Hari Kunzru: The Impressionist

By MARGIE THOMSON

Hyped to the hilt, Hari Kunzru's first novel, The Impressionist, has not only won a reported $1 million advance for its American sale, but was touted by the Observer as "the most eagerly awaited debut of 2002".

Kunzru has been linked with cool, bicultural, best-selling Zadie Smith (White Teeth) in a new bracket of Brit-lit. Kunzru, too, is trendy and hybrid (English mother, Indian father), aged in his early 30s, and described by Village Voice as having "hipster credentials" - he has worked as a DJ and at Wallpaper* and Wired UK.

He was snatched up by the same editor that booked 21-year-old Smith in 1997, and was thus from the outset picked as the Next Big Thing. The verdict? Well, I thought the hype was right on the money.

The Impressionist takes a tone of delicious comic irony in its exploration of the enduring racial tensions that are the legacy of the imperialist era. Bitterness and outright anger are so last century: ribald mockery seems the sharper postcolonial tool of inquiry.

Kunzru grew up in England and has obviously become interested in the fluidity of race and the fictions that surround it. The Impressionist is in a dialogue with writers that have gone before. Rudyard Kipling's Kim is an important influence - the English boy who could dress as an Indian and pass as a native in the bazaars - and in fact forms the epigraph to The Impressionist: "Remember I can change quickly ... " runs the quotation. "What shall the third incarnation be?"

Kunzru's central character, Pran Nath, is the product of a dramatic liaison between an Englishman and an Indian opium addict, but during his early years no one other than an embittered servant woman knows the truth. He is reared in a wealthy Brahmin household, where his supposed father simply believes him to be blessed with unusually ivory skin.

When the truth outs, Pran (a greedy, unloving fellow, albeit stunning looking) is denounced as a half-caste and thrown out among the beggars he has recently kicked and abused. It's a tribute to Kunzru's abilities that we never withdraw interest from Pran, although he is a most unheroic hero. Horrified fascination alternates with genuine sympathy for this morally empty vessel.

Initially seeking refuge in a brothel, Pran is drugged and abused before being sold to a nawab's harem and forced into sexual slavery as a pretty-boy cross-dresser known as Rukhsana. He narrowly avoids becoming a eunuch. It is there, however, that he gains his fist inkling of the future that could await him: encouraged to dress and speak as an English schoolboy in order to please the smitten English Major Privett-Clampe, he begins to aspire to an English identity.

Eventually fleeing, he ends up in Bombay where he has become Robert, or Pretty Bobby. He lives as a servant in the house of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, and pimps on the streets around the mission house, spending his money on fine suits and hanging around the flash hotels, hoping to be mistaken as English.

When a drunken young Englishman is murdered by fanatic nationalists, Bobby seizes his chance and becomes Jonathan Bridgeman, heir to a small English inheritance, and with a passport to the centre of English culture, Oxford University.

The dust and smells of Bombay give way to the drizzly green of England, and Pran's metamorphosis seems complete. No one is more English than he but, just as his new identity seems firmly within his grasp, irony comes full circle: his Englishness becomes obsolete and he is dismissed for not having suffered enough, for not having "soul", for in fact being "too English".

The novel ends with a bizarre excursion into a Conradian heart of darkness, into a fictional African homeland called Fotseland, where Jonathan must conversely travel deep within himself and recognise his own utter emptiness.

Set in the period immediately after World War I, and thus towards the end of the British Raj, it examines the upheavals and distortions brought about by Empire, and charts the ensuing dangers of unfixed identity.

Such a state, Kunzru seems to believe, leads to no ties, no commitment, no conscience, and the moral consequences are dire. In Pran's case, dishonesty goes from being a way of life and a necessary facet of cold, hard survival, to being a problem which begins to give him his first twinges of conscience when, like Christ's Peter, he denies out of cowardice the first friend he has had.

Dark subjects indeed, yet Kunzru's light touch dances through the pages, pirouetting with delight, bowing with irony, creating character after character which feel as familiar as stereotypes, yet with idiosyncratic touches that make them always fresh, distinct creations.

Oddly, while his English portrayals are generally unflattering (snobbish, exploitative, emotionally disengaged), they nevertheless are drawn with more genuine warmth and roundedness - a kind of closeness - that is lacking in his more one-dimensional Indian characters.

It makes you realise that, in the end, Kunzru is, despite his name, an English writer. His India is a picaresque backdrop for a story more about the English and their aftermath than about the Indians who are, in the end, left behind as our hero forges across other continents on his hopeless quest.

The Impressionist is a beautifully easy read. Its many messages and themes are gently pointed out; there is not much that is hidden, little that is cryptic. What it offers is a rare pleasure: a quality read that is unputdownable, in the company of an unstoppered imagination.

In short, a delight from start to finish.

* The Impressionist (Hamish Hamilton $34.95)