MicroPakistan

Mohsin Hamid has produced a dull novel that is bereft of any creativity or literary value. I would like to be fair to him and his labour but there is not much to celebrate in his latest novel Reluctant Fundamentalist. Reading, like any other important activity, is sacred and I take it very seriously. Firstly, I think the title of Mr. Hamid’s novel tells you all without even reading 170 pages of it. So the publishers have done an abominable job with respect to naming the novel because it leaves little or even nothing for imagination. Readers who like good literature will see through this cheap technique. Even before flipping a page of this novel one is thinking about the eventual fate of the reluctant fundamentalist. Is the literature reading public so inept that we have to be foretold about the central idea of the novel by its name? I think that is not the case because the novel is very bad as a whole. So it does not make much difference but the name of the novel is purely to sell the book in the post Osama Bin Ladin world. So the person who named this novel ought to be ashamed of him or herself. Perhaps it was done deliberately, for the publishers wanted to find a convenient or even a cheap way to sell a book, which in an ideal world should not have been published.

It is repeated everywhere on the Internet and elsewhere that Mr. Hamid is from Lahore, Pakistan. He was educated at the Aitcheson College, Lahore, Princeton University and Harvard Law School. After finishing his education he became a management consultant at the premier management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Why is all this important for us to know? It should not be of any consequence to us. I am sure if we, the public at large, all worked in employment agencies then it would, for Mr. Hamid has an excellent resume, but all this background information is very relevant to his novel as well. In fact, the idea for this novel must have come to Mr. Hamid by looking at himself in the mirror and then reading some stories on western educated students turning terrorists must have inspired him to create a novel out of it. So he created a person with his background and turned him into a person who becomes a reluctant fundamentalist. That is all there is in this novel. But let me still try to give you some more perspective on this grotesque novel.

Reluctant Fundamentalist is like a bad formulaic American action film. My guess is that Mr. Hamid must have watched his share of ghastly American action films and as a result, he must have retained some imprint of it in his mind. Not surprisingly, Reluctant Fundamentalist is about a young man who leaves Lahore because he received a full scholarship to attend the Princeton University. Can you guess what happens next? He graduates top of his class at Princeton and gets hired by the top US Valuation firm, which, it has to be told, only hires the best of the best students from the top US universities. Everyone at Princeton wants this job but Mr. Hamid’s reluctant fundamentalist gets it. And with this job he had made an entry into a world which he would have no access to had he not been equipped with a business card of his valuation firm. Whilst I was reading this book, I kept on asking myself, when is this person going to become a reluctant fundamentalist and what will drive him to become one. Mind you: that part never comes.

This novel is not held by imaginative or creative force but the only reason that compels you to read it is to find out what is going to happen to this academic genius from Princeton. It reads like a tabloid story. Suddenly, on his trip to Chile, he wakes up to find out that he was from a poor country and was the ‘other’ in the world where empires ruled everyone else. Mr. Hamid fails to bring forth this transformation in this person. True, this has happened before but Mr. Hamid fails to capture this transformation. Then this story falls flat on its nose and passes out.

After coming back from Chile, the proto-reluctant-fundamentalist decides to wear a beard and this alarms everyone in his New York City office. The post 9/11 environment and threat to Pakistan drives him to hate the life he has embraced in the post 9/11 United States and he decides to fly back to Lahore for good. I must add that there is also a love story in the middle of this as well. So now that all the ingredients of this novel are in place, now let me make some judgements.

This is a horrible little novel which leaves one to imagine why would Mr. Hamid write this and why would someone publish this drivel. Reading this novel did not affect me at all and there was nothing special about the narrative. I found it annoying and boring to read the mirrored narrative created by the author. But what bewilders me is that so many big names (for e.g. Philip Pullman, Kiran Desai and Hisham Matar) have given this novel great reviews. I could not believe that anyone could write a good review after reading this novel. Did they really read this novel? If yes, then I wonder, why did they give it such good reviews? I am not even a writer, let alone a novelist, and it is graphically obvious to me after reading this novel that Mr. Hamid has produced a literary titanic. However, it surprises me that after reading this novel some people have compared him to great Camus. If this was the case then I would have attempted to write the definitive obituary of novel. Finally: if you want to read this piffle of a novel then go ahead and waste your money but try to read it reluctantly because it will be a dreary and mortifyingly uninteresting journey.