In the thick of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, a folk-rock band called America broke into the number one spot in the UK music charts with the single “A Horse with No Name”, a flat, haunting tune that evokes the desert with surprising skill: “The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz/And the sky with no clouds/The heat was hot and the ground was dry/But the air was full of sound.”
All three band members had American fathers and English mothers and lived in the UK, many miles away from the land referenced in the song. In an interview years later, songwriter Dewey Bunnell explained the context: “I had spent a good deal of time poking around in the high desert when we lived in the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California… I loved the cactus and the heat. I was trying to capture the sights and sounds of the desert… But it's grown to mean more for me. I see now that this anonymous horse was a vehicle to get me away from all the confusion and chaos of life to a peaceful, quiet place.”
Considering Bunnell was barely out of his teens when he wrote the song, one can safely assume the last bit is a middle-aged extrapolation. The song captured the sights and sounds of the desert, as Bunnell intended, but also a moment in time when the yearning for those sights and sounds was at its peak. It is unfair to expect the same spontaneity in a 400-page novel as a 40-line song, but it's this innocence that, perhaps, separates a work of art that speaks to the audience from one that addresses them. Gods Without Men is a clever, mesmerising work of fiction, but its overstated agenda to that end frequently threatens to be its undoing.
Multi-layered
Whatever Kunzru may be accused of as a writer, lack of ambition is not one of them. If David Mitchell — Kunzru's blurb-writer, who describes the book as “a beautifully written echo chamber of a novel” — crammed in the entire universe and compressed a vast sense of time into Cloud Atlas, Kunzru wants Gods Without Men to work in the way consciousness does. Like a morning dream, it draws on layers of mythology and frontier evangelism, popular culture and religion, mysticism and extra-terrestrial cult-worship, escapism and drug-running, till they swirl around in a grey mist, each acquiring distinct form and shape before dissolving again into a wraith, throwing into doubt reality and perception and the distinction between the two.
These stories zigzag across time, but not space: All the intense focus of the novel is concentrated around the Three Pinnacles, “columns of rock (that) shot up like the tentacles of some ancient creature, weathered feelers probing the sky”, somewhere in the Mojave desert in the western United States. Kunzru's desert air, too, is full of sound, which crescendos into a soul-wrenching scream when Jaz and Lisa arrive here for a holiday with their autistic son Raj and, inexplicably, lose him. The story of this immigrant Indian's marriage with the all-American Lisa is the fluent heart of the book; it is also the section most vulnerable to being crowded out by the grey wraiths of the background.
Unifying link
In Cloud Atlas, a birthmark ran as a connecting link through the nesting stories. Here, it is the search for design and meaning — for a greater, universally ordained purpose, if you will — that draws the myriad characters to the edge of the desert. Whatever World War II veteran Schmidt or single mother Joanie, self-styled anthropologist Deighton or troubled rock star Nicky were looking for, their goals are corrupted and actualised in Walter, a global quant model that Jaz must use to discover predictable behaviours in apparently random data. Because Jaz's story is set in 2008 and he is a Wall Street whiz kid, it's not difficult to foresee how that story will unravel. Walter's collapse — was it a casualty of the economic meltdown, or a cause? — is followed by Raj being found, apparently hale and hearty.
The audacious ambition of this novel is well-served by Kunzru's dazzling talent but, once you've brought the back cover down on Jaz and Lisa standing on the edge of the ridge, looking for answers but seeing only a vast emptiness, the dazzle dies, the wraiths fade and you confront, like the protagonists, what should have been.
Gods Without Men,Hari Kunzru, Hamish Hamilton, p.384, £17.99.
