Reading the signs of the times

Published on Friday 14 March 2008 16:53

Hanif Kureishi's familiar formula of sex and intrigue is informed by his Seventies sensibilities, writes Anna Millar SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

Hanif Kureishi

Faber, 15.99

'SECRETS are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away." That this is the reader's introduction to Jamal, the narrator, in Hanif Kureishi's latest social work, Something To Tell You, is little surprise. As a writer, Kureishi has built his craft around the dissident woes of misplaced desire, furtive lovers and a longing to understand and be understood culturally and emotionally.

Jamal is, in essence, no different. A psychoanalyst by profession, he is paid to be a "reader of minds and signs", his own life a silent search for some redemption from a dark secret from his youth, his now mid-life half lived through the lives of others.

Described in flashbacks from the Seventies to the Nineties, sexual perversion, morality, death, celebrity, incest, murder and love all feature as Kureishi crashes from one memory to the next. His skill for capturing the social climate doesn't desert him in his snapshot of Seventies suburbia. "Sometimes people asked if I were 'Mediterranean', otherwise, there were few Asian people where we lived," explains the young Jamal. "Most whites considered Asians to be 'inferior', less intelligent, less everything good."

This is an image all the more prominent when, some years later, Jamal returns to an altogether different scene, his early years paving the way for a lifelong question mark over his own sense of self: "The bus slow, low and long, was noisy with kids … It stank, with every nation seemingly represented, and I wondered if anyone would have been able to identify the city just from the inhabitants of the bus."

Kureishi effectively muddles the political with the personal and (like Buddha Of Suburbia before it) casts a heartbreaking eye over the family in crisis, as he toys menacingly and satirically with the familiar and unfamiliar: "At home, sitting in front of the TV eating Vesta curries, the closest we came to the subcontinent, we kept him with us by saying things like 'Dad wouldn't like you doing that'. He became a made-up father, a collage assembled from bits of the real one." Later, following the hefty weight of Thatcherite Britain, Kureishi deftly showcases the early Nineties search for meaning through celebrity and personal reinvention.

It is when Kureishi focuses too innately on the personal that things go a little off kilter. Lying at the heart of Something To Tell You is the "secret" Jamal holds with the almost mystical and troubled Ajita, his great love. Constantly referred to in flashback and finally realised some years later, it is the prominence with which Kureishi holds this strand of the story that occasionally frustrates. While his most highly sexed novel, Intimacy, described sex as brutal and unerotic but none the less fascinating, here Kureishi struggles to make the reader care: the pure passion of the pair sadly lacking.

Infinitely more interesting is Jamal's sister's relationship with his best friend Henry and their unexpected interest in sex clubs.

At its best, there is enough energy and interest in Something To Tell You to distil the era and capture the sounds, thoughts and actions of Kureishi's characters. At worst, there is a sense of limbo; an awareness that Kureishi's well-scribed cultural boundaries and titillating sexual taboos are somehow too familiar (a fact not helped by the name-checking of real celebrities throughout the book). This aspect resonates on the final pages of the book, in Jamal's altogether uninspired conclusion, as he settles down with another patient: "I am no longer young, and not yet old. I have reached the age of wondering how I will live, and what I will do, with my remaining time and desire. I am not, I feel certain, finished with love, either in its benign or disorderly form, nor it with me."

Kureishi believes he has something (new) to tell us, and his fans will certainly not be disappointed, but for all its deft imagery and slick design, one is left with an unexpected appetite for something more.