The Impressionist
Hari Kunzru Hamish Hamilton, 496pp, £12.99
ISBN 0241141699
Hari Kunzru, we are told, is the Next Big Thing in publishing. He appeared on lists of Best Young Novelists and cultural panels even before his "epochal debut" hit the shelves. Eschewing modern-day multiculturalism, Kunzru considers the predicament of growing up an outsider, a child of mixed race, in the context of early 20th-century British colonialism. Opening with Kipling and ending with Conrad, The Impressionist challenges and parodies established versions of Englishness and empire - with mixed success.
Conceived in a cave during a flash flood, Pran Nath is the all-too-real result of a magical union between an opium-crazed Indian bride-to-be and a sex-starved Englishman (remember Rushdie's equally ill-starred Moor?). Pran Nath, whose no-good mother dies in childbirth, is raised as the pampered heir of the wealthy lawyer she married, his white skin celebrated as a sign of nobility. But tainted blood will out, and after Pran is caught ogling a servant girl (women are his downfall throughout), his impure ancestry is exposed. Branded a "horrid blackie-white", Pran is an outcast with only good looks to save him.
Thus our hero embarks on a journey of self-discovery and reinvention that takes him from the gutter to Punjabi palaces, from Bombay brothels to English lawns, and improbably into the dark heart of Africa. From his first watery beginnings, he is a fluid creature, borne helplessly along on a tide of random occurrences. He is a chameleon, a mimic man, a blank and ever whiter page upon which Kunzru invents a whole new character with a different name and story at every turn. Kidnapped by eunuchs, he becomes Rukhsana, an androgynous sexual pawn in the power struggles of the Raj; next he is Pretty Bobby, adopted son of devout missionaries by day and pimp by night; then, Ripley-like, he steals the identity of a dead English boy and travels to London to claim his inheritance. When he joins an anthropological expedition to the fantastical Fotseland, his metamorphosis from "perfect Kashmiri" to perfect English gent is complete. But oh the horror, when he looks inside himself and finds - nothing.
These picaresque adventures are episodically narrated. There are imperial orgies, farcical hunting trips mired in smutty jokes and priapic abandon (the novel's low point), Oxford tea parties worthy of Sebastian Flyte, and savagery. The Impressionist is overcrowded and chaotic, but, with its refreshing lack of spices or alluring virgins, this is not the India of much Anglo-Indian fiction. Instead, it is England that sends Pran's pulse racing: "Ah, the mystic Occident! Land of wool and cabbage and lecherous round-eyed girls." Nevertheless, the English are either boorish rapists or proselytising bores, the Indian aristocracy impotent or corrupt.
The frustratingly uneven narrative is as confused as its mixed-up protagonist. Somewhere in among all this, Kunzru is propounding theories on race and belonging. But he is not telling us anything new. He does, however, write with tremendous energy, the overwrought plot tempered by clean, confident prose. Ironically, given its epic scale, the novel is distinguished by its clever conceits, comic cameos and sympathetic histories of supporting characters. Disappointingly, especially after we have stuck with him for so long, the hero himself leaves very little impression upon the reader.
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