Product Description

Taking in the USA, India and Britain, the story of a disgruntled employee wreaking havoc...

When Arjun is fired from his IT job in Redmond, Washington, he unleashes the virus he's been growing on his computer system. And as his digital creatures make their way out into the world, they begin to have tiny cascading effects on people's lives. Guy and Gabriella live in a luxury riverside apartment in London, but soon, through Arjun's unwitting agency, the operation of chance begins to smash up their perfect world.

Everywhere new viruses and worms are being reported, all referring - either through picture, sound, text or code - to the film star Leela Zahir. Suddenly, Leela is the most famous woman in the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167994 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Transmission is Hari Kunzru's second novel and, in a similar vein to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the title is instructive; it's figuratively and literally, the book's pulsing leitmotif. To transmit is, by definition, to "send across", and the migration of information and people, the destruction and the erection of borders in our hi-tech, supposedly global village, (a world where Indian graduates gain Australian accents working in local call centres) is what this novel is all about. Although to be clear, that's an "all about" in much the way that Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up! was "all about" the Thatcherite 1980s; narrative invention, humour and satire form essential components of Kunzru's prodigious literary arsenal. (No prizes for guessing who Gavin Burger, an incomprehensively verbose US presidential spokesman who puts in a fleeting comic turn, could be modelled on.)

Leaving aside the broader forces of globalisation, Kunzru's chief dramatic agent is a computer virus that meshes together the lives of his main characters: Arjun Mehta, a sexually-naïve Indian programmer working in America who unleashes the contagion; Leela Zahir, a Bollywood actress whose image the bug zooms across the globe and Guy Swift, head of Tomorrow, a Shoreditch-based consultancy whose ongoing quest to harness the "emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand", becomes somewhat nobbled in the immediate technological fallout. Of his cast, not unsurprisingly Guy comes closest to caricature (though his scheme to rebrand European border police as Ministry of Sound-style nightclub bouncers--"Europe: No Jeans, No Trainers"--sounds alarming believable). But then Guy's is the incarnate of the worst, Panglossian traits of the West in this callow information age. His certainty and self-absorbed fecklessness (which thankfully he does eventually suffer, horribly for) contrasts jarringly with poor, Mehta, whose American dreams tip, all too swiftly into nightmare. --Travis Elborough

Synopsis
There's a message in your inbox. Then, a few moments later, your computer crashes. Leela Zahir, Bollywood actress and temperamental star, is being catapulted from the fringes of fame into a million inboxes. Arjun Mehta, computer geek, looks up from his screen to find that he does, after all, have a role to play in the world. Guy Swift, marketing executive with his own agency, a beautiful girlfriend and a handle on modern life, is losing his grip. In this age of instant worldwide communication, anything can happen and anything will Hari Kunzru's new novel is a heady mix of London, Bollywood and Silicon Valley. Taking in three continents and following the lives of Guy, Arjun and Leela as they make their way in the real world, Transmission is a brilliant and funny take on life at the click of a mouse.

Customer Reviews

Didn't set my world on fire
A contemporary urban story in every sense. Its relevance to now is so acute that this book will lose relevance quickly as times and technology move on. I liked the cross-section of Indian/ British/ American culture, most likely reflecting in some way the author's own experience but I dont think the book stands out for its literary value.

Our main character, Arjun, a computer programmer (stet: 'techno-geek') from India finds a passion for computers and technology from a young age. Losing himself in chatrooms and code and growing a sense of worthiness as his experience and capability in writing virus code gains him respect from his fellow virus writers. He dreams of America and is sent to the States by a sham organisasion that imports and hires out Indian IT staff, holding them ransom to their Visa requirements and charging them out at a profit to US corporates.

Meanwhile, Guy, a self made London media mogul thirtysomething with his head up his backside. Running a venture capital-funded new media branding company out of a rennovated factory in the docklands his shallow relationships fail to support him as the pressure to keep afloat starts to unwind his balance of mind.

Other more lightweight characters include Leela Zahir, a Bollywood star, a victim of her own success and a puppet to her demanding mother who rides her fame and calls the shots.

What brings these people together? Arjen finds himself a victim of the bursting dotcom bubble and his job and life in America are at threat when his company is forced to lay people off. His people-shy boss (recognisable I suspect to many IT professionals) hides behind the HR rep who tries to put a positive spin on the whole experience - a great comic moment as the boss hides under the desk when the meeting goes downhill.

His new life of takeaway Pizza and his sexual awakening (with a bi-sexual co-worker whom he falls in love with) is falling away beneath him and the thought of returning home to India in shame prompts desperate measures. He creates the ultimate computer virus in order to play the white knight and ride in with the solution to save his company's fortunes along with his job. It all goes wrong when the virus ravages systems around the world - meanwhile his boss takes the credit for his solution and he still gets layed-off.

I'm not sure what the theme of this book is. Burnout? The meeting of East and Western cultures? Modern life: email, SMS, fastfood, Blackberry, executive apartments, fame, media, the world wide web? Maybe all of these things. I didn't care too much for the characters and I didn't care too much for the plot - but it was entertaining for a time and the ending wrapped up the loose threads, if predictably.

Kunzru is an intelligent writer and I'd read another of his books - but this one didn't set my world on fire.

Highly perishable book
Transmission is about very trendy ideas (how globalization and internet make us all "connected") treated in a very shallow way; the sort of coverage you could expect from those hip and young magazines announcing with boring regularity that x,y and z are "The Next Big Thing". The story could almost be enjoyable if you didn't get the impression that the author has been trying to squeeze in as many fashionable characters and concepts as possible (Indian IT geek, Silicon Valley, Bollywood, computer virus, hipped-up marketing guru, immigration, etc.). All this makes for a very far-fetched storyline.

This is one of those books so topical that the little relevance it may have now will have completely vanished within 3 years. If you're interested in how new technology can shape our future, read Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, but I wouldn't bother about this one.

very enjoyable, and very funny in places
I've read the other Amazon reviews - this is clearly a book you like or you don't! I did. It is a light novel, deliberately over-the-top but with plenty of truth about the cyberworld of spin in which we live now. It's really a satire with elements of farce in places, and it seems to me a mistake to judge it in terms of depth of characterisation and integrity of plot - I really don't think that is what the book is about. Arjun Mehta, an overearnest, anxious, naive computer geek, is shafted more than once by his masters in the US. To impress them and win their approval (he is about to be sacked), he releases 'Leela', a virus featuring images of his favourite Bollywood star, Leela Zahir. All sorts of things happen as a result, almost too many to keep track of, and it all ends mysteriously but happily. There are wonderful set-piece scenes, though - Guy Swift attempting to make a sales pitch on a Dubai golf course (he doesn't play golf), Arjun at Virugenix (his workplace), spin sessions at Tomorrow* (Swift's appalling company), highly entertaining attempts to film a Bollywood scene at a castle in Skye, a most diverting use of language and many, many good jokes. I laughed out loud quite often, and I'm grateful to any book that can make me do that. I thought this one was witty, quite virtuosic in the writing and, in a light-hearted way, involving - and great fun.