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LONDON: Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid traces the transition of a high-flying New York businessman to possibly murderous anti-American in his new novel aimed at addressing global anxieties in a post-9/11 world.
`The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ is a monologue by central character Changez, who is born in Pakistan and moves to the United States, where he attends a top university and lands a well-paid job assessing ailing companies ripe for takeover.
But his charmed existence as a member of the Manhattan elite quickly ends with the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, after which Americans begin treating him with suspicion and even hostility and when his own resentment and paranoia grows.
Like many Muslims, he feels under siege when the US invades Afghanistan and links his adopted country’s interference abroad with its financial might, and so turns his back on a promising career.
Hamid said he wanted to help readers understand how a young man with roots in the east and west could turn into someone with ideas many would describe as radical.
“The novel was an attempt by me to empathise with someone who becomes radicalised,” the 35-year-old said in an interview.
“A novelist's task is about empathy. Empathy reduces fear and humanises this `other person'. If you can imagine what this person is thinking, they become much less frightening.”
The author saw first hand how the attitudes of Americans and Pakistanis changed after Sept 11, 2001.
“I see people in Pakistan as much more anti-American than they were. In America, suddenly I would be hauled into inspection rooms at airports and every time I went there I began to feel that perhaps this time, I wouldn't be let in.”
SINISTER UNDERCURRENT: Hamid believes many people, not just Muslims, shared Changez's reaction when he saw footage of the Twin Towers being attacked in New York.
“I stared as one -- and then the other -- of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed,” Changez says. “And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.”
The author argued that the symbolism of the world’s only superpower being so spectacularly humbled was satisfying to those unhappy about its pre-eminence and its politics.
Hamid maintains tension in his narrative with hints that Changez, who delivers his monologue to a faceless American in Lahore, may be luring his interlocutor into a deadly trap.
Readers will be reminded of the case of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted and beheaded in 2002 while researching a story on militants.
“This is about the way the audience looks at the world and takes a conversation and turns it into a thriller. “The war on terror turns it into a life and death situation. It reflects our own paranoia about the world in which we live.”—Reuters
