In Depth
Hanif Kureishi: The ordinary and insane
22.11.07 Benedicte Page
Hanif Kureishi's new novel is an energetic black comedy, as middle-aged psychoanalyst Jamal looks back on the passions of his youth in London in the 1970s and surveys the accumulated experience that has shaped him since then: lovers, analysts, a broken marriage, sustaining friendships and the changes that have overtaken the city and country.
In the background is always his memory of a romantic boyhood affair with a young girl Ajita, which ended in trauma when Jamal caused the death of the father who had been abusing her. When Ajita returns to his life at last, Jamal finds he must finally deal with this guilty secret from his past. But meanwhile, his best friend Henry has hooked up with his eccentric sister Miriam and they have taken to frequenting sex clubs; his ex-wife Josephine is exerting a surprising emotional pull; and Wolf, who was with him when the father died, is also back in his life.
"This book took me ages. I stopped and started a lot. At the beginning it was basically the story of the relationship between Ajita and Jamal: this boy and girl have a love affair in the '70s and then he finds out this terrible secret and kills the father. It would have been all right for a film, but because it's a novel, you can keep on putting in more material and making it more complex.
"The book is partly about ageing. I don't think that people do mellow with age. They rage and rage. It's about what you do in the second half of your life. What would you want after the age of 50? Your view of the world would be quite different to the way it would have been when you were 30, so what is there to want? What is there to love about the world? Of course you've got to sift through all this history and experience, and you think about its value. Why the hell did I do that?
"A lot of the hatred's gone. You meet someone 20 years later, and you don't hate them in the way you might have done when you left them or they left you. You feel really fond of them because of the intimacy there was between you, I guess. It's the litany of failures, and pleasures.
"I guess psychoanalysis is a profession you might take up if you had a traumatised childhood. You might do it in the way that a lot of social workers, mental health workers, are clearly people who had a bad time and want to spent the rest of their lives repairing that in themselves and in others. Yes, Jamal's a bit out there, but then all the early analysts were, except Freud who was a very conventional man. Jung, R D Laing, Wilhelm Reich—they were all barking. But I don't think the point of psychoanalysis is to make people conventional. The point might be to let people be as mad as they want to be.
"I wanted to make the book quite dreamlike. It's not a realistic novel— some of the scenes in clubs, to me they're like dreams or fantasies. I wanted to make the book more like the stuff you might say to an analyst, where dream and reality overlap. In a sense the book is a kind of free association. And there's a murder in it, which Freud thought of as the founding gesture of all societies—he thought that guilt kept society together.
"But in another sense, it's a bit like The Buddha of Suburbia—lots of humour, lots of characters, lots of people running around behaving badly. It's not an austere, short book like Intimacy—it's madder, and indeed more fun to write. I like the grotesque stuff as well. It's like reading Dostoevsky: in one sense it's like reading a description of reality, and in another it's mad, because the characters are insane. I really like all of them; I never write out of hatred. I think their lives are so wonderful and terrible and funny in the way that all our lives are.
"I wanted the book to outline some of the things that I've lived through: to do with music, sexuality, friendship, celebrity, psychoanalysis, philosophy. I was thinking about what should be in there and what did it mean, the stuff about sexuality particularly. What did I think about contemporary sexuality? The vision of the '60s was that sex would be entirely liberating for people. Once people started having guilt-free sex all the time, everything would be better all the time. But what we now know is that it creates a society that is entirely narcissistic, and out of that narcissism comes something like Muslim fundamentalism. The return of extreme religion, at the same time as society has descended into celebrity and narcissism—I see those things as definitely producing each other.
"Life is so dull, but at times it's incredibly dramatic. When you think that not long ago there was a huge bomb in the centre of London that blew apart people's bodies, lives, their families. And the extremity of having lived through this period of a war in Iraq, and the trauma inflicted on that society by our representatives, while at the same time we have become more obsessed with property and celebrity and clothes and London's become richer and richer. That's so extreme and strange. London contains all this in its ordinariness, and I'm fascinated by that. I suppose I was trying to find a tone to say something about that.
Hanif Kureishi Something to Tell You (Faber, March, h/b, £16.99, 9780571209774)
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