Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62121 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 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

About the Author
Hari Kunzru was born in 1969 and lives in east London. His first novel, The Impressionist, was the winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2002, and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Hari Kunzru was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, 2003.

Customer Reviews

Uneven follow-up
I really wanted to like this book - I really enjoyed Kunzru's very accomplished debut novel and the idea of exploring the dramatic potential of computer viruses is a very interesting one. Transmission is extremely good in parts but the novel as a whole is unsteady. I think he has succumbed to trying to manage too many locations and characters and consequently the novel as a whole becomes shaky. It's still worth reading, but it just is not quite engaging enough. It's a shame as there are some lovely moments. I agree with the reviewer who comments about the packaging which leads you to expect a more lyrical, misty novel than this which is full of spiky edges. I know it's a cliche, but Transmission does feel a bit of a victim of 2nd novel syndrome. I hope that the publishing industry is kind enough to Kunzru to forgive him this book and give him space to grow, because he has the scope to become a really good novelist indeed. Next time maybe.

Coke and Bull
Hari Kunzru's first novel The Impressionist was a massive achievement, though it failed to win the popular acclaim of word-of-mouth successes like Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Birdsong probably through the lack of empathetic characters. Nonetheless his publishers have chosen to build on that historical exotic base, giving his new novel Transmission a sort of Heritage Ethni-Lit cover. This is wildly inappropriate as the book is about the genesis of a computer virus and is a thoroughly modern and mostly Western confection.

With Kunzru the genius is in the detail, and he has a flourished knack of producing fleeting characters with a real sense of identity to them. In The Impressionist, this was balanced by the deliberate act of not giving the protagonist any character of his own. Here he goes one better, and gives us a fully joined-up hero in Arjun Mehta, who at 23 leaves his Indian family to work in the technology sector in Silicon Valley. Though 'hero' is not the right word, since Mehta is diffident, nervous and disappointed for most of the time. He comes to realise that the promises of riches as a code-jockey were horribly misleading, and as the market for his services shrinks, he finds himself facing redundancy and in a desperate attempt to save his job, unleashes a computer virus, Leela01, on the world, so that he can impress his employers by being the first to fix it.

By this halfway point, the novel is a rich dish, brimming with good things and endlessly lively and sardonic - Kunzru adopts a keen omniscient voice, seeing into his characters' minds but also standing back and slyly mocking them. The difficulty is that once the virus is released - and markets fall, worlds collide, and lifts stop going to the thirteenth floor - there is nowhere left for the novel to go. Kunzru does his best by bringing in - and in fact foreshadowing their appearances earlier in the book - complementary characters: Leela Zahir, the Bollywood actress whose digitised image tempts careless geeks into opening the viral attachment; and Guy Swift, a marketing man full of coke and bull, whose knife-edge finances may or may not (spoiler alert: not) be tipped over by the Leela virus.

Unfortunately these characters always feel secondary, despite Kunzru's best efforts to make them part of a tense triptych with Arjun Mehta. Guy Swift could have been a satiric monster like Patrick Bateman or John Self but ends up a low-key version of Sherman McCoy; and Leela Zahir rarely appears in the book except through reference. Their scenes too suffer from insupportable attentuation: when Guy is pitching to his PR clients, one can't help feeling that a little mangement-speak satire goes a long way; and the scenes on Leela's film set seem bland and full of tacked-on things (underworld gangs, futile sex) in comparison with the brilliant three-page summary of Bollywood films which Kunzru has put in Mehta's mind earlier in the book, full of vigour, colour and affection.

Finally Transmission fails at the last hurdle, when Kunzru leaves things hanging and then attempts to wrap them up in a twenty-page coda. This has all the feel of work to a deadline when it seems that he - and surely the reader - would have preferred to finish the story properly, in the richness of detail and fine prose which is Kunzru's considerable strength, perhaps taking a hundred or more pages over it, and not in this damp fizzle of signal to noise.

Fast-paced, fun and dazzlingly well-written
Despite structural shortcomings, I thoroughly enjoyed Hari Kunzru's second novel 'Transmission' that is fast-paced, fun and dazzlingly well-written. The opening sections of the novel - which introduce computer geek Arjun Mehta and the interesting characters in his family, particularly increasingly Australianised sister, Priti - had me hooked from the outset. It is a testament to Kunzru's writing that I remained totally engrossed by subjects such as computer programming and marketing that would not ordinarily interest me.

There are at least three different ways to analyse the novel's structure. Whilst reading the novel, 'Transmission' appeared to be primarily about Arjun, his experiences as a non-resident in America and his unleashing of the Leela virus to strike back at his company (and the global system generally?) in order that he could become better appreciated and recognised by fixing the ensuing havoc. The main sub-plot revolves around brash English marketing guru Guy Swift whose only nexus with Arjun is that his business ventures are disrupted by Arjun's Leela virus. As the novel progresses, Kunzru becomes increasingly interested in Swift's private and business life to the extent that this plotline is arguably elevated to central stage on equal terms with that involving Arjun. To further complicate matters, the real-life Leela Zahir - whose animated, dancing image is displaced by opening files corrupted by the Leela virus - herself becomes a major character in the second half of this novel, albeit one with less dialogue than either Arjun or Guy.

Despite its light tone and readability, 'Transmission' does raise issues such as globalisation, particularly as it affects those marginalised by the global economy; (instant) fame, privacy and media intrusion, and the all-pervasiveness of American values and concepts in fields such as international marketing, business and computing. Given my enjoyment of this follow-up work, I certainly look forward to reading Kunzru's critically acclaimed debut 'The Impressionists'.