Copies of this book are displayed prominently in the Gongguan branch of the Eslite bookstore in Taipei, next to John Banville's The Sea, winner of last year's Man Booker Prize. It wasn't very enthusiastically reviewed when it appeared in hardback, yet it's a wonderful work that gets better the more of it you read.
Hanif Kureishi has enjoyed a very successful career. He was initially welcome material for the multiculturalist critics who wanted to be enthusiastic about a Britain where people from varied ethnic backgrounds flourished happily together. Later, however, he became valued in his own right.
He was born in the UK in 1954, the son of a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father worked in the Pakistan embassy in London, and the family enjoyed a middle-class life in suburban Kent. In a photo on this book's back cover father and son are sitting in a small English garden in pale spring sunlight. Father is smoking his pipe and reading, while the infant Hanif, teddybear in lap, looks on, already with a puzzled expression on his face.
The puzzlement increased as he grew older. After school he went off to a small northern town and set up house with his girl-friend for a year. Then he returned south and dutifully began a course in philosophy at London University. His father wanted him to become a writer, and soon he was succeeding beyond his parents' greatest expectations. Drama was his first preoccupation, and before long he was Writer-in-Residence at London's trendsetting Royal Court Theater.
At 30 he wrote the script for the successful film My Beautiful Laundrette, followed by Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). On one occasion Samuel Beckett gave him ?50 for a course he wanted to enroll in. He apparently wrote for pornographic magazines under the pseudonym Antonia French, but even when writing under his own name was always considered unpredictable and refreshingly cross-cultural.
His father's ambitions were also literary, but more cautiously. In the 1950s most people in Britain thought you should have a regular job and a secure income, and only risk artistic expression after-hours, in amateur theater, for example, or as a weekend novelist. Social barriers, too, were not to be challenged, especially by members of racial minorities enjoying middle-class jobs.
And so it was that Kureishi senior penned novels about his life before he came to the UK. The discovery of one of these manuscripts forms the starting-point for My Ear At His Heart. What will it tell him about his father, Hanif wonders. And in the process of uncovering its secrets, Kureishi manages to reveal a good deal more about himself, which was perhaps what he wanted to do all along.
Early on in the book he writes: "It annoys me, as it might any novelist, to have my own work reduced to autobiography, as though you've just written down what happened." Yet the most controversial moment in Kureishi's career came with the appearance of a novel in 1998 entitled Intimacy, a detailed narrative by a man who was about to leave his wife and children. This is precisely what Kureishi in fact did at the identical time, and unsurprisingly his wife tried to have the book withdrawn immediately after it was published. Fiction and fact, then, are never far apart, both in Hanif Kureishi's books and in the two written by his father that he discusses here.
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