The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Notes:
This is an older review, but a majority of the books we review will be advanced review copies (ARCs) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
The coolest thing I noticed about the original text for The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007) is that it’s more of an overly-long stage play than it is a very-short novella.
Most people who know of it at all are probably more familiar with Mira Nair’s 2012 film, which, while beautifully shot and technically proficient, received mixed reviews for being too heavy handed and obvious. I think the problem comes from shedding an original quirk of the novel’s structure, in which no one else speaks but the protagonist, Changez. The entire book is written in second person, with Changez speaking directly at the audience the entire time. It is effectively one giant monologue.
That’s not a bad thing. The very original audiobook version, in which the author performs his own work, is by far the best. I’m just sad that apparently no one told him he should have gone into live theatre instead of novels. If someone had put him in touch with Doug Wright, it would probably have a Tony by now.
The work is ambitious, literary, intelligent, and comments boldly on geopolitics and the human condition, but does so in an appealing, charming way that lowers your defenses... and at the last minute, turns around into a thriller which races to the end. I listened to the audiobook while driving, and was so gripped by end that I sat thirty minutes in my parked car after arriving at my destination, because I could not stop before it was over.
The story is functionally told by a single actor on a bare stage with the quintessential table and two chairs - it really blows my mind how Hamid wandered into this convention without ever having attended theatre school - speaking directly to the audience as if they were the person in the other chair. At least, that’s the way the “novel” is written. A bit of google tells me the National Youth Theatre of Britain did an adaptation, which seems to have done okay, if hugely overcomplicated with *fourteen* actors, for some reason. I don’t recall there even being fourteen *characters* the protagonist mentions, even if one chose to make the nonspeaking man in the other chair a physical human who sits there and nods the whole time, and let other students participate by embodying things like the waiter who comes back and forth to the table. It was likely hampered by exactly that -being adapted for the National Youth Theatre, which inherently means providing opportunities for as many inexperienced actors as possible to cut their teeth.
What really needs to happen is a high risk production where the novel is performed as written by a single actor, a once in a generation talent, the Pakistani equivalent of Jefferson Mays. This probably could be Hamid himself under the hand of a good director, and someone to help him lightly cut the script down to three hours without altering how gloriously his prose is crafted.
Never mind the movie. Never mind reading it with your eyes. Listen to the version of the audiobook narrated by Hamid himself as if he were sitting on a stool in a spotlight in a dark room, performing his one-man play the way it was meant to be done. It’s only four hours long, and you’ll wonder where the time went.
