This book, a novel by Mohsin Hamid, was not at all what I expected. I included it on/in my holiday reading-pile as a bit of light relief from the non-fiction otherwise comprising the pile, assuming from the blurb-quotes and title that it would be a very well-written exciting funny satirical romp of a rags-to-riches romance story. And, to be fair, it is. But I was unprepared for the sheer brilliance of Hamid as a writer - this is a novel that sucks you into the life of its protagonist with all the raw power of a momentarily-startled goose getting sucked through a jet turbine. I would've finished it all in one go did circumstances not conspire against me.* Before I even start discussing the plot, style, themes, character and setting, various other general brilliances, in any detail - I fully exhort anyone who likes a good novel to bump this one up to near the top of your To-Read List** as it's one of the most original, powerful, and downright gorgeously life-affirming things I've ever read. Maybe don't even bother reading this post - I don't have any particularly interesting reflections on it, I'm just going to talk about why I think it's such a great novel, in considerable detail.
So.
[Having just finished writing this post I feel obliged to add - SPOILER ALERT.]
Basically, the novel is about a man from Asia who is born in poverty and becomes extremely wealthy. We never learn his name - the book is written in second person, as if you, the reader, are this character - and far from disorienting or gimmicky, this serves to hit home the interminable squalour or dizzying privilege experienced throughout. The novel spans this man's entire life; starting out as a sickly rural toddler teetering on the cusp of possibility and prospects seeming minimal (even survival only down as a maybe), before your father moves the family to the city, you enrol in school and do well, you get a job and put in the effort to learn business smarts as well as a bank of global cultural reference-points, you make it into higher education and navigate the ideologues and religious-political activism that dominate there, you gain further work experience paying close attention to the modes of a man who knows what he's doing, you turn an entrepreneurial hand and start producing and selling bottled water (a much-needed good) which, following a few of the standard hiccups and ladders (violent clashes with more established business rivals, greasing the right palms, striking back-room deals with political figures, you know) blossoms into a hugely successful corporate entity - well, for a while - and finally, you take stock of what's been worthwhile in your life, and you die. Somewhere along the way you marry a wife*** whom you go on to neglect, but more importantly (to the novel), as a teenager you strike up a friendship with a girl, fall for her, only for her (following a youth-shattering pleasurable encounter) to leave and pursue a career in modelling, which you follow closely for the next decade or so, semi-accidentally running into her later in life, and then slowly fading from each other's memory (until, spoilers).
The narration does occasionally lay off from being purely second person recount of your life to take flights of descriptive detail about other characters' lives, situations, struggles; and similarly to describe the frenetic dynamic surroundings enabling the events of the story - that of massive rapid socioeconomic development in Asia.**** These latter passages help place 'your' story in context (one poor kid who made all the right moves and got lucky out of an enormous continent of poor kids who, largely, don't make the right moves and/or don't get lucky - the former passages about other characters help flesh this out, often twisting a dagger of bleak realism through your gut with a single deft sentence).
Awareness of making these right moves forms a large part of the basis of the structure and style of the novel - it's written (very loosely) as a parody of a self-help book.***** Chapter one, where you begin as a child on the brink of serious illness in the helpless deserts of opportunity that are the underdeveloped countryside, is titled 'Move to the city' - which, in that chapter, thanks to your father's family spirit, you do, and you have taken the right first step in becoming filthy rich in rising Asia. In subsequent steps the narrator (i.e. the writer of the self-help book) walks you through the successes of the protagonist (i.e. you) in becoming filthy rich, 'Learn from a master', 'Be prepared to use violence', 'Befriend a bureaucrat', and so on - with the exception of the chapter in which you fall in love with the girl, which is titled 'Don't fall in love' on account of infatuation's (especially with a girl who soon after your first encounter runs off and becomes a famous model while you're still struggling through entry-level business experience) being a hindrance rather than a help in your striving to become filthy rich. However, this element takes on a new vigour in the book's later chapters, when you are old and losing control of the empire you have built, when you are verging on being forgotten and dead: the narrator (who to be fair is playfully insightful throughout, in short bursts at the fore of each chapter) takes stock of the fact that you, though having become filthy rich, seem to have lost steam.
