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So Like Mike Then

Kunzru's wit acquires a bitter edge in this interweave of the real and the imagined in the year that was 1968

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So Like Mike Then
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You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world
Street Fighting Man

Heady times for young men like Chris Carver, 19, and a "fairly typical" second-year student atLSE: "which is to say I’d spent the previous 18 months in an overheated coffee-bar argument about the best way to destroy the class system, combat state oppression and end the War". In March 1968, 80,000 protesters battled with mounted police outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square—Chris just one of the hundreds rounded up and imprisoned. His political idealism leads him fromanti-Vietnam war protests to sit-ins and marches, experiments in communal living, squatters’ rights, clashes with the police over British imperialism in Ireland, the Anti-Nazi League, and finally to armed robbery, bombing, terrorism: any means necessary to smash the state, to ‘Off the Pig’.

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As their activism turns more extreme, Chris and his comrades become more isolated, more paranoid, more suspicious—and with reason. Not for them the ‘cop-out’ of Lennon’s lyrics ‘But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out’.

Kunzru charts Chris’s revolutionary career interweaving real events—the bombing of the Post Office tower in ’71, the hostage-taking at the West German embassy in Stockholm (puzzlingly relocated to Copenhagen in the novel) by the Baader-Meinhof Group in ’75—with imaginary ones, to describe a life that has unravelled and then been tortuously put back together: and is now under threat of coming to pieces yet again.

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On the eve of his 50th birthday, Chris—who’s lived for most of his life under the assumed identity of Mike Frame—takes flight. He is running from his past which, like a sinister shadow, chases after him. His wife, Miranda, and their 16-year-old daughter know nothing of his revolutionary past, but the return of middleman Miles Bridgeman into his life threatens to upset the applecart. Fleeing the country, he fetches up circling Paris on the motorway, caught in the spiralling web of his ‘revolutions’: not the smashing of the capitalist state, but tramping round the exercise yard on Pentonville prison, circumambulating a stupa in Thailand as he goes cold turkey from heroin, driving in circles through France searching for a woman who should be dead.

Like the hero of Kunzru’s first novel, The Impressionist, Mike is a character whose facade is at odds with his reality: both seem born of Kurt Vonnegut’s famous phrase, "we are what we pretend to be". But whereas Pran so fully invests in each of his disguises that his masks became more authentic than what lies beneath, Mike has lived more than half his life "in a kind of mental crouch", expecting at any moment to be ambushed by the ghost (himself) he is unable to lay to rest.

It’s hard to sympathise with someone like Mike who oscillates between a sneering, been-there-done-it machismo and the timidity of a man on the run. For the political extremist, no one deserves more scorn than the liberal—you respect your enemies, but your faint-hearted pals are the real canker at the heart of the apple. Mike scorns his wife—an Anita Roddick-like figure; her only crime that she is successful at running her natural beautycare company. Mike, however, "diagnoses" in her "the unease of a woman who’d once spoken about alternative lifestyles with the emphasis on ‘alternative’ rather than ‘lifestyles’". To have Mike’s tentative redemption hang upon the revelation of the value of their love is a serious flaw in an otherwise dark, convincing narrative, since nothing that’s gone before suggests that he views her with anything but contempt.

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Kunzru’s sharp wit, used to such good effect in his earlier work, here acquires a bitter edge. Thirty-nine years after ’68, as I watched pictures of riot-police on their horses, charging down climate change protesters around Heathrow on TV recently, I wondered how much has changed, and how little. Despite set mostly in the past, My Revolutions is a novel very much of the present. The queries it raises—of how idealism and extremism can end up looking like their opposites—are as pertinent now as ever.

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