SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

Hanif Kureishi - Faber and Faber; $38.00,

reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan.

This review first appeared in the New Zealkand Herald's Canvas magazine and is reproduced here by kind permission of the Herald and the reviewer. I had read the book and was about to write a review myself but thought Gordon caught the book perfectly. So here it is.

This novel sprawls around a murder committed early in the book and in the lives of the characters, and the incident remains the thread that pulls through the plot as these characters age and pursue their separate lives. A young, English-born Pakistani, Jamal, is the murderer, along with two others. You might as well know this because the event is described and names named as it happens.
As a child Jamal was abandoned in London by his father, who returned to his native land and left his children to fare as best they could with their mother. The sister, Miriam, remains, throughout the story, obsessed with herself and sex, but Jamal is scholarly and becomes a professional psychiatrist.

Early in the novel, Jamal discovers that the young woman with whom he is deeply in love is being raped regularly by her father. He and two friends go to the father’s place of work late at night with the intention of roughing him up. During the struggle they kill him. The daughter flees to India, and her gay brother becomes a successful and wealthy pop star. Some years later, they are all reunited.
The question nagging me through the early chapters was whether I wanted to hang around long enough to follow the fate of the characters concerned. They are an eccentric lot, their lives driven largely by drugs and sex, the stuff of so many modern urban novels, and I found it hard to relate to them. But then I was hooked. Kureishi is a sophisticated story-teller, seductive in urging the reader on. His style is aphoristic, flawed sometimes by glibness, but his characterisations are wonderfully consistent.

Kureishi is the English-born son of a Pakistani father and English mother and has been hugely successful in Britain as a screen-writer. He has received Academy Award screenplay nominations for My Beautiful Laundrette and, more recently, for Venus (which starred Peter O’Toole). In the early 1990s, I was wowed by The Buddha of Suburbia, which won him the Whitbread Prize for best first novel, and much of the infectious energy of that has carried through into this latest story.
Some chapters in Something to Tell You run almost like separate essays – one on modern media, for example, and another on Pakistan through the eyes of an English-born Pakistani -- but they fit neatly enough into the story.

This is a satisfying novel for a reader patient through a slow start.

FOOTNOTE:

Bookman Beattie observes that the cover illustrations, done by Darren Wall at Faber, are both subtle and quite erotic, something most readers I have spoken to had not noticed before I pointed it out.