The 'How To' intentionality lends a dogged single-mindedness to the protagonist's pursuit of wealth (one that, given his abject poverty faced in early chapters, can be entirely appreciated) that leaves by the wayside relationships with parents, siblings, wife, son - not ignored, but not prioritised: through the bulk of the book, you are following the self-help guide to getting filthy rich, and your mislaid attention is of course attended to by the narrator and it hits home superbly. Only when your energy is spent and your business in the hands of another do you reassess your priorities, regret the marriage you allowed to crumble, and by a chance meeting with the girl (also now very old) stumble into a more-or-less happy ending. I don't think by losing the bulk of his wealth and re-encountering his first love the protagonist's plight is meant to show us that young love is what really matters, or even in a skewed way to show us the opposite (classic novel trajectory): I think Hamid is doing something far more fundamental - to make us attentive to real life as it is lived, in the moment, shared with people one loves. The protagonist's pursuit of wealth tears him away from his birth family when they need his help (and he does help out financially but his relationships with them stultify until they, having not become filthy rich to escape the oppressive conditions of rising Asia, succumb to various ills long before he does) and even when he starts his own family his prominent position occupies all his concerns - so that while his wife and son are provided for far above the majority of the population or the protagonist when he was young, they are starved for him relationally. Hamid is not saying 'oh but then he meets the girl again so it's a happy ending' - he is saying DO NOT FORGET WHAT IS IMPORTANT: PEOPLE - especially across the span of a whole life, mislaid priorities can leave us empty even when we achieve great things in one particular field, and when these achievements are stripped away, what are we left with? The protagonist and the girl meeting again in old age is not a solution, it is a consolation, where you, with all your friends and family dead, your wife moved on, your son busy with work as you were at his age, and you not even filthy rich anymore - find some comfort in finding someone to share the last few lonely years with, and appreciate properly, living in them as they are, loving who you are with.
The whole style and structure and story is a magnificent testament to the fundamental importance of empathy: of it being part of how we are as human persons that we constantly seek to know and care how those around us are feeling, and respond rightly to that, rather than assuming people to be ticking along aright and continuing following whatever self-help guide to a less important goal is playing itself out in our heads. Reading and stories are part of this learning process, as the narrator sometimes discusses - indeed, getting emotionally involved in a good novel is probably about as empathetic an experience as one can possibly have on your own. And this novel does so like very few others (no doubt, literally making 'you' the protagonist helps). I rarely quote passages from books I'm blogging about, but here's a relevant passage from the final chapter:
"As you create this story and I create this story, I would like to ask you how things were. I would like to ask you about the person who held your hand when dust went in your eye or ran with you from the rain. I would like to tarry here awhile with you, or if tarrying is impossible, to transcend my here, with your permission, in your creation, so tantalizing to me and so unknown. That I can't do this doesn't stop me from imagining it. And how strange that when I imagine, I feel. The capacity for empathy is a funny thing."
Truly, Mohsin Hamid is one of the greatest novelists I have read, and this paragraph I hope serves to show that he genuinely understands the raw power that stories have, and is using the medium of the written word for its greatest possible use - to inspire and empower us to do what we know is fundamental: empathise.
I'm done. Read this book.
* I started it during the Megabus journey from Barcelona to Paris to Amsterdam (a 25-hour crawl but I hate flying on eco-principle and this was super cheap for such a long drive), hopping from a family holiday to a techno festival, and was engrossed after about three pages, but eventually had to sleep. And then I couldn't read it when I got to Amsterdam because there was a bloody festival going on, and my engrossment passed during all the Quality Music - so I had to wait a few days for a truly spare moment (the Megabus back to London) to dive back in. I think this might be the only novel I've completed having read exclusively during international bus journeys.
** Do people other than me have To-Read Lists? Dunno. You should. To start you off, here's three novels with a life-spanning emotional heft similar to this one: 1, 2, 3.
*** None of the characters have names - they are all referred to either in immediate situational context or via their relationship to you (e.g. 'your wife', 'your father', 'the girl'), a touch which lends the reader's walkthrough of the protagonist's life an earthy, human, memory-like quality. You have to picture the scene, because there aren't specific verbal labels to latch onto in your head.
**** It doesn't really matter where in Asia - the cultural references are so generic that it could be anywhere from Afghanistan to China to India to Myanmar - what is important is the enormity of globalisation's impact on the societies and economies on the continent where this is happening, which has been by no means uniform, but the events of the novel are characterised so much by this process above country-specific culture that the vagueness probably helps the reader get sucked in, fleshing out the look and feel of the protagonist's environment with whatever Asian culture we're most familiar with. Nifty trick to grab a global readership - 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Pakistan' (cited as that's where Mohsin Hamid is from but I haven't a clue if he wrote it with a specific nation in mind as setting) just doesn't smack of the same seismic shift, which is a key ingredient in the book's punch.
***** Hence the title.
