Extraordinary aliens and angry racists
Writer Hari Kunzru is finally returning to Christchurch. But not in person. Philip Matthews talks to him.
T‘‘I imagine gradually people are getting a bit more woken up, especially after Christchurch.’’
Hari Kunzru
his is how it is for writers now. This is what they do. There was a time when they toured, unpacking suitcases in hotel rooms, signing books until their hands were sore and speaking before audiences. Now, in the time of Covid-19, they sit in their studies and Zoom to the world, and hope that the books lined up behind them don’t reveal anything embarrassing.
Rachael King, programme codirector of the Word Christchurch Festival 2021, had tried for years to get British writer Hari Kunzru to appear in Christchurch. He finally said yes, albeit virtually.
He will be one of the stars of Word’s The Faraway Near, an innovative venue inside Tu¯ ranga. It is set up to have the intimacy of a pub, with the guest writer beaming in to every table. Others include Helen McDonald (H is for Hawk), literary podcasters Andy Miller and John Mitchinson (Backlisted) and AC Grayling (The Frontiers of Knowledge).
Kunzru will be at home in Brooklyn, New York, on a Friday evening, but people at The Faraway Near will enjoy his company on a Saturday afternoon. Such radical technology.
A novelist, an essayist and a podcaster, Kunzru is a good candidate for this kind of thing.
He also has an unexpected relationship with Christchurch. Although he has lived his life in London and New York, and studied in Oxford and Coventry, there was a time when he spent summers in Christchurch.
That was in the early 2000s, before the earthquakes, the mosque attacks and Covid-19. He dated a London-based New Zealand artist, and they escaped cold London winters for Antipodean sunshine.
So in March 2019, he knew where the Al Noor mosque was; he knew Riccarton. He could picture the park across the road.
It hit home in another way. Kunzru has long been fascinated by internet culture in general, and white supremacist culture in particular.
‘‘When I was first online in the early 90s, I did go and look at far Right content and see what was out there,’’ he says. ‘‘It was that oldfashioned skinhead culture. It seemed stale, like it was never going to reach out of its natural limits.’’
But then there was what can only be called ‘‘a cultural flourishing’’ on the far Right. The racists discovered humour, irony and very contemporary subversiveness. The Christchurch terrorist ‘‘was soaked in this joking, not joking culture that I’ve watched gradually take hold in angry young men over years and years’’.
Kunzru’s New York Review of Books essay, ‘‘For the Lulz’’, is one of the best examinations of all this. In internet slang, ‘‘Lulz’’ means laughs. ‘‘It’s still striking to me how invisible a lot of these things are to mainstream decision-makers,’’ he says. ‘‘I imagine gradually people are getting a bit more woken up, especially after Christchurch.’’
The rise of this culture, and the parallel rise of Donald Trump, inspired his latest novel, Red Pill.
‘‘One of the feelings I wanted to write about was when a bizarre thing from the margins you may be paying attention to suddenly becomes everybody’s reality. This thing that you almost felt was just in your head actually metastasising and becoming a dominant part of the mainstream experience of the world.’’
‘‘Red pill’’ is also internet slang, lifted from The Matrix, to describe online radicalisation by the Right.
In the novel, an American writer does a residency in Berlin, where he becomes obsessed by a police reality show, Blue Lives, and its creator, an enigmatic Rightwing intellectual named Anton, who has a Steve Bannon-type vibe. It’s an eerily plausible version of the world we inhabit.
‘‘Meanwhile, it’s 2016,’’ as one reviewer said, ‘‘and a certain rough beast is slouching toward the White House.’’ It gets the paranoia and dread of those times.
‘‘Things have, on a personal level, felt less insecure in the last six months or so,’’ Kunzru admits. ‘‘I think I was at my most tense around 2016, 2017, when I really had no idea how far things were going to go. I’m not from the US, but I’ve lived here for 13 years and made a life here. I’m married to an American, and we have two American children, but we were having serious discussions about where we could go.
‘‘Where could we manage to make a living and also be safe? It felt like we had to at least consider that this was what it might have felt like in the early 1930s and the person who took too long to jump was going to get caught.’’
The dread has subsided for now, he says. ‘‘It felt justified at the time, and we’re very much not out of the woods yet. I don’t just mean Trump. I mean globally, there is a huge convulsion around ideas about democratic participation, an increase in inequality. We’re back to the social relations of the Gilded Age. I feel that in the future there’s going to be a great deal of political volatility. It’s sending people Left and sending people Right and what doesn’t seem sustainable is the centre.’’
The pandemic has produced further polarisations, or made existing ones visible. Covid masks are ideological symbols. A friend in Los Angeles told Kunzru that at high school, ‘‘Democrat kids wear masks and Trump kids don’t wear masks’’.
But still, Kunzru found the lockdown relatively bearable. He and his wife, writer Katie Kitamura, had childcare and managed to keep working. His main project in those months was an eight-episode podcast, Into the Zone. ‘‘I think it helped me psychologically to have something there was a short deadline for, that other people needed me to do, and that didn’t force me to be too much in my head.’’
He also liked the ‘‘weird intimacy’’ of the medium. It is an extraordinary series, covering everything from the racial origins of Europeans to life in communist East Germany, from Trump’s use of positive thinking to the history of country music. Each episode unfolds like a superbly-written essay. ‘‘It’s quite a challenge trying to do complicated ideas. There was one episode where I was trying to do 12-tone music and the dialectic, and it was hilarious trying to find ways that were crisp enough to get some idea of those things across.’’
His novels cover equally eclectic subjects. White Tears was about blues music. Gods Without Men dealt with UFO cults and My Revolutions was about 60s radicals. Earlier novels featured computer viruses and a young man who, like Kunzru, came from an English-Indian background.
Yes, UFOs. Kunzru was writing Gods Without Men when he came to the US on an artists and writers visa, as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability. It’s an amusing category in hindsight. ‘‘I’d say I was a writer, and you’d get into a conversation about what you write. Literary fiction is not what they wanted to hear about. So I used to say ‘I’m writing a book about UFOs’ and invariably that got a positive response. You’d end up having a chat with the immigration guy about what you believe. It was the most all-American thing to be interested in UFOs. That says something about the desires people have for this to be evidence of something extraterrestrial.’’
UFOs have also come in from the margins, with the US Government recently admitting that some filmed sightings can’t be explained. For people who spent decades observing fringe culture, this admission is remarkable. Kunzru has been following arguments between sceptics and believers, and will admit that one of the released UFO clips feels ‘‘truthy’’ to him.
There is intellect, and then there are deeper feelings. When he first heard of these official clips, did they strike a chord with him? Did he, as they say, want to believe?
‘‘There’s the excitement that the world is larger than we’ve dreamed of,’’ he agrees. ‘‘I definitely share that.’’
Details about The Faraway Near can be found at wordchristchurch. co.nz.