Transmission (Hari Kunzru)

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.