Transmission by Hari Kunzru : Book Review

by Carmen Nge


Techies are never given enough respect. We ridicule them about their anti-social behaviour and joke about their lack of fashion sense. We watch movies that exaggerate their thick-framed spectacles and satirize their loveless lives in front of their computer monitors.

But when robust viruses and sneaky computer worms infiltrate and decimate mainframes, servers and international databases worth billions, we genuflect at the feet of these geeks. We wait for their viral-busting verdicts and deplore the state of our own ignorance, secure in the knowledge that these masters of technology will prevail and save us from certain doom.

Let’s face it: computer geeks wield power. They are capable of binary-coded benevolence but they are also capable of unleashing great terror unto the world. Such is the thin premise of Transmission, a highly enjoyable, addictive novel by British writer, Hari Kunzru.

With his liberal use of spot-on adjectives, generous doses of sarky humour and sly snippets of satire, Kunzru takes us on a thrilling ride worthy of someone noted in 2003 as one of the twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta, the prestigious literary magazine.

In many ways, Transmission is an updated postcolonial novel; it traces the life of a young Indian computer geek, Arjun Mehta, as he chases his American Dream as an IT consultant in the Silicon Valley. The modern day postcolonial subject doesn’t just aspire to become big in Britain—he really wants to covet a slice of American pie.

“Amrika: Residence of the Non-Resident Indian,” Arjun’s interviewer, Sunny Srinivasan, is glowingly optimistic. “Good programmers like you are gold dust over there. Everyone knows American college students are only interested in cannabis and skateboarding.”

Thus, 23-year old Arjun takes a leap of faith into the imperial unknown, leaving behind his nouveau middle class family in BigCorp Industries Housing Enclave, a corporate-owned township for upwardly-mobile Indians. Arjun’s family is fawning and fiercely competitive, using their children as pawns in the one-ups-manship game that only relatives of huge extended families can play. But if life in New Delhi is suffused with ambition and suffocating, life in California is a void.

The American dream is a hoax and Kunzru paints us a picture of an economic dustbowl that is bleak, yet darkly funny. Life in suburban California is miles askew from Arjun’s fanciful imaginings. Left to rot in a low-income area full of black and brown inhabitants, he comes face to face with American poverty for the first time, something he cannot fathom because it doesn’t exist in his cinematic consciousness. This is the unadvertised America he has to get used to—take-out fast food, mind-numbing hours of trash TV, and the growing stench of joblessness coupled with the stale sweat of despondency.

Kunzru paints a picture of America that is perniciously poised on the precipice of emptiness. A country desolate and devoid of life—a manufactured nation, built on the foundations of its own public relations. This is a California far from the glitz and glam of Hollywood, ignored by those languishing in the seat of superpower status. A year later, Arjun was still at it—shacked up with Tamil Java programmers in a neighbourhood of enormous Samoans, resembling a scene from a WWF wrestling program in retirement—jobless more often than working.

But just in time, salvation arrives, wrapped in a package called Virugenix—global computer security specialist, “home of the Ghostbusters”—and nestled in the nature-infused municipality of Redmond, Washington, “a town with nice graphics and an intuitive interface”—an ideal town for a programmer. Working as an assistant tester, Arjun’s job was the next best thing to being a virus analyst.

As a novel, Transmission takes us on two very different plot and philosophical trajectories, which eventually clash and collide like a good art house film. Arjun’s out-of-control, haphazard postmodernist roller coaster ride to success—fed on the grand narratives of Bollywood romance with Amitabh Bachchan as hero—is matched by 33-year old “paper millionaire” Guy Swift’s carefully plotted modernist pathway to fame and fortune.

“Genetically gifted with height, blond with clear skin and a cast-iron credit rating,” Guy is all about visual perception, image-making and no substance. He is surface slick not inner depth—the quintessential postmodern hero. Sprightly world traveller—the neo-colonial in a technologically advanced world—Guy, cocooned in his international agency, Tomorrow, is ready to infiltrate new markets with his brand of Euro marketing strategy: TBM: Total Brand Mutability. An evolution of an earlier acronym, CAR: Cool, Attitude and Revolution. Guy helps sell sporting footwear, game consoles and snowboarding holidays. His future is the science of “deep branding—the great quest to harness the emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand”.

Kunzru’s novel is a meditation on the idea of belonging. Brand identity is about feeling a deep connection to a brand, embodying its identity, its signature. What is identity in a postmodern world? A man like Arjun craves belonging more than Guy but both men need it. Guy, as a means to mold and solidify his business, and Arjun, as a crutch with which to bolster his own self-esteem as a non-resident alien: never American but forever dark-skinned foreigner, potential security threat.

Yet, identity is an amorphous concept at best. It can be vacuous and slippery, highly unstable and bowing to the whims of national and personal idiosyncrasies and agendas.

Arjun is awed by surface trappings—free lattes at Virugenix, a refrigerated cabinet of free sodas, the geeky paraphernalia of the senior anti-virus team—and also confused by them. The high tech America of state of the art soft- and hardware, also houses the hippie, early 20-somethings eco-grunge workforce in dreadlocks and shorts, Birkenstock sandals and tattoos. This is a culture all about the visual, where identity is a surface marker.

Arjun is member of a generation fed on the social mores of computer alienation—holed up in his room for hours, trying to fathom and then master a binary code encased in a shell. These living and breathing computers birthed a new desire: touch. The longing for human skin on skin, something more than virtual massages of the mind. Arjun’s obsession with creating viruses was akin to procreation without a partner—it was the only outlet of a shy, quiet boy with no true friends but his PC.

Unleashing the Leela virus was Arjun’s way of dictating his future. From LA to Auckland, Europe to East Asia, a beautiful sari-clad icon was dancing on computer screens, systematically wiping out entire systems and years of database inventory, corrupting classified data, reorganizing information (George Bush Intercontinental Airport mysteriously changed to George Bush is Incontinent Airport) and driving corporations built on internet interfaces to their own destruction. This is the new face of terrorism and Arjun is its geeky, bespectacled Osama.

Hari Kunzru is a masterful storyteller of his time; his finger is firmly on the pulse of the here and now: the consolidation of Europe and the assertion of an EU identity; the plight of migrant workers, both legal and illegal; the torture of detainees and prisoners of conscience; the rampant commercialization of values; the ludicrousness of corporate-speak and senseless marketing jargon.

Yet he never loses his sardonic, acerbic wit nor does he compromise on giving us a damn good read.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge magazine, November 2006 issue.