Hari Kunzru is one of those names I’ve repeatedly come across when browsing bookshelves over the years but I’ve never read one of his books before. So when I saw Red Pill, which sounded topical and potentially interesting in a transgressive/satirical way, I decided to finally find out if this was a writer for me. And - nope!
The premise of Red Pill is a middle-aged academic accepts an invitation to go to an all-expenses-paid three-month artistic retreat in Berlin in an attempt to sort out his writer’s block. What the book is about is another thing entirely and I’m not convinced Kunzru even knows! The novel is such a mess of seemingly-disconnected tangents.
SPOILERS
Shortly after arriving, the narrator becomes fixated on Heinrich von Kleist (the chap on the cover with the Superman laser eyes), an obscure German Romantic poet who committed suicide, with his friend’s wife, on the banks of the Wannsee, near to the retreat a couple centuries ago. That leads into a tangent about one of the retreat’s cleaners and her youth as a punk rocker in East Germany and subsequent experience with the Stasi.
Then our narrator becomes obsessed with a fictional gritty crime show called Blue Lives and conveniently happens across the show’s creator at a random party he goes to. This creator then, incongruously, decides to become the narrator’s cartoonishly evil nemesis, leading to the narrator’s full mental breakdown. The book ends anticlimactically and underwhelmingly with the conclusion of the 2016 election.
Oh… k?
I really don’t know what to make of it all. I guess the premise and parts of the first act were mildly compelling. I enjoyed finding out about Kleist and I thought Kunzru would explore the tantalising mystery of why the institute was spying on its guests, but he doesn’t. Other than that, I was mostly bored with what I was reading. The maid’s Stasi past was dull, the way all these divergent narratives came together was sloppy and contrived, and the entire characterisation of Anton, the Blue Lives creator, was bafflingly silly from start to finish. Why would this total stranger decide to go out of their way to destroy another total stranger’s life on a whim for no reason other than a passing disagreement over politics? It made no sense. Anton leads a busy life - who is this unknown academic to him??
I mean, really, what was the point - right wing = wrong wing, or something equally trite? Or the ultra-sensitive narrator was simply plain nuts and got pushed over the edge by awful aspects of our modern world? That’s unimpressive. Ironically, and probably intentionally, the criticism the narrator levels at Anton about his view of the world being full of nihilism and pessimism is reflected in this novel/the narrator’s life - which means the Forces of Darkness won in the end or something gloomy…?
END SPOILERS
No idea what Hari Kunzru was driving at in this very muddled novel but whatever it was wasn’t entertaining or thoughtful. If this is what the red pill does, take the blue pill instead and don’t head down this dead-end path!
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