FICTION: Something to Tell You, By Hanif Kureishi, Faber, 345pp. £16.99LONG BEFORE even reaching the midway point of this entertaining, often horrifically funny, burlesque saga of emotional truth and serial pain, Jamal, the narrator, successful psychoanalyst, struggling father and failed husband, considers a post-gig Mick Jagger, writes Eileen Battersby.
"There he was, Jagger, fit and lithe, and looking like a man who has seen everything and understood a lot of it." The same could be said of Jamal, and probably of Hanif Kureishi, a writer with more than a grasp of the human comedy.
If ever there was a life-experience book, this is it. So convincingly does middle-aged, battle-scarred Jamal wearily, if never quite cynically, stagger through the incidents of his daily life, that we can almost hear his bones crack, his most recent intake of breath. Playwright and screenplay writer as well as novelist, Kureishi emerged in the early 1980s as one of the fresh young voices of multi-cultural Britain. My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay, while his fiction debut, The Buddha of Suburbia, won the 1990 Whitbread Prize for best first novel.
If never as stylish as Martin Amis, Kureishi writes fluently and fluidly and is almost as streetwise. Given to viewing the world, or at least Britain, through the eyes of two cultures, Kureishi featured among the Granta Best of Young British Novelists 1993, He was also both praised and attacked for Intimacy (1998), a powerful short novel in which the narrator, about to walk out on his wife and children, recalls his old love in the face of his new one. A stark, candid book, it is eloquent and mature as well as an example of a literary work, which, though well reviewed, was mauled on a more personal level in the comment columns.
Although this often buoyant new book has passages of subtle beauty and even touching interludes, particularly as Jamal, an intelligent and sympathetic narrator, remembers his son as a younger child, it fairly leaps off the page. If, in Kureishi's fiction prior to Intimacy, we've already experienced Kureishi the bright young spokesman of a generation buzzing with ideas and new sensations, now meet the older, wiser man burdened by memory and a storeroom of life and cultural - particularly literary - references.
Having made his living by listening to the secrets of his patients, he has learnt a great deal about the mystery of human existence. "At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others. They also imagine, in the ordinary course of things, that they will explode, implode, dissolve or be invaded . . . " The narrative possesses all the urgency of panic - Jamal's. He is privy to secrets, and he also has his own, the guilt of the murder he committed years earlier. Not that Jamal, short, once beautiful or at least sufficiently pretty to attract men as well as women, and not overly robust, appears to be the typical murderer. His crime and his story-within-a-story are complicated; it was undetected and accidental. It also concerned a girl, the love of his life. He is now middle-aged and depressed, just about holding his own with Rafi, his 12-year-old son, half little boy, half street thug. Rafi lives with Josephine, Jamal's disaffected wife. No one is all that happy, although Rafi does his best to liven things up.
Contributing to the noise is Miriam, Jamal's larger-than-life sister, a single mother with many children and a complex past featuring men and wild behaviour. The siblings, the offspring of a favoured Kureishi theme - an English mother and an Indian father - were once dispatched to India to see their father and were sent back in disgrace. Miriam is loud and difficult, she could take over this novel, but Kureishi has prevented this happening if only by introducing several other characters all capable of out-shouting her.
Although Jamal is no slouch when it comes to the one-liners, he often takes second place to yet other of the central characters, Henry, Jamal's best friend, an easily bored, theatrical theatre and film director - and the divorced husband of a wealthy woman who has never quite let him go. "A brazen intellectual whose passion is for talk, ideas and the new." Life may be hectic, but Jamal and Henry spend a lot of time in each other's company, particularly in Jamal's home. They are opposites. "We walked up the street together, him a head taller than me and a third wider. I was as neat as a clerk, with short, spiky hair; I usually wore a shirt with a collar, and a jacket. He was shambling, with his T-shirt too big; he seemed untucked everywhere. As he went, bits seemed to fall from him. He wore shoes without socks, but not shorts, not today. With his arms full of books, Bosnian novelists, the notebooks of Polish theatre directors, American posts, and newspapers bought on Holland Park Avenue - Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, El País - he was returning to his flat by the river."
Well, as life will have it, Henry becomes involved with none other than Miriam. The pair, having fallen insanely in love with being "in love", set about celebrating it with grotesque inventiveness. Their drug-taking, bare-it-all, crazed antics are saved largely by their desperate need to succeed as a couple. Jamal never allows the reader to forget this is a tale of aging survivors of the 1970s, all united by the blood and guts of some 30 years in the making. It is all very plotted, even over-plotted, but such is the vigour of the telling that Kureishi gets away with most of it.
"Against death and authoritarianism there is only one thing," announces Henry. To which Jamal suggests "Love?" Henry's reply comes packed with characteristic bluster. "Culture, I was going to say . . . Far more important. Any clown can fall in love or have sex. But to write a play, paint a Rothko or discover the unconscious - aren't these extraordinary feats, the only negation of the human desire to murder?"
There are weaknesses; Ajita, the lost love, never convinces, while at times it does seem that Jamal's hectic life leaves little or no time for his patients. Then there is Wolf, the friend from the past with the power to destroy Jamal. The stagy twist is all a bit corny but funny with it, as if by the time all of this surfaces, Kureishi has decided to take a few risks. Late in the narrative, Jamal muses: "I'd been considering Ralph Waldo Emerson and his essay, 'Circles', the first words of which are: 'The eye is the first circle.' For the next few days I could look at a door and imagine an eye at the keyhole - an eye followed by a head, by a body, a man. A man who had come to hunt me down, arrest me, condemn me. For what? . . . Things are always what they seem."
It is true of this thoughtful, bizarrely philosophical novel. For all the fun and games, the jokes, the characters, the sexual excess, it is one man's story, one man's life, one man's regrets and hopes told with intelligence and humanity by a natural satirist who has always listened and watched - and on the basis of this extravaganza, understood a great deal.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times