Brannavan Gnanalingam. The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat. ISBN 978-0473725976. Wellington: Lawrence & Gibson Publishing Collective, 2024. 297 pp. RRP: $30.00.
This is certainly a very timely book. At a moment when bizarre political twists and turns come so fast that we can hardly keep up with the craziness, a backwards look at the origin stories of certain such social-media-driven ideologies might well come in handy for all of us.
It’s a timely book, but it’s also a book about time. The first chapter is dated 1984, and the last 2024. The first is called “I’ve Been Writing” and the last “I’ve Been Thinking.” For older readers, at least, that triggers a little trip down memory lane to the titles of Richard Prebble’s infamous 1996 and 1999 ACT manifestos.
Brannavan Gnanalingam, too, has been writing. In the fourteen years since the publication of his first novel, called (appropriately) Getting Under Sail (2011) he’s completed another seven: an impressive total by any standards.
Like the protagonist of V. S. Naipaul’s debut novel The Mystic Masseur (1957) – the cautionary tale of a thwarted Trinidadian writer who exploits the gullibility of his celebrity clients to climb the social totem pole – Kartik Popat, Gnanalingam’s own anti-hero, also begins as a “creative” of sorts.
Popat’s thwarted ambitions as a film-maker, centred around his projected feature film And Jack, are gradually eroded away by the ever more effective prostitution of his talents by, first, the New Zealand political establishment; second, the anti-Vaxxer movement. (And, if we hadn’t already suspected the fact, Gnanalingam informs us in his bio-note that And Jack is the title of a real 2004 short film, “written and directed by Brannavan Gnanalingam, Jonny Thompson, and Steve Wakeem”).
This autobiographical note seems inextricable from his writing. Each of his first seven novels appears to have been based on a particular period in the author’s life: Getting Under Sail on a trip from Morocco to Ghana (which included being detained as a murder suspect); You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here (2013) on his time in Paris between 2012 and 2013; Credit in the Straight World (2015), the first of his books to be set in New Zealand, on the global financial crisis as seen from down under. And so on.
Again and again I felt these uncomfortable rhymes with experience as Gnanalingam/Popat forced me to relive Helen Clark’s painful last years in the Beehive; the rise of the “smiling assassin”, John Key; and the ghastly death throes of Jacinda Ardern’s coalition of kindness. You can’t take even the most tangential interest in New Zealand politics and not find your worst suspicions about our elected representatives thoroughly vindicated by Popat’s half-hearted Apologia pro Vita Sua.
However, it’s the pitiless grimness of Popat’s early years, bullied and despised at High School without the slightest prospect of reprieve from the dungeon of ethnicity, which really ring true. It was, admittedly, a long time ago. Change is possible. I’m sure there’s even more kneejerk racism on display now than during Popat’s miserable childhood.
Which brings us neatly to the question of what exactly Gnanalingam is seeking to achieve with this novel. He’s explained in some detail in a Spinoff article the moment of inspiration when he watched an Indian American podcast host (and former Republican presidential candidate) interviewing a notoriously racist influencer, a white woman, who began by praising him for being so “articulate”:
“I guess I can call you ‘articulate’ because you’re not an American black.”After they had a good old yuck at the idea of such an obvious oxymoron, she threw in the kicker: “But I still would not have voted for you, because you’re an Indian.”
As Gnanalingam explains in his article:
you can grease up to racist folks by doing some of the heavy lifting for them, but they’ll still never view you as one of them. You’re just the hired help. And they’ll still view you as a loser. …Perhaps the question Gnanalingam’s novel sets out to answer, then, is: How do you get from here to there? How do you start off as a proud child, shaped by community and family values, and turn into a grovelling toady for the modern day equivalent of slave-owners? It’s certainly a tricky one.
I wanted to capture this ugliness in my novel, grift off the grift, and imagine a New Zealand equivalent. Presumably mocking other minorities must be rewarding in its own way (putting aside the societal impacts) – power, money, royalties from tank-top sales, and kudos from the worst people who’d discard you the moment they don’t need you – and all you have to pay is your self-respect.
