the time of the bombings by his August 14th collective, recalls as what the dreams of the Sixties had dissolved into during the slow descent into violence in the Seventies by remnants of an outraged, impotent, and bitter minority of hippies who found they could not change the world by love, peace, or dope. A cadre ruthlessly purges the wavering among them and learns to take up arms against a sea of troubles. Backed by a Palestinian cell, the English radicals are given a mission. Assigned as a class enemy a London Jewish merchant who the Palestinians target as a "Zionist," Chris chooses his own fate.

He spends the rest of the decade incognito on the trail through Europe to Asia so many other backpacking tramps followed. He spends years in a Buddhist monastery detoxing and decompressing, but curses the chants and sickens from the oppression that religion fosters. He comes back to small-town England, finds a partner who starts a sort of faux-The Body Shop line pitched at his own demographic, and settles down uneasily with a concocted past identity and a present rootless banality. The novel spins through the decades since, back and forth, to 1968 when he was first jailed after an antiwar march at Grosvenor Square, to his rejection of the State and his attempts to rally the working classes to rise up against the Establishment.

Beaten by police, sentenced for protesting, imprisoned for his principles, he wonders-- how did he authorize the British government to "distribute violence on my behalf," when he never gave his consent? "The state claimed it was an expression of the democratic will of the people. But what if it wasn´t? What if it was just a parasite, a vampire sustaining itself on our collective life, on my life in particular?" (79) The alternative, in the eyes of the leaders of the collective (the term is deliberate on my part), is "I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires." (110)

Hating the war in Vietnam, the war in Ireland, the defeat of the French strikers, and hailing Palestinians, Viet Cong, and squatters, the collective tries its best to overthrow the system. Kunzru channels through Mike/Chris´ first person narration a stream of phrases and slogans from this past. The author deftly mixes the decades, although this may throw off a casual reader. The book´s layered, and juxtaposes events and recollections constantly. This kaleidoscopic effect mirrors the protagonist´s attempts to come to terms with the unmasking of his underground persona as 1998 finds a disturbing comrade from his past life showing up to haunt him for political dirty-tricks as he tracks Mike/Chris during his efforts to flee yuppie domestic stagnation in Chichester.

The problem remains for the radicals the same as it ever was. "We were in a church hall and somehow that made everything we were doing absurd, just a bunch of people pushing each other around, like a Scout troop. How could we even think of making something new for ourselves when there were metal-framed chairs stacked at the sides of the room and a piano under a canvas chair in the corner?" (131) This solidity, this forever England, frustrates those who long to follow Mao´s dictum that to give up the gun, one must take up the gun; to bring an end to war, one must make war. Kunzru seems to me to fudge or blur, perhaps deliberately to reflect his narrator´s worried state, the decision to go underground after the collective bombs the Post Office Tower. (Kunzru´s endnote informs us that this was in fact done on October 31, 1971; no claim of responsibility was ever made.) I was not sure why Chris cut his hair, and donned a suit precisely then, but the general necessity emerges: those truly devoted to their cause had to blend in, to vanish into plain sight.

Mike/Chris, faced with his past colleague who threatens to blackmail him if he does not cooperate with his Blair-era dirty-tricks scheme, defines his philosophy. His nemesis "could live in the world as it is, which (depending on your point of view) is either pragmatism, coarseness, or a particular kind of heroism. Whatever it is, I´ve never been able to do it. The world has always seemed unbearable to me." (168)
This combination of concern and detachment unsettles him and the few with whom he stays, as the Seventies dim the bright visions of the Sixties, to struggle on. But, after the Post Office Tower, Mike/Chris cannot find an easy solution. Had their fight, now that an economic target, a symbol of Britain, had been bombed, turned real?

"We were already floating free, as removed from the experience of the average worker as the diners of the restaurant at the top of the tower. After that, the insidious message of the spectacle-- that nothing takes place, even for the participants, unless it´s electronically witnessed and played back-- took us over. We thought we were striking a blow against it, the hypnotic dream show of f[---]able bodies and consumable goods. Instead we fell into the screen. Our world became television." (202)

This trail of exposure, literally and symbolically, traps the collective. The man who pops up from his past to rip off Mike´s mask to reveal Chris rationalizes his move. His New Labour-type of service, he intimates, is "grown-up politics, not the kind that starts out by carving out a Utopia and then hammering at the world, trying to make it fit." (207) Later, his pursuer elaborates his dream for an Age of Y2K rather than of Aquarius. The triumph of Das Kapital, but the end of history. "In a couple of years, it´ll be a new millennium, and, with luck, nothing will bloody happen anywhere, nothing at all. That´s what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by." (259) At least, his handler counters, his pragmatism occupies no less a moral high ground than does a former member of the collective.

