Hari Kunzru was worried the advance - £1.25 million - might distract from his first novel, The Impressionist. He needn't have worried. Setin 1920s India, the story of a high-caste Indian boy who, via a eunuchs' harem, makes a passage to England, is a tissue of fiction rather than a narrative, he tells Louise East
Poor old Hari Kunzru; he's one of those first-time novelists who must do the publicity rounds afflicted by the curse of the "massive advance". In Kunzru's case, the total sum from the UK, US and European rights to his novel, The Impressionist, was £1.25 million sterling, one of the largest advances in publishing history, so interest is particularly intense.
"Well, it's only tough if you put the word 'tough' in inverted commas," grins Kunzru, well aware there are worse ailments in the world of publishing. "I was concerned that this would become a publishing story, that people would be less interested in whether I had any ability, or in judging the book on its own merits, and more concerned with deciding whether I deserved the money or not."
After weeks of interviews and several positive reviews, it seems that Kunzru needn't have worried; The Impressionist takes far too many narrative risks for the advance to seem interesting for long. First, there is the dissonance between the author, a 32-year-old technology journalist brought up in Essex, and his protagonist, Pran Nath, an Indian boy who tumbles from a high-caste Brahmin family to a harem of eunuchs, then a Bombay church mission and finally on to Oxford University and Africa. Then there are the worrying glimpses of other books that fox the reader, who one minute thinks The Impressionist is a fawning copy of Salman Rushdie only to find herself coming up short against a shadow of E.M. Forster or Evelyn Waugh. The Impressionist is vibrant and mischievous, and like Pran Nath's character, it just keeps slipping away.
Kunzru outlines what he set out to do with his first novel: "I wanted the clarity and the colour of the picaresque novel tradition, and I wanted a certain carnivalesque quality to it. I became fascinated by the pageantry of empire - all that pomp layered on top of a fairly brutal regime. I was certainly interested from a personal point of view in the point at which the histories of India and England collided, because without that relationship, I wouldn't be here."
Kunzru's father, a Kashmiri Pandit from Agra in north India went to England in 1960 to further his career as an orthopaedic surgeon and while working in London, met Hari's mother, Hilary, who was working as a nurse. They married in 1967 after a "fairly Mills and Boone-ish hospital romance".
Frequent family trips to Agra provided both inspiration and material when Kunzru started to create the character of Pran Nath, but historical research was needed when he decided to set his narrative in the 1920s. "That was the last era in which the Empire was really functional. Even by the next decade, there's an awareness that it'll have to end some time. But in the 1920s, there really was that idea that the sun never set on the British empire and it was going to last forever. It made me think of a cartoon character; like Wily Coyote who runs off a cliff yet doesn't realise that the ground has disappeared from under him."
The British Library proved an invaluable resource and for six months Kunzru made the Oriental and India collections his home, poring over officers' diaries, accounts of corrupt Marahajas, boxes of old party invitations and an exhaustive commission report into the size and nature of Bombay's brothels.
"Because it was the English, everything was taken down and typed up and reproduced in triplicate . . . but through all these dry reports you could really build up human stories." In fairness to Kunzru, the months of research and his acute observation have paid off, and there's a well-achieved sense of place in The Impressionist.
Yet there are bits of the book which do stop you in your tracks, not because they stick out but because they seem oddly familiar. "The way I see it is that if you're writing about this era and subject, you have two choices," says Kunzru. "You can either realise that there's this enormous body of literature out there and attempt to side-step it, but I really didn't see how it was possible to research this period and ignore it. So instead, I decided to refer to the novels that were there without apology, by quite consciously using or echoing them.
"In a way, it's a tissue of fiction rather than just one narrative, because I said 'I'll read these texts and I'll engage with them'. It also meant I was able to play with those texts and use plot reversals and so on - instead of Passage to India, there's a passage to England; Kipling's Kim is a story of white boy who can enter the exotic world of the black, whereas Pran is Indian able to pass for white. In a sense, I was interested in the whole idea of Englishness being turned on its head and becoming the unknown, the weird."
Kunzru is aware that he is treading on fairly thin ice - already reviewers have fallen into two camps, those who find it "playful" and those who find it "derivative".
"It's not a risk-free project. Some people just don't like that kind of self-consciousness reference. But the thing is, it's not as if it's really possible to write now, about then, without it being refracted through the prism of what we know now. In a way, it's as much a book about now, as it is a historical novel. It was never going to be a seamless re-telling of a moment in history because it's written by me, and its concerns are my concerns."
Another risk was that his book would become the next overripe mango, in the very lucrative publishing orchard of "designer exotica"; books inspired by the easy vividness, and popular appeal of the South American magic realists or Salman Rushdie, but lacking their innovation, skill and narrative purpose.
"I was in an unbelievably compromised position before I even began, particularly as somebody born in Britain and writing about India and Africa," sighs Kunzru. "But in the same way that I looked at the literary tradition, I decided that rather than glancing sideways at the problem, I'd try and meet it head-on. I tried to blow up that sensualism to show how it operates and whose interests are best served by it. I don't know whether it works or not. There is always the danger that it's going to be read as just another example of over-blown exoticism."
Kunzru's ability to spot the prospective flaws in his grand design before the critics do, is no doubt in some part due to a double-whammy of English literature studies, first at Oxford University and then at Warwick University.
But such a heavy dose of book-learning was in danger of stifling any creative urge altogether: "Oxford was definitely the best and worst training I could have had. It made me hugely self-conscious about writing anything because I was so rigorously trained as a critic. I definitely had a kind of paralysis which took me years to unpick."
Yet even before he started writing fiction in earnest, Kunzru had moved away from a life in academia: "I realised I wasn't really interested in literary theory and criticism any more; it just didn't seem relevant. But I was fascinated by all the people down the hall in the computer lab who were looking at things like neural networks and cyborgs. That was around 1993 or 1994; not early enough to earn real geek cool, but earlier than most."
A job as associate editor on the influential Wired UK magazine followed and by the time it folded in 1997, Kunzru was "a technology journalist by accident", with a sideline in travel and music writing, a freelance career he was able to combine with writing his first novel. He is now the music editor of Wallpaper* magazine and has started on a second novel.
Yet, despite all the success, the large advance and the critical plaudits, Kunzru is aware of still writing himself out from under an oppressive early sense of being different. "I had it very easy compared to some," he says of his middle-class up-bringing.
"Although I can't say there weren't times when I had to run from the Chingford skinheads, it wasn't like some Indian families who had to keep a dog to keep the neighbours off. But I only recently realised how angry I was that I was never really allowed to forget that I was a 'Paki'. That was my condition and it was not 'normal'. All kids who are different, whether they're fat or their parents are weird or whatever, feel this to a certain extent, but it was extraordinary to feel that you are a thing and you cannot change, and that thing makes you less. It did affect me. It certainly made me competitive. For a long time, I think I was mentally sticking two fingers up."
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99 sterling)
