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flying_monkey's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Hari Kuzru is one of my favourite contemporary writers and his last novel, White Tears, was the Get Out of literary fiction. Red Pill deals with similarly contemporary issues, but it's set very specifically in 2016 in the run-up to the election of Donald Trump, although this doesn't become signficant until near the end of the book.
The protagonist is a poor Kunzru substitute, Gary Bridgeman, an aimless British-Indian writer (not of the same level as Kunzru) transplanted to New York, with a lovely and brilliant Japanese wife, Rei, and 3-year old daughter, Nina. Due to some limited success with a popular book on aesthetics, he is offered a 3-month residency by an eccentric German oganisation, the Deuter Foundation, located in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, just across the lake from the house where the Nazis developed the Final Solution. Like me, Gary is already obsessed with surveillance and privacy and somewhat paranoid, and it turns out that the foundation has completely the opposite views and expects its fellows to work completely transparently and engage with the other resident fellows. Needless to say, Gary reacts badly and retreats into his room and then tries to escape into the local area and the centre of Berlin. He encounters Syrian refugees and ex-Stasi informers, but most fatefully of all, Anton, a mephistophelean white supremacist who happens to be the showrunner of a TV show Gary is obsessed with, a truly horrific police drama called Blue Lives (and yes, you can't help adding the 'Matter' at the end). From here things go very badly wrong for Gary.
Red Pill is another beautifully written and genuinely disturbing novel from Kunzru, but I can't help feeling, coming out as it does as Trump is on his way out, that it feels much more temporally specific and maybe even dated, than White Tears. There is a lot going on and some of it feels forced, and certainly the story of the Stasi informer reads so much like an outtake from or a riff off Anna Funder's brilliant book, Stasiland, I was surprised not to see her name in the acknowledgements. It's still head and shoulders above most other things I've read this year.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness
Moderate: Racism and Suicidal thoughts
Minor: Genocide
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