A brilliant novel: compelling reading, in limpid and straightforward prose.
In a café in his native city of Lahore, some time after 9/11, a bearded 25-year-old Pakistani called Changez engages an American in talk, though we only read his side of the conversation, so it is in effect a monologue. We gather from it how the American responds. He seems nervous, probably regarding Changez as a dangerous Muslim fanatic. Changez tells him of his life.
He had had a scholarship to Princeton University, had graduated with distinction and had then been one of the select few who had been chosen to work for Underwood Samson, a prestigious consultancy in New York, which specialized in turning businesses around, usually by sacking many of their employees. Its operatives are constantly told of the need to focus on the economic FUNDAMENTALS in the concerns it takes on. He came top in the exacting training programme at Underwood Samson; and his employers value him greatly.
Changez seemed to be well-integrated in America, seemed in love with it, as he was with an American girl called Erica. (The Amazon reviewer “Pipistrel” has intriguing suggestions about the symbolism of the names Changez and Erica.)
He sees quite a lot of her, and she clearly feels affection for him; but he is aware that she has never stopped grieving a Chris, a boy friend who had died of lung cancer the year before he met her. He feels the dead Chris as a rival; and he behaves towards Erica was exquisite tact and never makes any erotic advances. In the end it will be she who will invite him, but their encounters are problematical. She is quite disturbed. There are many days when she does not answer his phone-calls and when he does not see her. At one time he visits her in a clinic where she had sought isolation. He never sees her again: she disappeared from the clinic and would appear to have drowned herself.
While Changez is in Manila on business, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York happens; and he confesses that the symbolism of America being brought to her knees appealed to him, though of course he concealed that from his colleagues. But immediately his life changed. He was searched at the airport before he boarded the plane back to New York, and he was again held back for a while when he arrived there. He is shocked by the American attack on Afghanistan, and alarmed by the threat of war with India. To affirm his identity, he grew a beard, and that made his colleagues uneasy. For his part, what with his disillusionment with America’s policies in Asia and unhappy about Erica’s wish to be left alone, he loses the concentration on his work with Underwood Samson, which had sent him to Chile to assess a struggling publishing firm. He was suddenly aware of the impact his work would have on the people in the publishing firm. A striking comment made by the owner of the firm, comparing Changez with a slave janissary in the service of the Ottomans (Americans) settles it: he is suddenly aware of American intervention all over the world, not only militarily, but also, through institutions like Underwood Samson, financially. He abruptly leaves Chile, and of course he lost his job in New York.
He returned to Lahore. He became a university lecturer, and stimulated his students to demonstrate – peacefully - for the real independence of Pakistan. He gave a powerful television interview in which he bitterly attacked American politics: it went viral. He was warned that the Americans might seek him out for retaliation. Was his American interlocutor in the café, who clearly packed a gun under his clothes, an agent sent to do the job? Or was he armed because he feared that someone like Changez might target him? The book ends with these questions.
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