Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Posted on: May 03, 2012

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Hari Kunzru’s latest book Gods Without Men is a frenetic, intelligent story that spans several narratives and time streams. It’s a busy, engaging novel that gathers together a complex weave with its multiple energetic, glorious threads. Each thread is perfectly clear and succinct, and while some stand out more than others, each is intelligent and informed. Kunzru is precise and yet poetic; skilled at language, very well versed in the myths he uses to draw his narratives together. Like the Coyote stories of the Mojave Desert tribes, GWM is also a story that is almost hyper-real without ever falling into ‘hysterical realism’, never pandering to lazy readers.

 

Kunzru evenly distributes chapters between his various characters’ time lines – the 18th century monk amongst the Mojave tribes, a 19th century Mormon miner in a fug of mercury madness, a 70s UFO hippy cult, a man the Mojave called Skin-Peeled-Open, a young couple from New York with a highly disruptive autistic son, a British rock star running away from it all, a teenage Iraqi immigrant and a financial genius who has developed a system in his search for the ‘face of God’ that may be controlling world economies. Each of these stories is somehow imminently tragic but Kunzru’s voice is never depressing. Instead, it has a sense of frenzied urgency as it examines the troubled characters, each searching for belonging, each somehow connected to the Pinnacle rocks in the Californian desert.

Judging with standard contemporary literature clichés, this is a strange book for a British novelist to write. The setting is entirely so American: the Californian desert, the ‘white trash’ life of small towns, the hapless military exercises, the constant presence of Coyote the trickster from Mojave legends, and the rhythms of Americana as found in road movies with peyote eating, hallucinating 70s rock bands and perhaps the work of Hunter S. Thompson and Thomas Pynchon. But Kunzru is nothing if not determined and controlled – it is a testament to his writing that even within the frenetic narrative there is never any needless chatter. His treatment of the UFO cult, the Ashtar Galactic Command is particularly skilled, never falling into the boredom that could have come from dealing with such a cliché. He writes of a young girl who finds herself heavily involved in the cult for years: Dawn finds herself in L.A on a ‘fishing mission’, where she is to try and recruit followers for the cult. She ends up prostituting herself, never quite straight or sober, ‘saying have you heard of the evacuation and …laughing laughing laughing and going to the store and back to the Strip and taco stands and coffee shops and topless bars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars…’

For Kuzru’s characters, the desert is a place for redemption, for seeking knowledge and achieving higher states; its emptiness and vastness always greater than what the human heart can understand. One character describes, the Pinnacle rocks as ‘a peculiar rock formation, three stone towers like fingers pointing up into space’. She believes, ‘if I lie down here … I would die. I would step out of my body like a dress and float straight up into the blue’. The idea of the desert presenting an alternate reality, of being a saviour is very present throughout the book: each character wants more and perhaps in the desert they can find the life they are searching for, although they are unlikely to find explanations. When the ‘slippery as ever’ Coyote is asked why ‘he was poisoning everybody…why was he causing so much harm? He just laughed. ‘What you care? You ain’t even sure any of it’s real’.