Hari Kunzru’s Transmission shines a satirical and oftentimes
farcical – as in the development of some ridiculously cartoonish characters
that are all stereotype and no depth – spotlight on how Western states respond
to the dilemmas of globalisation. On one hand, there is the boon of cheap
immigrant labour; and for anybody with even a passing grasp of the indenture
system, Kunzru’s rendering reads like a twenty-first century update on those
indignities: paid pittance, left to subsist in a state of squalor, without
family or comfort, unable to return home because of the shame it will confer on
one’s family, unwilling to return home because there yet persists a dream of something
better if only you hang on in there. On the other hand, is the impulse to close
borders, malign those who don’t belong, cast them out like so much unwanted human
detritus.
I felt so much impotent rage and Kunzru was so alarmingly
spot-on in deflecting that anger, making me need to almost laugh out loud through
the rising bile, that I think he wrote Transmission as a straight-up drama, gave
it out to test audiences, and then sat inserting just the right amount of pith
and humour into the text in counterbalance to reader expressions of outrage and
sadness and, yes, tears at some point.
There are other things too that spoke to me in Kunzru’s
book, a nod to the overlapping identities that are written into us but are too
rich and diverse and chaotic, and ultimately that are simply too useless in the
zero-sum power games that characterise the vast swathe of state and political activity
in the twenty-first century. I identified with the Indian immigrant when he chooses
to stand up for his rights as an employee, with the Bollywood actress whose
worth is measured in terms of how good she looks and her happiness be damned,
with the flamboyantly rich and egotistical PR man who gets beaten and
trafficked like those he despises. Quite an achievement, this multilayered
identification, given that many of the characters are so sparsely drawn that
you imagine it was a deliberate tactic on Kunzru’s part, that he’s goading you
into fleshing these characters out using the basic stereotypical
characteristics he provides as a springboard.
My lasting impression of Transmission - and it was a compulsive read, aided by flowing
language – is that when mapped along the postmodernist continuum Kunzru emerges
as the London Oratory School-educated cousin of Ben Elton’s more grizzly
wideboy satirist. And the prep-school polish pays off.
