From: The Independent (March 23, 2007)
A jester among the jihadis
By AAMER HUSSEIN
A spring day. A dusty orange sky hangs over the city of Lahore. Changez, a bearded local, accosts an American stranger, offering him the perfect cup of tea in Old Anarkali, a district named for a "courtesan immured for loving a prince". Who is the American? Is Changez, who tells him stories of the city, the world and himself, a reliable narrator?
Though the unsuspecting reader might take a little time to work this out, we have in this novel entered not one, but two, ingenious games. One of them Changez plays with the American, telling him stories which loop into other stories that change their pattern. The other Mohsin Hamid plays with his reader, daring us to separate what's true from what might not be in his narrator's confessions.
Changez, like others in his city, has mastered the art of the monologue. His voice can be urbane at moments, at others confiding and intimate, or defensive and strained with touchy dignity. At other times, you can't help but realise that the formality and archaisms of his speech are his badge of distance, compounded in equals parts of mockery and suspicion.
At once native informant and prickly nationalist, he veers between pride at his country's past, dismay at his family's nouveau pauvre present, admiration for America's mastery of the technological universe and, increasingly, fury at the abject place the masters of the present have allotted his country - and many others - on their redrawn map. He reveals himself, as much in the gaps and ellipses in his monologue as in its digressive and deliberate instabilty, as a man standing on the dangerous precipice of a new millennium.
Changez has been left hollow by the sudden desertion of the ideals (or non-ideals) that he acquired during his Princeton sojourn. During that period, he realised that he has been hand-picked as one of a new breed trained in and by the world of corporate capitalism to serve its super-economies. So he finds himself in search of new words to fill his hollowness.
As often, history chooses a moment. Witnessing, vicariously on a television screen in a Third-World hotel, the fall of the twin towers, Changez finds himself exultant. As he suggests, the battle-cries of jihad - deriving from the anti-Western rhetoric of those who feel used and betrayed by the West - are the rallying sounds he hears after the event that tears a massive hole in the fabric of the 21st century's first decade.
Much of the skill of the novel lies in withholding obvious conclusions. Is Changez's awakening religious, or merely inspired by those who attack the bastions of world power in the name of any ideology that counters the rhetoric of neo-colonial hegemony and greed? Is his threatening demeanour a mere mask, a badge of confrontational identity? Hamid scarcely touches on religion, preferring to dwell on the utter normality of Pakistani lives: the hope and hedonism, failure and aspiration, of the daily routine of every nation's people, privileged or deprived, during peaceful times.
To give away the game between Changez and his companion would spoil the movement of this clever and elegant novel, which hints at far more than it chooses to disclose. As Hamid registers the pulse of the body politic besieged, he pauses, too, to measure heartbeats.
Changez, early in his American sojourn, takes time off to fall in love with Erica, a girl with classy parents and literary aspirations who at first seems to represent the American dream her name echoes. Instead, she proves to be damaged, despairing and all too real. The way in which Hamid deals with their unfinished love adds depth, and an unsuspected dimension of tenderness, to his tense, polished second novel. |