Gods Without Men [Paperback]

Gods Without Men was both compelling and frustrating. Hari Kunzru's descriptive writing is emotive and effective, as is his characterisation. My frustration stemmed from the various plotlines and timelines failing to be tied together to a coherent degree. In that respect, the book could be compared to a literary X-Files, as it leaves the reader to fill in substantial gaps with his/her imagination.

The main characters are Raj Matharu (a four-year-old autistic boy) and his parents, Jaz (an American-born Indian) and Lisa (raised in the Jewish faith). Jaz doesn't embrace the religion and culture of his parents, yet it still manages to become a barrier between him and his wife. His parents' superstitious ideas - especially with regards to why their grandson is the way he is - grate on Lisa, causing resentment bordering on hatred. When Raj vanishes into the Californian desert, the clash of ideologies between Lisa and Jaz becomes more evident than ever. Lisa opens herself to the idea that spiritual intervention could help find her lost child. Jaz, however, remains firmly rooted in the material world. Believing that his son has been abducted, Jaz thinks that only physical evidence can lead the path to finding the child.

Raj's disappearance happens near The Pinnacles, a rock formation which has for centuries attracted those who believe the stones to have miraculous metaphysical properties. Some chapters are set in the 1800s, when local Native Americans thought The Pinnacles marked the boundary between the lands of the living and the dead. Other chapters, set in the mid-1900s, tell the tale of people flocking to the area to commune with higher intelligences, the Ascended Masters, using The Pinnacles to transmit and receive 'light energy'. The rest of the chapters, set in the present day, focus on Raj's disappearance and subsequent return to the world a changed boy. The present-day occurrences at The Pinnacles echo events from the past, and hint at their significance. Kunzru's descriptions of the area's relevance to various people and eras are eloquent and extremely readable. He doesn't spoon-feed the reader, leaving him/her to draw conclusions and fill in myriad blanks, some of which are perhaps too vast.

My only criticism is that some of the story's strands are left flapping as loose ends, hinting that they were superfluous padding rather than integral parts of the plot. The myriad storylines and timelines lack a unified sense of interconnectedness, which wouldn't happen in, for example, a Salman Rushdie novel. That said, 'Gods Without Men' is a well-written book which demonstrates Kunzru's incisive understanding of human nature and behaviour.

I always enjoy Hari K's writing, loved Transmission, *loved* The Impressionist, but his latest, Gods Without Men, is not one of his best. Much of it is good, some of it is very good indeed, but an awful lot more feels forced and pedestrian.

The story covers several places in time and space, each told from a different character's point of view, some were engaging, some rather dull. It rarely works when the opening character turns out to be one of the least important; it certainly didn't work for me here, I was just getting interested in Nicky - a runaway rock star whose career has hit a rocky patch - when he faded into the background scenery after one chapter. The true central characters, Jas and Lisa - a rich young couple with an autistic son and a struggling marriage - failed to fascinate me, I found them stale and stereotypical. The tale of hippie-Dawn and her life with the cult of the Ashtar Galactic Command was more interesting, but ultimately disappointing, because her story didn't seem to go anywhere either.

I do love Hari Kunzru's writing and the writing in Gods Without Men is terrifically good, but the plot and the structure didn't really work for me, making God's Without Men my least favourite Hari Kunzru novel to date.

This is a beautifully written novel. The prose is evocative and rich, and each individual section is lovely.

In terms of how it all links together, that is also clear - although the stories may appear disparate at first, they are woven together expertly.

The loss of the star is possibly due to my own stupidity or shallow reading - but I was left with a sense of "so what?" The stories were clear enough, but the meanings were slightly lost, in my opinion. I also actively loathed the presentation of autism as something bad and to be cured.

But aside from that, the book is lovely, well-woven, and gripping.