How extraordinary and wonderful it is for a reviewer when, after months of wading through indifferent or only partially interesting books, you come across something unreservedly magnificent -- intelligent, funny, scathingly witty, a comic masterpiece hot off the presses.
In Agra, India, just after World War I, a boy is born, the child of an hour-long encounter. His father, a British horticulturist, is drowned immediately after the conception. His mother, a young Indian bride-to-be on her way to a loveless marriage, dies giving birth. Fifteen years later her husband, a hygiene freak, succumbs to the global influenza epidemic that killed more people than the war itself, while lying in a bath of sliced onions.
At that moment the boy, Pran Nath, lies masturbating while looking at the buttocks of a servant girl. As his father dies, he touches the object of his desire. Immediately the girl's mother, who has seen all, announces to the household the boy's real parentage, and he is thrown from the front door and into the gutter.
Homeless and foodless, he is directed by a beggar to a house of prostitution. There he is fed, dressed as a girl, and before long finds himself on the way to a location that will one day be a film-maker's dream -- a pink architectural folly in the Punjabi principality of Fatehpur. Here the proud and traditionalist Nawab presides over innumerable wives and concubines but, due to his own impotence, no heir. His younger brother is a dissolute pro-Westerner, a lover of champagne, racing cars, cigarette-holders, Swedish dancers and hot-air balloons.
With no direct successor, the brother will inherit, subject to endorsement by the British Resident, Major Privett-Clampe. But, a trembling Pran is informed, Privett-Clampe has one significant weakness. "He likes beautiful boy-girls. Like you."
A plan is hatched -- to photograph the nude and flushed Privett-Clampe at the moment of his highest pleasure, in the palace's Chinese chamber with the equally naked Pran. The resulting image will succeed in blackmailing the British to favor the Nawab's chosen successor over his debauched, utterly impossible brother.
This is an epic comic novel of high quality. It's a fine achievement because beneath the hilarious plot is a serious analysis of the pretentions of empire. Privett-Clampe is a major comic creation -- pompous, absurd, but embodying an extraordinarily apt and perceptive analysis of character and motive, and of the entire imperial project itself.
A hero of pig-sticking forays where he heaves the barbed stick between the shoulders of the charging boar, and of bloody duck-shooting mornings where he relishes the feel of the warm gun between his fingers, he delights when Pran, dressed up as an all-English schoolboy, stands at the other end of the room reciting The boy stood on the burning deck, while he sits loosening the belt that circles his own massive girth, and unbuttoning his pants under the desk.
Hari Kunzru is 33, lives in London, and this is his first novel. He has previously written on topics such as Ecstasy-culture and the more esoteric regions of the Internet. This novel may appear a worthy historical enterprise when you begin to read it, but the high-wired author has many other tricks up his sleeve.
A wild boy, you feel, has taken time off from a fast-paced life to do something that requires real application and a long view. He's succeeded -- and some. This book, though only published in London in April, has already been translated into 11 other European languages.
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