Fiction: Computers are the new tyrants, true or false? Technical aptitude may determine your answer. They have streamlined modern life, but have also dehumanised it. Anyone who has spent hours weeping before and swearing at a frozen screen, courtesy of an unwelcome virus, will enjoy Hari Kunzru's highly entertaining second novel, writes Eileen Battersby.
In writing it, Kunzru, author of The Impressionist, a début that secured him a famously huge advance and also saw him selected among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003, has defeated the odds - and in some ways, the publishing industry, as well as the difficulties of writing.
Many first novelists have fallen by the success of a well-praised debut. Zadie Smith's White Teeth was followed by a disappointingly slight effort, The Autograph Man. While Kunzru's excessively celebrated The Impressionist was inflated by the hype that surrounded it, Transmission succeeds through the ease of the story-telling, Kunzru's balanced, fluent prose, comic timing and his technical confidence in balancing this textured, tripartite narrative with its several sub-plots.
Arjun is a young Indian. Quiet, hopelessly inept socially, he carries his personality shortcomings in addition to the burden of his mother's ambitions for him and the fears his parents harbour on his behalf. He has one redeeming talent however; he has mastered the mysterious art of the computer. This skill earns him a job in the US. Off he goes, the pride of his family, to a new life.
But it is not a job. He has instead become an expendable component working in a stable of computer temps for an agency that hires out its workers for short-term, freelance work. Most of his income goes on paying for his accommodation.
Worse is to follow. "As he became more attuned to American language and economics, he realized he was living in a 'low-income' area . . . The idea of American poverty, especially a poverty which did not exclude cars, refrigerators, cable TV or obesity, was a new and disturbing paradox, a hint that something ungovernable and threatening lurked beneath the reflective surface of California."
Arjun's encounter with America is but one of the triumphs of this fresh, lively novel. Kunzru, in common with Monica Ali's Brick Lane, demonstrates how the best of the contemporary Indian novel can invigorate its English counterpart, with more than a few nods to the zanily controlled Martin Amis of Money (1984).
While Arjun battles for survival in the new world, the world itself is confronted by a menacing rogue virus that utilises the image of a famous Bollywood actress to spread chaos and financial collapse. Kunzru is very good at describing the relentless passage of this modern plague, an evil that moves faster than the rats of old. It is no longer necessary to be bitten by a flea, an ill-judged click can cause a system to crash, and any amount of firms and industries to collapse.
Nothing is particularly straight forward in the narrative which cleverly shifts between the central characters and at times, injects a telling flashback. Having met Arjun as a vulnerable young computer buff attempting to make sense of human beings, we are eventually presented with his younger self, the one that "first saw a computer when he was ten years old" and on a visit to his cousin's house in Bombay.
"By the age of thirteen Arjun had long discounted the theory that there were actual living things inside computers. But something mystical persisted, a hint, the presence of a vital spark." It is a novel about escape. While Arjun battles for justice, Leela, the beautiful young Indian actress whose image has been hijacked by the virus and has come to personify it, is herself desperate for freedom. Intent on flight from her life, her career, her fame and her mother - a wonderfully comic caricature - she finally decides she has had enough while working on a film set in Scotland. This makes problems for everyone, not least the equally lovely public relations ace, Gabriella.
But Gaby - as she is also known - although she is sympathetic to Leela's dilemma, Gaby has problems of her own, largely to do with her relationship with Guy Swift. In the characterisation of Guy, a crass businessman on the run from impending financial ruin, Kunzru has created a comic figure worthy of the best of Amis the Younger. Convinced that money is all, Swift, the boss of a failing company already on its way to oblivion, believes that just about everything, including his dying romance, can be solved by a chequebook. When Guy announces over supper, "Sweetie, I thought maybe we could try out Thailand this summer," the by now exasperated Gaby replies, "Try it out? Why? Do you want to buy it?" For all the topicality of Transmission, the narrative never becomes either contrived or chaotic, such is Kunzru's attention to detail, grasp of characterisation and control of his story. On many levels it is a comic satire, yet it also manages to be deadly serious. Transmission looks at the threats posed to economics and state security by a technologically transmitted virus - "Across America, citizens started to look with suspicion at the computers on their desks. These machines which had always terrorized them in small ways - by crashing, hanging, demanding meaningless upgrades or simply scolding them in the persona of an annoying cartoon paperclip - were now revealed to harbour something more sinister, something with an agenda. This was it, the enemy within . . ." Computer haters across the globe will applaud many of these sentiments. Meanwhile readers will enjoy this intelligent and potentially prophetic yarn which is, ultimately, as concerned with truth, as it is with telling a good story.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times.
Transmission. By Hari Kunzru, Hamish Hamilton, 281pp. £12.99