In these times when new fissures erupt every day, and old fissures grow wider, it is important to welcome a work that seeks to build a bridge, or at least to map the terrain that separates us from them. Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways endeavours to show, with great compassion and earnestness, how young people in places like Britain and Pakistan come to cross over from the safety of the bourgeois quotidian of home to the bloody exhilaration of elaborately staged deaths in the desert, journeying from places like Karachi and London to the battlefields of Iraq.
The narrative has a simple arc. There are three main characters who find their way to a dramatic denouement in Nineveh: Sunny, a motherless Pakistani-origin Briton from Portsmouth; Anita/ Layla, a poor Christian girl from Karachi; and Monty, the son of one of Karachi’s wealthiest, who is in love with Layla.
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Sunny is the most fully realised of these three characters. He is the son of an immigrant father who is such a Naipaulian mimic man with his Ascots that he appears to be an anachronism in 2017. Sunny hates his father and is confused about his sexuality, which, if he were white, would probably have driven him to nothing more disruptive than an alternative lifestyle involving drugs and petty crime.
But his cousin Oz, who has just returned from Syria, throws the oil of racial disenfranchisement on the fire of Sunny’s teenage angst, thereby setting in motion a sequence of events that ends with Sunny joining a jihadi movement in Iraq where he rises to the position of commander and passes the empty time that war often throws up by compulsively posting videos and selfies with his AK 47, which he lovingly calls Rita, on various social media platforms.
Sunny is sketched in vivid detail and the entire book, including the denouement, seems to be set up to give depth to his story.
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Sunny’s sense that he has not been acknowledged by the world is the engine that powers the tragedy of the book: his inability to reach out and grasp things that can heal, like music and his love for DJ Aloush, provide poignancy. And as we spend more and more time with Sunny we do begin to feel for him despite the fact that Sunny seems like a character drawn from the headlines, a radicalised youth in inverted commas.
His obsession with his phone and the various electronic spaces it leads to, and the way that obsession is presented as a keystone of his personality, make the reader wonder if a “these kids are always on their phones” attitude has mistakenly wandered into the already foggy terrain of geopolitics and misrepresented histories.
Spiritual centre
Perhaps Bhutto’s achievement is that we feel for Sunny despite this suspicion. We swing between wanting to shake some sense into him, wanting to hug him, and being horrified by what he is capable of. Of the other two characters, it is Monty — the soft son of a member of Karachi’s elite, neglected by his father, unable to identify with a mother who grows more religious every time she turns on the TV — who is the more sympathetic.
The love of his life, Layla, who is presented as the spiritual centre of the book, is an overly dramatic and poorly realised character. We see her rise out of poverty by being pulled in two directions by two older men: the Communist Osama tries to indoctrinate her in the revolutionary democratic ideal represented by Faiz and Habib Jalib, while her older brother Ezra wants to drag her along his unscrupulous path to consumerist bliss.
This set-up is somewhat schematic, and the twists and turns that follow, leading to Layla becoming a video-making ideologue of the jihadi movement, are as unconvincing as Monty’s reasons for finally deciding to chuck his comfortable life and go looking for her in the desert.
Lost echoes
There is an old echo here; Monty searches for Layla in the desert, but the allusion to the story of the legendary lovers is unsatisfactory because the novel is set in a claustrophobically materialistic present. There may be a way to rise above this moment and view it through the spiritual lens of Layla and Majnu, but that way is not to be found in The Runaways , not the least because Layla’s name comes from the Eric Clapton song, not from the famous heroine. If this kind of roundtripping of symbols across cultures has a deeper significance, then it was too subtle for this reader to catch.
Bhutto’s editor should have pushed her to either expand on it or drop it. Editorial intervention would have helped elsewhere: words from Urdu and Arabic are used untranslated without adequate thought given to the reason for doing so; perspective shifts and, especially, shifts in diction take place in ways that don’t always make sense. The overall effect can be underwhelming at times.
But the only reason to quibble about issues of craft is that Fatima Bhutto has the two qualities that are most difficult for a truly great writer to acquire: her eye and ear pick up the slightest detail of the human condition, and she loves her characters and this flawed and ugly world of ours perhaps as much as Majnu loved Layla.
The Runaways is worth reading because of these qualities, and because it is a timely intervention by a talented voice who, if she backs up these qualities with a greater emphasis on craft, is very likely to one day write a timeless book.
The writer’s latest novel is Half the Night is Gone.
The Runaways; Fatima Bhutto, Penguin/Viking, ₹599