For, as Mike/Chris recounts, the August 14th group, splintering inevitably into a harder and tougher core, enters the frontier where ideals shadow into fanaticism. "´The revolutionary is a doomed man,´ wrote Nechayev. ´He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no belongings, nor even a name.´"´(219) This, in turn, compares to Mike/Chris´ later retreat to the monastery. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, he reminds us, urge us to see suffering, recognize its cause in greed and craving, and to realize its potential to come to an end. Then the problem emerges. "But what´s the right way to end suffering? The revolution, giving yourself up to history? Or Nibbana, giving yourself up to transcendence?" (219)

Those vowed to the former path learn to shoot on the desolate Holstein marshes, mudflats on the Danish-German border. One of their PFLP trainers teaches comrade Anna how to use a Skorpian machine pistol. "Khaled stood beside her, nodding approvingly, his eyes fading from view behind his Polaroid sunglasses whenever the sun emerged from behind a cloud." (229) Not for the first time in this novel, Mike/Chris finds himself spooning bland vegetable soup, debating ideas "in a patchwork of languages. Plans were formed. People spoke of a strategy for victory. They spoke about the end of Imperialism. They could have been talking about anything. Road resurfacing. Water disposal. Out in the marshes, I thought. We´re out in the marshes at the edge of the sea, miles from the nearest other human beings, talking about who we´re going to kill to demonstrate our organic connection to the masses. I´d light my way back to my tent with a little pocket flashlight, a bright speck in the enormous darkness." (230)

Caught in a campaign to expose another former radical, and seeking to expose another himself, Mike unravels back into Chris. The conclusion arrives with tension. Without giving it away, here´s an excerpt a few lines from the end. "Because legality is just the name for everything that´s not dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because in the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn´t enough, not by a long way, because there´ll come a time when any amount of love will be too late." (276-77)

This dense, intricately organized, intellectually rewarding story -- while it revives the sentiment of the counterculture perhaps more vividly and effectively by comparison with the duller decades that followed, and while the characters dim by comparison with the evocation of fiery rhetoric and urban uprisings-- represents a considerable achievement. It´ll reward a thoughtful reader seeking a nuanced valediction and sharp dissection of a radical´s rise and fall as seen from 1998 projected back upon ´68.
¤

6) Hardcover Book My Revolutions by Dutton Adult. Critics have compared him to Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Tom Wolfe, and Don DeLillo. Granta dubbed him “one of the twenty best fiction writers under forty.” Now Hari Kunzru delivers his “finest novel yet . . . bringing to the angry activism of the young in the late sixties all the suspense of a spy thriller.” (Lisa Appignanesi, author of Unholy Loves)

Chris Carver is living a lie. His wife, their teenage daughter, and everyone in their circle know him as Michael Frame, suburban dad. They have no idea that as a radical student in the sixties he briefly became a terrorist—protesting the Vietnam War by setting bombs around London. And then one day a ghost from his past turns up on his doorstep, forcing Chris on the run.

As Chris flees, he remembers his days as an isolated youth, hopelessly in love with Anna Addison, following her as she threw aside conventionality. Chris’s rival for Anna’s affections, the charismatic Sean Ward, was the leader of the radical August 14th Group. Egging one another on, the three inched closer and closer to the edge, until the events of one horrifying night forced them apart, never to see one another again.

Gripping, moving, provocative, and passionate, My Revolutions brings to brilliant life both the radical idealism of the sixties and the darker currents that ran beneath it, the eddies of which still shape our history today.¤

7) Hardcover Book My Revolutions by Dutton Adult. Amazon Significant Seven, January 2008: It´s not the first time a story like this has been told: a ´60s radical-turned-terrorist, living quietly under a new name with a family that doesn´t know his history, finds his past about to catch up with him. But Hari Kunzru´s novel, My Revolutions, feels fresh on every page. Not from the over-the-top pyrotechnics that brought so much attention to his precocious debut, The Impressionist, but from a thorough fictional imagination that gives every scene and every character the rich strangeness of reality. It´s a grownup story of a youth lived at the edge (and a life spent in its shadow), which makes an emblematic tale of a generation feel irreducibly individual. --Tom Nissley¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 7-Sep-2008, 05259493219780525949329, 2X0-400-500-210-061-991-8

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