Book Notes: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a short, easy-read, which for all it's delicacy, charm and rich scene-setting observation, is disconcerting, and troublesome. The book, (of which there are countless on-line reviews following its short-listing in the Man Booker 2007) is set in a Lahore cafe in which a lone - and entirely silent- American is approached by Changez, a young Pakistani, whose love-affair with America has turned sour.

Two things mark out this book as unusual. The first is its method of story-telling. The entire book is the spoken words of one man, the answers given by the other person in the story are not recorded, merely alluded to. The character who emerges from this is wounded, angry, intelligent, educated, patriotic, but feels emasculated and betrayed by his encounters with the West. The second element is that the author allows one character to speak, but never allows any other interaction with, or evaluation of his story. As such the book is full of allusions, allegories, suggestions and possibilities, but suggests more than it reveals, leaving the reader with countless tense ambiguities with which to wrestle. It is this element of the book which the author quite deliberately plans and achieves with considerable force.

Whenever there is a terrorist outrage, a psychologist is wheeled onto the TV to explain 'what makes them do it'. Some, of presumably more Freudian leanings, talk about a crisis of masculinity, and note the profoundly erotic nature of the rewards such fanatics believe await them in Paradise. Mohsin Hamad plays a devious game with such theories in this book. As Changez tells his painful tale of rejection in the bed of an American lover, who is unable to give herself to him because of her own mental scars - he initially presents the beginnings of radicalisation in such terms. However, the story is interwoven with an alienation and rejection from his position in a global capitalist corporation, suggesting that more than just love, lust and sexual identity are at stake here. This is re-enforced by the names that Mohsin Hamid has given his characters. The lover who initially adores him but who can never be fully his is Erica, and her failure is because of her completely self-destructive attachment to her long dead lover, Chris. It seems that while this individual story of loss and pain is played out, it is also to been allegorically. Erica is surely America, and Chris presumably Christianity. If so, then America can never embrace Changez himself, either as an individual or a people.

The lone American in the bar, gets increasingly shifty and nervous as the tale is told. The ambiguity is that Changez could be a gracious host - or could be a potential kidnapper. He is certainly charming, urbane, vulnerable and engaging. He wins the confidence of the reader even as the confidence of the American is being won in the book - but to what happy or sinister end? The growing menace is intensified by the fact that neither the American, nor the reader (who are of course addressed together as the book is written in the first person) is completely sure how to gauge Changez and his heart-rending tale. Bombs are raining down from American planes in neighbouring Afghanistan, anger over American foreign policy is intense, this is clearly coupled with an intense personal narrative; the glowering angry waiter does hate Americans and he is following them... all of which leads to a crescendo of tension, and a climactic....... ambiguity.

I suppose the outcome is related to the title. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is in itself an oblique phrase, as it asks us not to picture a chanting fanatic in a state of religious fervour about to commit a heinous act of violence - but rather a somewhat bewildered, beaten-down and world-weary soldier trudging to a duty. The author makes this point when the American worries that the aggressive waiter is praying and is told by Changez that he is merely reciting the menu in Urdu! The question upon which so much of this book hangs though is 'what fundamentalism' was reluctantly embraced? On one hand it might refer to Changez embracing of American Consumer Capitalism, especially as the job he had within it was what we might call a 'corporate-evangelist' roaming the world evaluating smaller companies for American takeover. If this is the case then he has backed away from his dangerous fundamentalism and so the American in the bar is safe. On the other hand, if the fundamentalism into which he has entered is the dark heart of Islamism, which he has embraced as the only viable vehicle for his increasingly powerful Anti-Americanism, then the American has not long to live. The fact that we are not told, leaves the reader in a tense, dangerous scene, full of intrigue, misunderstanding and menace - as individuals are locked between two unresolved fundamentalisms, Islamism and Americanism. Indeed the human carnage of such clash seems to be exactly the point of the nervous end to this serious book.