Hari Kunzru: Embracing structural strangeness

'The majority of reviews have been good and the ones that have been bad have really hated it, which is a sign people felt they had to react to it.' - Hari Kunzru. Photo / Supplied

British writer Hari Kunzru tells Stephen Jewell why he has adopted America as his base and why sci-fi readers are more open to the unusual.

Hari Kunzru has taken America to heart. Following the break-up of his relationship with New Zealand-born artist Francis Upritchard, Kunzru relocated from London to New York in 2008.

Initially planning to pen a vast historical epic about Raja Birbal, the Grand Vizier of the 16th century Mughal court, he instead embarked upon the equally ambitious Gods Without Men, which centres around the inexplicable disappearance of an autistic 4-year-old, Raj Matharu.

"I went out there thinking I was going to do something completely different but I just couldn't get my head around the book I was going to write," says Kunzru, on a promotional visit in London. "I was incredibly preoccupied with America. It was the presidential election at the time and there seemed to be quite a lot of things at stake. I was panicking because I had an office and a stipend but no project."

The 42-year-old initially shifted across the Atlantic on a nine-month fellowship at the New York Public Library. "I thought I'd come home to England when it finished but I didn't and it's been three years now," says Kunzru, who lives in the East Village with his new partner, Katie Kitamura.

"It's a fantastic city. Everybody goes through there, there's a lot of transient action. I don't know if it's a place where I'd live forever. It'll probably spit me out eventually. I might end up back here, I might end up somewhere else."

A journey into the Californian desert with his good friend Bic Runga and her then partner, Darryl Ward, provided the vital inspiration for Gods Without Men. "They were holed up in Silverlake and rang up to say they wanted to take a road trip and if I wasn't doing anything better why don't I fly out and join them," recalls Kunzru.

"The three of us and their new baby went out for a week, driving around the Mojave. I came back from that trip having been very moved by the landscape. I decided to write a short story and that sort of metastasised into a book."

Bringing to mind David Mitchell's equally beguiling Cloud Atlas, Gods Without Men spans several centuries and involves UFO cults, Native American myths and mystical Wall St traders. It has divided British critics with the Guardian describing it as "something of a revelation" while the Observer claimed Kunzru should have pursued a single storyline instead of splitting and splicing various narratives.

"The majority of reviews have been good and the ones that have been bad have really hated it, which is a sign people felt they had to react to it," Kunzru admits with a wry laugh. "They felt I'd failed to write the book they think I should have written, which would have had a nice linear narrative set in the present day, focused on the couple and their kid. Patently if I wanted to do that, I probably would have done it."

Raised in Essex by his Indian father and English mother, Kunzru has courted controversy since receiving a £1.25 million two-book deal for his 2003 début The Impressionist and its 2005 successor Transmission. He has also consistently defied expectations, by not including any Asian characters in his 2008 third novel My Revolutions. A long-time science-fiction fan, he believes that those with an appreciation of the genre will better grasp Gods Without Men's shifting and overlapping timelines.

"Sci-fi readers are much more open to structural strangeness," he says. "One of the great joys of sci-fi is when you begin a book, it often has to teach you how to read it. Initially you don't understand this world but you're confident the context will eventually become apparent. It's the big hit of that kind of reading."

Raj's vanishing has been compared to the similarly puzzling and tragic real-life cases of Madeleine McCann and Azaria Chamberlain.

"Clearly, all those well-publicised child disappearances are exactly the kind of stuff I was thinking about when I made up those characters," says Kunzru.

"I was interested in how the family is treated by the media and how it's interpreted by the human flesh search engine, which is a brilliant Chinese phrase for a lynch-mob that really sums up that cannibalistic quality. When the internet decides you are wrong, it gets really ugly, really quickly. YouTube comments are particularly rough and tumble."

Crucially, Gods Without Men takes place just before the rise of websites like Facebook and Twitter.

"It's right on that cusp," says Kunzru, who wrote about changing technology for Wired UK in the late 1990s. "It's amazing but 2008 seems like quite a long time ago in media time. I've always been interested in the idea of characters having an effect on each other at a distance. Transmission now seems like ancient history, as it's actually set earlier than 2004 when I published it. In that book, the main characters are never in the same place but stuff happens because of the computer viruses that are drawing them together. You could do the same sort of story much easier now. You don't need complex mechanisms because you've got the mechanisms of social media."

Despite being decades and, in some instances, hundreds of years apart, the fates of Gods Without Men's numerous protagonists subtly interweaves with the turbulent experiences of Raj's beleaguered parents Jas and Lisa.

"Ideas of reverse causality fascinate me," says Kunzru. "What happens if, in some sense, all time is simultaneously present, which is a very mythic notion although I didn't want to do that sci-fi thing where it's all about the mechanism. I'm making gestures towards that but I'm not interested in saying that in this book this is the mechanism by which this happens or this other thing is not happening. I'm interested in humanity's relationship to the unknowable and hints something counter-intuitive is going on."

Although he declines to reveal many details, Kunzru will venture even further into unknown territory with his next novel. "I've made some stabs at something," he says. "At this point, I'm bringing things on from each book with the stuff I've learnt how to do. With the thing I'm looking to do, the setting will again be different and it might be that it'll be very strongly sci-fi this time."

Gods Without Men (Hamish Hamilton $40) is out now.