Fundamentally Fantastic

Yesterday morning I sat down in a comfy chair to read the first few pages of Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’. Yesterday afternoon I realised I hadn’t eaten all day.

This thrilling novel is truly impossible to put down, which is incredible considering that it features only one conversation, one speaker, and just a single setting.

Two strangers meet in a café in Lahore, one is a nervous foreigner, the other a bearded local with verbal diarrhoea.

Nevertheless, Hamid’s protagonist, the Westernised Changez, tells an extremely compelling story. The tale of his love affair with an American girl and her country utilises the talent for emotional subtlety that made Hamid’s first novel, ‘Moth Smoke’, such a triumph.

However, the conclusion of the novel is extremely predictable and the form is often a little clumsy. The situation with Changez’ strangely threatening American companion does not create the tension it should; it was the protagonist’s history that kept me on the edge of my seat, rather than the impending threat of the novel’s present.

Although this is an intelligent and entertaining novel which successfully uses intimate personal dramas as a means to understand important international ones, as a novel I do not believe it is quite as strong as ‘Moth Smoke’. It’s fundamentally fantastic, but the details could be a little more polished.