A million ideas pressurised into a crystal
Afew chapters into American journalist Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, the eponymous protagonist is taken to see a personal computer by his future wife, Margaret. It is 1975, a year after the Altair, the first PC, was released in the US market. Even as he observes the machine, King remembers reading about PCs in a magazine: “The era of the computer in every home — a favourite topic among science fiction writers — has arrived!”
It is a prescient scene, in which Vara delightfully mixes up our presumptions about fact and fiction, and suggests that things that seem like impossible nuggets of a writer’s imagination could soon be our reality. This could include designer babies, cybernetic drugs, omniscient AI, and mind-transfer, all of which and more are embedded in this mind-bending narrative.
King Rao is a novel of a million ideas and feelings and inventions, pressurised into a crystal. In fact, as novelist Karan Mahajan writes in one of the endorsements for this book, “it is three great novels in one.” One might dispute the adjective “great”, but one cannot disagree with the other claims Mahajan makes.
The framing narrative of the novel is that of Athena, King’s daughter, who, through cuttingedge technology, has been provided access to all of the internet as well as her father’s memories. She has been brought up in secret by King, like Miranda and Prospero, on an island in Puget Sound, to which he was banished after a devastating fall from the peaks of power and money.
Athena is accused of murdering King, and as she awaits judgement from an omniscient AI, she narrates all of King’s memories and her own, somewhat like Oskar Matzerath of
The Tin Drum.
This would have been sufficient for most writers, but not Vara, a former technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal and business editor for The New Yorker. There is more: the biography of King himself, a Dalit boy from an Andhra village whose sprawling family has gained a toehold in prosperity through investments in a coconut plantation. King is sent to study engineering in the US, and eventually becomes a tech billionaire bigger than Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg put together. He figures out a world government
The Immortal King Rao Vauhini Vara
374pp, ~699, HarperCollins where everyone is a Shareholder (with a capital “S”). But one of his experiments goes awfully wrong, causing deaths.
But even this is not enough for the ambition of King Rao. There is more. What more, you ask? Climate change, of course; and a utopian / dystopian society. So many different ideas expressed through information packed together like Wall-e’s trash compacts can overwhelm the reader. But the novel is saved by Vara’s linguistic skill.
However, The Immortal King Rao’s flaw lies in its strength — its immeasurable ambition. At times it can seem like a dish too rich; truffles and caviar and champagne. The dystopian world that Vara imagines is somewhat amateurish, when compared to say Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Also, Vara can err on the side of providing too much information. For instance, as the novel opens, King’s mother Radha, who dies at childbirth, steals a bar of Pears soap from the village grocer. The writer goes on to provide details on the Lever Brothers, the makers of the soap, and their racist advertising. Does the reader need to be assaulted with such details?
Nevertheless, this is an important book. Even as I was reading it last fortnight, news broke of Google cancelling Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s presentation on caste because of pushback within the company. It revealed, yet again, how
Indian expatriates transport caste with them. While many of the sci-fi elements in the novel might come to pass sooner rather than later, a Dalit boy from an Indian village making it
to the top job in an American tech giant might take longer.