Extended Release: On Hari Kunzru's "Red Pill"
Hari Kunzru | Red Pill | Knopf | September 1, 2021 | 304 Pages
Imagine a world where you have a choice, in the style that was offered in the movie, The Matrix - you can either swallow a blue pill and stay in blissful ignorance or take a red pill that reveals an unpleasant truth and free your mind of all delusions. Which one would you choose?
Hari Kunzru's Red Pill shows how red-pilling and blue-pilling are very much a part of our reality today. The unnamed narrator in the novel is a writer going through a mid-life crisis. To get out of the rut, he decides to spend some time away from his wife and toddler daughter by taking up a prestigious writing fellowship that he has been awarded in Germany. Sounds like a cliche character? Yes, but only up to this point. For when our narrator arrives in Wannsee, a suburb in Berlin, he begins to experience the unexpected. Pretty soon, he is driven by fear and paranoia down a rabbit-hole from which there will be no escape for him.
It is when you first understand that your condition - physically, intellectually, socially, financially - is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story.
The Deuter Center holds a romantic dream for the narrator - a retreat where he can lose himself in complete creativity and work in absolute solitude, on the theme of the subjectivity of the lyric poet. But he hasn't read the fine print on his contract clearly, which says the Center is all about transparency and openness. The narrator is forced into socializing with other fellows at the Center - having group dinners and working in a shared space, much like open-office plans of our current times, where anyone can peep into anyone's screen and be privy to their personal and professional journeys. This is not conducive to the narrator's creative process - or perhaps this is the perfect excuse for him to escape what is clearly a very persistent mental block. As he struggles to produce his new work, the narrator takes to doing two things obsessively - he either takes long walks around Wannsee or secludes himself in his room, binge-watching a violent cop show, Blue Lives. It shows the brutality of corrupt police and criminal gangs, with the actors occasionally propounding philosophical quotes.
The more inward the narrator turns, the more oppressive he finds the Center's policy and the stronger he fights to escape it. On his walks, he discovers the grave of Heinrich von Kleist, a German poet who committed suicide with a friend after realizing that “no happiness was possible here on earth.” The Deuter Center also happens to be located across a house where the Final Solution to the Jewish question was designed by Reinhard Heydrich. With this, Kunzu sets the theme of his novel - we are witnessing a man who is slowly, but surely, headed towards some disaster, as history winds itself into the consciousness of the narrator and he begins to feel the weight of the shadows of the past on his present.
Our narrator's mind is getting hijacked by dark ideas. He has this uncanny sense of being watched, and one day, he discovers that the fellows at the Center are under video surveillance. He ends up having a breakdown in front of a lady cleaner who works at the Center. In what feels like a diversion from the linear narrative, the cleaner goes on to tell the narrator about her own dark past, showing him what stalking and surveillance actually feel like. She was once forced into acting as a Stasi agent, forced to rat out her friends and familiars and her life was completely upended by the regime. If this bit of the book feels disjointed, there is a good reason for it - it is the bridge that will gap our vulnerable narrator's mind from the first half of the book to his insanity in the second half.
People extrapolate from what they know. They find it hard to imagine radical change. It's a cognitive bias.
Running through the novel is another theme - an alt-right view of the world. During a party he attends, the narrator meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives. After their conversation, the narrator becomes obsessed with Anton and finds himself moving towards moral darkness. He believes that Anton is "red pilling" his viewers by showing them an ugly view of the world and preparing them for a time where empathy would have no place. Anton's opinions mess with his head and he starts to unravel. When the narrator finds himself repeatedly running into a refugee family, a pair of father and daughter who seem to be struggling to make ends meets, he exercises his empathy to help them, by giving them money. But he is misunderstood for a human trafficker which results in his expulsion from the Center. But instead of returning home to his wife and child, the narrator sets himself up to chase a shadow, born from a thought that has taken root so strongly in his head, that he says his goodbyes to his family and sets out to hunt what haunts him, completely aware that this might very well result in his own end.
I wrote about pointlessness, the utter ruin of all my projects, the supercession of all that I was or ever could be. I described the reduction of my most cherished mysteries to simple algorithmic operations, instructions that could be put on a chip, a disenchantment so total that afterwards, after the shift, it would be impossible even to think back to how it was, to imagine what it was to be alive in the old way. My luxurious mental furnishings, my sensibility and intelligence and taste, all would turn to ashes. And the same thing would happen to everyone else on earth. The destruction of culture was only the beginning. Meaning itself would be revealed as an artifact of a period that was slipping away into history.
Kunzru takes us on a journey through just how vulnerable our minds are today and how easily one can spiral into mental instability. What starts as a conversation between Anton and the narrator, soon leads the narrator down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, perceived threats and a persistent fear that everything he holds dear - his personal freedom, his values and even his family, are in grave danger. He begins to question the very nature of reality. As a reader, you begin to connect with the narrator and while navigating the chaos in his mind, you find yourself feeling claustrophobic as you witness a world where a "dog-eat-dog" mentality rules supreme. You want to ask yourself - are the narrator's fears really just in his mind, or do they truly threaten his existence? The book culminates with the narrator returning to his family after a mental breakdown, emerging into the world of alt-right politics as Trump wins the US election of 2016 and a "blue-pill" effect, one of acceptance, takes place.
When you're going back somewhere, it is hard to think of anything but the destination. You fall out of the present, into a strange state that is a blend of anticipation and recollection, a blend of the future and the past. You see for a second time the landmarks on the route you're retracing, and drift to thinking of the routine you'll follow when you get back home. Onwards is always better.
Kunzru does a neat job of connecting disparate dots of our existing world - how manipulation in the form of what we are shown on television or other media can lead ordinary people down deep abysses, how blissfully ignorant we are of what's going on around us and how we are increasingly giving up our freedoms in the name of transparency. Full of thought-provoking ideas, this is a book that delivers some extremely hard-hitting lessons and one that will leave you with a very heavy feeling.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider making a donation.