Money talks in Mohsin Hamid's third novel
Mohsin Hamid loves to play with narrative voices. From the multiple storytellers in his first novel, , to the book-long monologue of , the skill has won acclaim. But finding his voice was not so easy.
Six years later, the experience found its echo when the family returned to Pakistan. Hamid had forgotten Urdu, forcing him "to relearn my first language as my third language". While he may not remember this period of silence, it shaped his personality. "I feel, in any context, that I need to conduct myself so I am not surrounded by people who ask 'What's the matter with him? Is he retarded?' So, I learnt … a chameleon-like quality that allows you to fit in."
(2000) garnered impressive reviews and a strong following in Pakistan for its taboo-busting focus on drugs, crime and illicit sex, but it was 2007's Man Booker-nominated that made his name. In May it will be released as a film directed by Mira Nair. Hamid co-wrote the screenplay, which recounts how Changez, a young Pakistani, finds himself increasingly disillusioned with corporate America after 9/11.
Today Hamid lives in Lahore with his wife and two children, upstairs from his parents. Last month saw the publication of his third novel, . Structured like a self-help tome, the novel is written in the second person, addressing the reader as "you". As the protagonist, "your" meteoric rise is charted in the novel from rural poverty to urban success. The setting is deliberately obscure, and while the plot probably unfolds in Pakistan, the implication is the unnamed characters could live anywhere in Asia.
Removing what he calls the "branding" of the country meant he could use Lahore, for instance, "as a template for universality … Every city struggles with the same things - mass migration from the countryside, how you deal with the transport system, how to deal with the new entrepreneurs required in the global market economy, urban violence, or sewage". More importantly, it gave him the freedom to talk about something other than the narrative of extremism and political violence in Pakistan.
Hamid's decision to move away from specifics, however, has not been universally applauded. One reviewer blasted him for equating Pakistan with India, and his "cowardly dereliction" in not making religion - explicitly, Islam - more central. The author is unapologetic. "Pakistan and India are incredibly similar. If you have no clean water and live in a slum in Lahore, or you live in a slum in Delhi … life as lived is the same."
But he seems stung by the suggestion that this obfuscation is the result of fear: "I live in Pakistan, speak in colleges and write my books. I don't feel I pull my punches. My desire is to persuade, more than to offend. I am not interested in making some symbolic gesture and fleeing to live abroad, or in provoking a response that allows me to say, 'These people are barbarians'."
Having dealt with religion as a form of identity politics in , he is more interested in the spiritual goal of religion. "It's not that I am not engaging with religious issues, it's just that for me the shape of your beard is not the most significant."
In fact, he says, while sounds mammon-obsessed, it is actually a "secular Sufi love poem". "Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred. That's at the heart of Sufi philosophy and is close to what I am looking at," he says.
This makes his least autobiographical book his most personal. And one which he says he could only have written after becoming a father and moving back to Pakistan to live with his parents. "Seeing the world from the standpoint of a child or an elderly person became something I was inclined towards doing. After that, it wasn't such a big leap to … seeing echoes of yourself in everyone."
He admits some readers of his earliest books might not be as thrilled with his latest. "I was at the Karachi festival a month ago and a young man gave me a letter. It said: 'There are three of us in a small town and we really love . So we put our money together to buy one of us a bus ticket to travel 600 miles, and give you this letter'." Hamid laughs. "It said: 'We particularly loved the drugs and sex scenes.' I think implicit is the critique that in I didn't deliver."
