Saturday, March 13, 2010
One of Britain’s best-known Anglo-Asian writers tells David Kernek that, unlike many of his fictional creations, he’s a happy man.
ONCE upon a time, back in the 20th century, Hanif Kureishi wrote his way into British literature with sparkling tales — screenplays, short stories and novels that were in part autobiographical — of rebellion, racism, rock ’n’ roll, recreational drugs, sex and relationships as durable as a match flame in a hurricane.
He was an angry, hedonistic young Anglo-Asian man whose early works, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, chronicled the lives of first and second generation Pakistani and Indian immigrants as they laboured to survive and prosper in the wastelands of suburban south London.
Well, you can’t be angry forever. Or, at least, Hanif Kureishi can’t, thanks perhaps to the years of weekly Freudian therapy he’s been having and, of course, to the triumph of time over passion. Now middle-aged and middle class, the long, black hair of his youth is short and grey and he has fame, money and a CBE for services to literature and drama.
When we meet at his favourite venue for interviews — the Café Rouge in Shepherds Bush, west London — he brushes aside the roasting the London critics gave his National Theatre adaptation of The Black Album — a critically acclaimed novel about the rise of radical Islam in Britain. It hadn’t, they groaned, moved at all well from the page to the stage.
"I’m of an age now when I don’t get discouraged," he says. "I just carry on. Now and again you get a bollocking; so it goes. But it did very well at the box office."
Over tea and coffee, the conversation moves on to topics with which more than a few inhabitants of Kureishiland struggle — marital fidelity, or lack of it, experiments in personal relationships, the collision of duty and desire. "Marriage, separation, kids here and there," says Jamal in Something To Tell You. "No one gets married at 25 and stays with their partner until they’re 70 unless they are deficient in imagination." In his novella The Body, an oldish man whose brain is transplanted into the body of a vigorous youth owns up: "From the start of our marriage I had decided to be faithful to Margot, without, of course, having enough idea of the difficulty."
How, these days, did he see affairs and other personal arrangements recognising the limits of marital fidelity?
"Oh no, not now. I want a quiet life. I don’t want erotic over-excitement. I’ve tried it, and the trouble is that the ideology in this area doesn’t overcome the emotions, the jealousy, which is toxic. The people I know now, my friends in London, are really quite conservative in their lives. They’re either in stable relationships or quite sad and lonely people trying to meet men and women through the internet."
He might have given up on erotic over-excitement, but — as the seven new tales in Hanif Kureishi: Collected Stories demonstrate — he’s as interested as he ever was in the quandaries at the heart of the human condition.
"They’re the questions about how to live, how we get all of our needs, our conflicting needs, satisfied. Marriage, forms of love, how we satisfy our desires without creating chaos… how we deal with these things, that’s the question literature is always about. Just read Anna Karenina."
Or, indeed, read his own short, sad and shockingly honest novel — thought to be semi-autobiographical — Intimacy, the reflections of a writer as he prepares to leave his wife, two young children and domestic drudgery for the novel sexual favours offered by a younger woman. A male friend tells him: "Marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell and a reason for living."
His startling new fictions paint arresting pictures of menace and threat, obligation and guilt. A woman and her child are attacked by feral dogs; the cosy life of a writer is disturbed when an ex-lover — one third of a menage-a-trois he’d enjoyed as a younger man — makes an inconvenient request; and in The Decline of the West, a heavily mortgaged middle-ranking business executive sees his family’s middle class comforts flattened by the stupidity of the banks and the collapse of the Blair-Brown boom.
"When Labour won the 1997 election, most of us had a huge sense of optimism," he says. "After the Thatcher years, we had someone we thought was a radical leader and who had a large majority. But there have been three huge disappointments — education, the Iraq war and social justice. What a waste. Perhaps we’d have been better off being more cynical, don’t you think?"
One of the most chilling stories in the new collection is Weddings and Beheadings, the calmly related thoughts of a cameraman who is forced to film terrorist beheadings. It was shortlisted for Britain’s National Short Story prize.
He agrees that the western fear of Islamic fundamentalism is in fact justified. "Yes, yes, it is dangerous, no doubt about that. But I think it’s more dangerous in terms of values than bombs. It’s a threat to our liberal values — free speech, education — values we’ve always taken for granted, like fish in water."
There are signs of reform in Islam, he believes. "I think that’s happening. Muslims are now thinking about what it is they believe in. The Muslims I know entirely dissociate themselves from the Jihadists."
He has, though, spent time visiting mosques in east London, a recruiting ground for Islamic extremists, talking to young Asians with identity crises and, often, no jobs. He’s stopped doing it, likening it to negotiating with Scientologists. "You can’t convert these kids. You just have to defend your values."
The bigger Islamic and Taliban threat, he says, is to Pakistan.
"I have family members who are in the fashion business there — I know you might not associate Pakistan with fashion — and they’ve been told that their business is unIslamic. It’s very difficult, because the middle class way of life is threatened by the Taliban, but there’s also support for the Taliban among the middle classes because of their suspicion of the USA."
Racism, identity crises, conflict between desire and duty, economic collapse and religious extremism? Is Kureishiland a vale of tears?
"The planet is a very violent place," he says. "It’s unforgiving and cruel. But there are also people who are kind, loving and sensual. So, if it was only a vale of tears, you’d know where you were and you’d shoot yourself, wouldn’t you? No, I’m happy and lucky… no, fortunate is a better word. I’ve lived a life of freedom and I know interesting people in this most interesting of cities.
"My wife says to me, ‘all you do is have lunch and dinner’, but that’s all I want to do, have lunch and dinner with my interesting friends. I’m not lonely when I’m writing; I’m busy writing. I’m lonely when I stop writing, so that’s why I do lunch and dinner. People say writers should hide away in an isolated chalet in the Alps. I couldn’t think of anything worse."
Kureishi’s passion for London — and especially for Shepherds Bush, just to the west of Notting Hill — is undiminished.
"I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. When I want a change of scene, we take family holidays in Battle, near Hastings on the Sussex coast, and I do the literary festivals here in Britain and abroad. They’re very important now for selling books, and that’s something that many writers forget, that they and their publishers are in the business of selling books. Franz Kafka wouldn’t think like that, but he didn’t have three kids at private school."
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