Back at the end of October last year I attended ‘The Man Booker at Birkbeck’ talk for 2018, featuring that year’s guest Mohsin Hamed, the author of the exceptional The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the yet-to-be-read-by-me Exit West (although I picked up a free copy of the book at the annual London event, so it’s just a question of time before I do).
He was interviewed on-stage by Birkbeck University’s Dr Anna Hartnell. However, with the exception of the first question below, she didn’t ask any of the others, being far too smart to be quite so simplistic…
What makes him write?
Feeling “confused, conflicted, upset” is apparently what sets the creative ball rolling
What does he write?
The obvious answer would be ‘novels’, but he calls his work “half-novels” – because he “leaves space for the reader” in order for them to animate them “into a full novel”.
His description was in response to being asked whether Lahore was the unnamed city in Exit West – Hamed replied that it could be if that’s the what the reader chooses it to be.
What’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist?
Okay, so this time the answer is ‘a novel’, but it’s a “dramatic monologue that replicates the filter bubble of today” in the sense that the reader only receives one side of the story, as people do with their social media newsfeeds. But in this case the reader can’t respond. As with a previous answer about leaving space for the reader to create the “full novel” – in the the context of the time of that text, the reader is “already scared before you start reading the book”. The novel creates an atmosphere of dread and builds on what the reader is already thinking.
What form should a novel take?
Hamed believes that novels should not do what televisual modes of storytelling do – so that means not doing dialogue, and not ‘showing’, because that’s what TV does. So his advice is to do what TV/film/Netflix can’t do as well, and concentrate on internal feelings.
Although that doesn’t mean novels aren’t allowed to steal some ideas from television – e.g. ‘jump cuts’.
Hamid also talked about the position that the narrator assumes relative to the book – i.e. he described the narrator in Charlotte’s Web as partisan and on the side of the character and reader, while the narrator in Anna Karenina is neutral (a point I found particularly helpful, as I always struggle with knowing how to think of, or position my narrators). Exit West empathises with the migrant, says Hamed, and in that sense we can relate to the book because we are all migrants; for instance, temporal movement is a form of migration – e.g. we are all refugees from childhood.
How would he describe his personality?
Finally, despite the subject matter of his books, Hamid described himself as an optimist, stating that “not genocide” is the true history of the world.
For a more in-depth and high-brow take on what was spoken about that evening, head to here: blogs.bbk.ac.uk.
A G Rock 