My Revolutions, By Hari Kunzru

Thriller plot with the reek of truth

Hari Kunzru's novel stinks. Its pages emit the authentic reek of that distinctive aroma associated with the Ladbroke Grove squats of the cusp of the 1960s and the 1970s: a potent brew of unwashed clothes and bodies, stale smoke both legal and illegal, leftover vegetarian food. At the height of the Vietnam war, as the Summer of Love overlapped uneasily with the Days of Rage, groups of young radicals moved from pamphleteering to petrol-bombs. Urban guerrilla warfare briefly seemed like a rational response to the massive criminality of the state terrorism visited on distant lands by Britain's allies.

Those times come to spectacular life in My Revolutions, a novel which arrives at another time of massive upheaval, as another international conflict galvanises a generation to take it to the streets. Kunzru has been attacked by some for writing a novel which includes no Asian characters – a subtly unpleasant way of keeping an "ethnic writer" in his place – but the contemporary issue is no less apposite when displaced in space and time, especially when spaces and times are so conscientiously evoked. Through two parallel narratives – one taking place during High Blairism, one in the back-story – Kunzru explores the morality and the mechanisms of armed struggle.

In 1998, the protagonist is mild-mannered Mike Frame, husband and stepfather, almost 50 and working in an antiquarian bookshop. Or is he? He used to be Chris Carver, member of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the by-any-means overthrow of bourgeois imperialist society, and still on the wanted list. On holiday in France, he spies a dead ringer for a former comrade presumed dead since 1975. Back home, he is confronted by another former comrade, who requires a favour in return for the preservation of his sedately respectable existence.

This is a classic thriller plot: retired terrorist forced to go on the run when denizens of his previous existence surface. But Kunzru is too fastidious an author to rock with that particular trope. Possibly, he is concerned that too much emphasis on action and suspense might morph him into James Patterson. And compel him. To write. In very short sentences.

Nevertheless, the point is made. Frame/Carver is not a thriller character. Not only is he not a hero, he isn't even an anti-hero. The principals may have met in police cells in the aftermath of the Grosvenor Square demonstration against the Vietnam war ("this was it, our Winter Palace. This was 1917"). But young Carver is essentially passive, swept out of his depth by teenage idealism and far more powerful and charismatic figures. As, indeed, were many, before and after.

Along with the sights, sounds and smells of the era, Kunzru also evokes the rhetoric of the time: the language of the cell's communiqués is a ventriloquistic pastiche of Situationism and Mao-speak, and their endless debates – in which "the workers" are omnipresent in theory and entirely absent in practice – should generate a sympathetic wince from anyone who has ever spent time around the Left. The abyss that stares back at Kunzru's characters is still open for business.

Charles Shaar Murray's 'Crosstown Traffic' is published by Faber & Faber

Hamish Hamilton £16.99 (278pp) £15.29 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897