A straightforward first person life-and-times narrative must have seemed the obvious approach. But there are problems as well as advantages with that form. The Mystic Masseur, for instance, is not told in the first person. Its eponymous protagonist is observed from a discreet distance by a very judgmental contemporary (who sounds, strangely enough, a lot like Naipaul himself).
The apparent focus of Kartik’s tale is himself, his struggles, all the appalling people he’s met, virtually all of whom seem to have betrayed him in some way. The real focus is (I presume) supposed to be the morally bankrupt, self-serving nature of his story.
The ever more degrading compromises he makes in the desperate quest to be accepted by the complacent reactionary racist society around him – which lead him eventually to posting off packages of multi-vitamins as Covid remedies at the height of the Pandemic, and even renting an (admittedly unoccupied) tent in the anti-vax encampment in Wellington – are chronicled by Popat / Gnalalingam in grim detail.
“There need never, at the worst, be any difficulty about the things advantageously chuckable for art,” said Henry James. Gnalalingam has, understandably, chucked out little – certainly none of the rage and disgust he still feels at the self-satisfied complacency of Pākehā society. This is something (I would guess) that he experienced continuously as a child, and no doubt still experiences to this day.
It's not that this is bad material, by any means. On the contrary, the trouble is that it’s too interesting. My fascination with Popat’s early life and humiliations far outweighed any indignation I felt down the track at his anti-vaxxer shenanigans.
And given how little of the book is actually devoted to his final incarnation as an online stirrer and random conduit of contradictory misinformation, it’s not surprising that it’s the vomiting subhuman MPs he was forced to serve as a parliamentary staffer who remain the truly unforgettable parts of his story. Popat himself begins to fade to a mere reporter on their infamy.
Satire is a particularly demanding form in this respect. It’s not by accident that its most effective examples exhibit a kind of meme-like intensity: Jonathan Swift’s cartoonish Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, for instance; or Evelyn Waugh’s battling war correspondents in Scoop. These are not subtle narratives, by any means, but they’re effective because of the burning indignation which compels each brutal line.
Swift, Waugh, Orwell had something vital to say, and they said it in the shortest, most telling way possible. Is the same true of Gnanalingam? His own political satire seems to me to lack the necessary counterbalance of a moral centre. Unlike Swift – or, for that matter, Laurence Sterne, whose Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy presumably inspired his title – he leaves us with nothing to believe in.
So, in the absence of anything to hold to in the amoral vacuum that is the world of Kartik Popat (or, if you prefer, of contemporary New Zealand), we’re left only with the narrator himself. It’s not that it’s possible to love – let alone respect – Kartik Popat (or “Pooh-pat” or “Tikka”, as he’s variously nicknamed), but it’s easy enough to understand and even (at times) empathise with him.
His own analysis of his surroundings is, always, fatally flawed by the basic futility of his desire to fit in: “fit in” with a bunch of subhuman cretins, limned with all the bitterness of experience. But then that, too, is a profoundly human trait. Nor is his inconclusive ending – a new job as an insurance adjustor with instructions to deny as many storm-claims as possible – exactly calculated to enlighten us. It’s always someone else’s agenda he’s following.
Popat may well be a figure for our times – I fear that he is – but unfortunately that doesn’t make the novel he stars in as coherent as it could have been. For all its many undoubted merits, it’s too inclusive: too detailed in some places, too summary in others.
However, even if it’s not be quite the taut, targeted satire it set out to be, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is still an invaluable chronicle of “the time of our time” (to borrow a phrase from that great Satan, Norman Mailer). There are some scenes here I doubt I’ll ever be able to scrub out of my memory no matter how hard I try.
(13-22/2/25)
Landfall Review Online (2025).
[Available at: https://landfallreview.com/fitting-in/]
[1506 wds]
Landfall 1 (1947)
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