From raj to riches

The Impressionist by hari kunzru (hamish hamilton, (pounds) 12.99)

WHEN a first-time author handily describes his debut as Midnight's Children meets Tom Jones (the Henry Fielding novel, not the Welsh crooner), you can bet your (pounds) 1.25 million advance he once worked as a journalist. Only hacks and Hollywood producers have that knack of talking in pitches.

And so it goes: Oxford-educated Hari Kunzru, anointed successor to Cambridge-educated Zadie Smith, is a former associate editor of Wired magazine and currently works as music editor for Wallpaper* - which means he knows a hook when he sees it. By the end of the year he may even be familiar with Hollywood producers too. You don't get that sort of advance without a strong chance of an eventual film tie-in.

To give him his due, Kunzru's pitch is an almost perfect description of The Impressionist, a journey through the underbelly of the Raj in the 1920s. Oddly, however - at least for an author with Anglo-Indian parentage whose subject is race and identity - the voice he most resembles by the end of The Impressionist's 400-odd pages is not Rushdie or Fielding but that exemplar of Englishness, Evelyn Waugh. So let me add Scoop-meets-A Handful Of Dust to Kunzru's own helpful signposts.

The Impressionist is the story of Pran Nath, a high-born Kashmiri Pandit who is thrown out of the family home when it is discovered that his true father is not the wealthy lawyer who raised him but an English government official with whom his long-dead mother had a brief liaison during a flash flood. Spoiled, haughty and breath- takingly handsome, the 15-year-old is unprepared for life on the streets and his naivety leads him to a brothel where, drugged and trussed, he is eventually sold to the wealthy Nawab of Fatehpur; earmarked, if that's the right word, to become a hijra - a eunuch.

At Fatehpur, Nath is re-christened Rukhsana and so begins the first of the re-inventions that will lead him to cast off his Indian identity and eventually become the thing he believes he admires most of all - an Englishman. The irony of that wish has a cruel resonance, both in the novel's final chapters and in his relationship with the one woman he truly loves.

After the cloistered intrigue of Fatehpur, the action moves to Bombay where Rukhsana has become Pretty Bobby, a chiselled ladykiller in polished brogues and a sharp linen suit. Moored to a Scottish-run mission in the red-light district where he does odd jobs for board and lodging, he becomes a fixture in the backstreet demi-world where off-duty sailors are tumbled for a few rupees.

A fateful meeting with a drunken Englishman, a street riot, a death: suddenly Pretty Bobby has become Jonathan Bridgeman and is heading "home" on the SS Loch Lomond to take up a place at Oxford University - and, newly orphaned, to meet his legal guardian, Mr Samuel Spavin of Spavin and Muskett.

It is Pran Nath's final reinvention, and a fateful one at that since it takes him into the orbit of Astarte Chapel - Lillian Gish- meets-Marianne Faithfull, as Kunzru himself might say - and her anthropologist father, Henry. Our hero falls for the fickle Astarte and so begins a chase that moves from Oxford to London and eventually to Paris. Jonathan and Henry are on their way to British West Africa to study the Fotse; Astarte is spending the summer in the French capital. Worlds clash and hopes are dashed.

Jonathan's moment of self-revelation comes when Astarte takes him to a jazz club. Their only sexual encounter to date has been marked by some colourful language on her part ("Yes you big buck - do it to me - make jelly-roll with me, baby") so when Jonathan meets Sweets, a black jazz pianist, one or two things fall into place.

After the confrontation, Jonathan is left facing himself in the form of a burlesque stage impressionist. What he sees between turns is what he himself has become: a blank. He has no option but to try to embrace Africa, the heart of darkness, yet he fears the questing looks in the impassive black faces which seem to say "Are you like us or are you not?"

Kunzru has little of Rushdie's literary heft or Fielding's satirical bite, but he steers his story with a masterful touch and his sketches of the colonial horrors who ran 1920s India are equally poised: Major Privett-Clampe, a repressed homosexual who enjoys shooting because the "discharge has to substitute for all others, his sole relief from the urges he finds welling up so powerfully and problematically inside"; Reverend Andrew Macfarlane, a crazed Scot intent on proving the white man's innate superiority by studying skulls and physiognomy; and Prince Firoz, a coke-addled fop who cares more for cufflinks than irrigation systems or land rights.

Pran/Rukhsana/Bobby/Jonathan is more problematic. His personality changes so much from character to character that the only constants are the fine features. Pran's sexual potency, however, seems to diminish the whiter he gets so that as Jonathan Bridgeman limps drippily through Oxford, you find yourself begging for the cocksure Bobby to return. At best Pran is a nebulous centre to this constellation of oddballs and interlopers, which means that as one persona moves on the next it becomes harder to believe in the continuum. Jonathan should still show us glimpses of Pran or Bobby but Kunzru gives no indication that they're in there. Dr Who had the same problem: well, did you believe Sylvester McCoy was once Jon Pertwee?

Still, skimpiness of character is a hallmark of such picaresque meanderings, and even Waugh was guilty of using thumbnail sketches when portraits were required. Besides, it's a literary point and this is not a literary novel, just one of those hugely enjoyable books that come along once in a while to reignite your faith in the transportive power of the written word.

As for Kunzru - he remains sanguine about his impending fame. "It's just a bet taken by a publisher," he said recently, playing down that record-breaking advance. "Money is not necessarily an indication of literary value." Quite right: instead it's an indication of popular appeal, and on that scale The Impressionist is one bet that's already a length ahead.

Copyright 2002
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