The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a glorious exception to this rule. Its success depends not just on sympathy and thought, but also on this young novelist’s deftness. To begin with, Hamid’s protagonist-narrator, Changez, is a carefully delineated and located character: not just any ‘fundamentalist’, but a top graduate from Princeton, working for an elite firm, and hailing from a genteel family of professionals in Lahore. His trajectory to ‘fundamentalism’ is not confused with that of the madrassa student (like the Taliban), or the small-town immigrant worker in Riyadh, London or Delhi.
That in itself is an achievement. Hamid’s use of ‘fundamentalism’ is not smeared with a broad brush, painted so liberally that it can’t be used to understand, analyse or, for that matter, narrate. But it also presents some advantages: anglophone legibility, for instance. Hamid structures Changez’s narrative of his own ‘development’ as a monologue, addressed to a mysterious American whom Changez befriends at a roadside hotel in Lahore. Wielded so lightly that one almost fails to notice the art and thought that went into it, Changez’s monologue is a major success of the novel.
Despite its particular and contemporary vocabulary—"monickered" etc—Changez’s monologue carries echoes of 18th-19th century monologues. The situation is similar, for instance, to that of the ancient mariner: a ‘guest’ is detained by a man, in this case Changez, with a disturbing story to tell. Even as the voice of Changez erases the voice of the American, except as reportage (thus reversing the usual situation), the monologue highlights a major flaw in our relationship to the other. For even a common vocabulary does not imply a shared language, or ‘dialogue’: Changez and the unnamed American share much, and still do not agree or trust each other.
But who is the ‘reluctant fundamentalist’? Is it Changez, the bearded Princeton graduate who has left a cushy New York job and now teaches and organises students in Lahore? For if Changez is a fundamentalist now, thanks partly to his beard, he was once a westernised, clean-shaven, alcohol-imbibing yuppie who had been taught, in his prestigious American company, to "focus on the fundamentals." "This was Underwood Samson’s guiding principle, drilled into us since our first day at work. It mandated a single-minded attention to financial detail...." Changez’s move away from America is also a movement away from these "financial fundamentals" and back to a recent human history of powerlessness and resentment.
Changez comes to the point where, as a result of the ‘war on terror’, he realises "the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers [terrorists] also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage"—and he switches his allegiance. He becomes a ‘fundamentalist’, but then what was he earlier on?
And what about Erica, the rich, beautiful American girl he falls in love with? Erica is still in love with her childhood sweetheart, who died of cancer. Is she any different from people like Changez, who cannot write off the present and the past for a promised future? Is she a ‘fundamentalist’ too? How does one live, or die, in a world in which some places (in space, time, or the mind) are blithely "condemned to atrophy"?
Hamid’s is too much a novel of the times to pose these questions directly. But unlike some much-hyped novels, it does not shirk or short-circuit such questioning. The narrative forces the reader to confront such questions, even while never losing the momentum of its brisk and captivating ‘story-telling.’
This novel is also a test. At the end of it, Changez and the American confront each other across their similarities and differences. For, perhaps, Changez has been setting up the American to be murdered by his fundamentalist disciples. Or perhaps the American is a professional sent to kill Changez. What ending, reader, would you choose? (Or is there a third possibility?)
I know what I will choose. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Hamid’s second novel. I never read the first one, Moth Smoke. I will buy it now.
(Tabish Khair’s novel, Filming: A Love Story, will be out soon.)
