The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Penguin Books, 2007
Our author, Hamid grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, where this novella is set. As a gifted scholar, he attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. He brings all this personal experience to bear on this short novel. (It is worth noting, also, that his essays and journalism have also appeared in Time, the New York Times and the Independent among other publications.)
In this novella, we are presented with a Pakistani Muslim take on the West. Now, we in this part of the globe need to read as much literature as possible emanating from the East so that we may understand the standpoint of modern Islam. Needless to say, there is a sheer lack of understanding of the world of Islam in our Western world. Any literature that will increase our understanding of this matter is more than welcome.
This novella is written in a rather unique style. We are the listeners to a monologue by a Pakistani from Lahore, one who has spent a considerable amount of time in the West, but has opted to quit the world of high finance in New York after the devastation of 9/11. Strangely enough, the opening reminded this reader of S.T. Coleridge’s famous ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The narrator of that long poem stopped guests coming from a wedding to tell them his tale of the weird and the wonderful, of the sad and the tragic. Here, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, we have the narrator sit down beside an American visitor in a restaurant in Lahore, and regale him with the story of his life, and more, namely a moving depiction of the chasm between the East and the West...
The listener is anonymous, as is the speaker at first, though we learn later that he is called Changez. In fact, we are given very few names in this novel. The narrator starts into his tale of success and tragedy immediately - from the off, as it were. This novella begins: “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America.” (p. 1) And that is essentially what this book is about – trying to explain why the West should not be afraid of the ordinary everyday good living and law-abiding followers of Islam.
Interestingly, the only characters who feature in this little book, outside the narrator, Changez, and the unknown visitor/listener who never speaks, are the characters of Erica and Chris, the former being a well-off student whom our narrator fell in love with and with whom he had a short physical affair, while the latter, Chris, was Erica’s boyfriend who had died of cancer while only in his early twenties. Erica cannot face life without the presence of her dead lover and so succumbs to a mental breakdown which eventually leads to her suicide. In this novella, the narrator, Changez, tries to save her from her psychosis, but needless to say, fails abysmally. The only other character worth mentioning here is Jim, Changez’s boss at Underwood Samson, the international valuation firm where Changez gets a wonderfully well-paid job as a valuer.
Erica found Changez to be a wonderfully understanding and sympathetic friend with whom she could talk at the deepest possible level. Changez falls deeply in love with her, only to find that he really cannot reach her as she is lost in her past. She is still, sadly and dementedly in love with her lost lover, Chris. Changez simply cannot reach her. In a sense, this story is a parallel story to the main plot of the book, namely the lack of understanding between East and West. While Changez cannot reach Erica because she is lost in her past, neither can he understand the West because it, too, is lost in its past. However, the same can be said indeed for Islam, and while Hamid fails to point this out, it is to be inferred from the text, I believe. It is left to the reader to make this inference.
The narrator is constantly attempting to reassure his guest that he is a bona fides person, that X or Y in the restaurant is not looking at him, that Easterners with beards are not necessarily a threat to his well-being, that the Caucasian need not be ill-at-ease in Pakistan. He tells his anonymous listener succinctly to “relinquish your foreigner’s sense of being watched.” (p. 35)
While Changez is initially embarrassed at his relative poverty in comparison to the wealth obtained in the U.S., he becomes highly critical eventually of a system which ranks people every six months on their performance. (p.39) The “primacy of efficiency” and the doctrine of “maximum return” (p. 41) eventually pale for Changez as he experiences the hostility of Americans after 9/11 and experiences his inability to do anything to save Erica from herself.
Hamid also makes rather polemical points like the common Westerner’s recoiling from the reality of poverty in Eastern nations like Pakistan. Also, our narrator explains that alcohol for a Pakistani is tantamount to what marijuana is for a Westerner: “In truth, many Pakistanis drink; alcohol’s illegality in our country has roughly the same effect as marijuana in yours.” (p. 61) However, he can be scathing of the gross disparity of wealth in Eastern countries, and homes in on Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, as a great example of such gross inequality. He is excoriating in his criticism of capitalism with its “wanting everything now!” mentality. (p. 74) In this, I believe, he is rather like the newly converted former cigarette smoker or like St Augustine who, having lived his years of succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh, begins in earnest to almost hate anything to do with the pleasures of the body. Then, our author points out a rather old and hackneyed gem of wisdom which we learned years ago at college – in the 1970s here in Ireland, even – that America and the West did not practise “delayed gratification” which the East had to practise out of necessity. These rather preachy gems give this novella a doctrinaire and didactic twist which would have certainly lost it the Man Booker Prize in my estimation.
And yet, this is a novel of layers, of images and symbols which deepen the surface story. When we read the following we become aware of the depth of meaning in the symbolism of the falling darkness of the night. There is a hint of possible war between East and West in these words: “Night is deepening around us, and despite the lights above this market, your face is mostly in shadow. Let us, like the bats exercise our other senses since our eyes are of diminishing utility.” This is surely a metaphor inviting us to reach out and try to understand each other, the Westerner and the Easterner, in all our human frailty without recourse to hatred and war.
It is also interesting to note that the “Fundamentalism” of the title refers to the capitalist fundamentalism of the West – and what an abyss that has got most countries in the West into recently – and not the religious fundamentalism of Islam. It is good for us to be reminded that our fundamentalism is of an equally entrenched kind, that capitalism is as much a fundamentalism as that of religion. Hence, the title could read “The Reluctant Capitalist.” In this regard, then, this novella makes us question our own values in the West.
There is much to be contemplated in this novel, then, including a short visit to Pablo Neruda’s house in Chile which is the turning point for Changez, where he decides that it is time to quit his job in high finance and embrace once again his traditional culture in Pakistan. However, this novella lacked a certain depth and a certain power which would have lifted it off the shortlist to win that elusive literary prize.
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