Hari Kunzru Red Pill

However, things have changed since then. Politics has become much darker. Authoritarianism has reared its ugly head all over the world. We are in a time of greater uncertainty than ever before and it’s a very strange time to be thinking about the future. Whether it’s here in New York, or when I talk to my parents in London, or when I talk to my cousins in Bombay – everybody’s anxious. I wanted to try and write honestly about that feeling. The core of the book for me is that anxiety.

The narrator is quite an unlikeable and unreliable character. He’s someone who walks while always looking over his shoulder, he lives sloppily and even abandons his wife and child. Is he a patchwork of people whom you’ve met?
In many ways, he is a worse version of me. It’s a book about mid-life crises. Most men’s stories about mid-life crises involve some sort of sexual straying. It’s all about, ‘Oh, Iam unhappy in my marriage, so I am going to have an affair and maybe that will change things’. However, I wanted to write about a crisis, which happens to a man who really loves his wife and child. He never stops loving them, but he feels that in some way he has let them down, just by existing.

That’s the core that he feels is wrong with him and he unravels as the book goes on. He’s carrying this shameful feeling that, in some ways, he’s not up to the job. That his wife will one day realise, ‘Oh, he can’t protect us, he can’t help us. He’s not going to be a man’, in that traditional sense.
So, that was another thing that interested me: how does a situation like this play out, if it’s not orientated around the clichéd story of sexual infidelity?

I say this because there are other kinds of crises, other kinds of situations where men feel they’ve failed. It’s really a book about masculinity and given how many men write books, it’s peculiarly limited how often they discuss their anxieties or fears. 

Monika’s story is fascinating. As a teenage punk living in East Berlin during the 1980s, she was strong-armed into becoming a Stasi informer. How did her character come about?
Berlin is really a city of ghosts. You cannot not be aware of its past. As you walk in the city, you realise that there are holes in the buildings made by fifty calibre shell bullets from 1945. You look down at the sidewalk under your feet and there is an artist who has a project called Stolperstein (Stumbling Stones) where he set little square-shaped brass plates into the sidewalks, each bearing the name of a Jew who was taken from that address. The project commemorates them. Also, in terms of Berlin’s geography, you can still feel presence of the wall, even though it’s no longer there.

While I was living in Berlin, I was getting more and more interested about ques- tions of privacy, about the individual and the State power. I started reading about the Stasi and how they monitored and surveyed artists and creative people in East Germany. I thought I might write something about an artist or a poet – somebody who was close to the kind of work that I do. And then I started reading about what happened to the punks in East Germany. These were really young people, teenagers most of them and yet the State considered them to be a serious threat. The more I read about them, the more I became fascinated by their world.

I wanted a story that was kind of a wedge into the main story – like a free-standing novella inside the novel. So, I wanted Monika’s experience to be a comment on the nar- rator’s experience, because she’s gone through so much more. You learn that she’s been very traumatised by what has happened to her. So, that was the relationship between her story and the narrator’s story.

You did this because you were interested in drawing parallels between the past and the present?
Yes, absolutely. It’s something that I’ve done in a lot of my fiction. I’ve used the past to illuminate questions in the present. As a fiction writer, I like imagining my way into thesealternative systems. It’s a very interesting exercise for me to imagine how I might have behaved if I was living under a particular kind of regime. What would be the actual pres-sures? What would be the actual decisions that I’d make?

Crippling paranoia and mental breakdown are at the heart of ‘Red Pill’. What drew you to these themes?
I’ve been living in America for the last twelve years. Americans have a picture of the world in terms of what they think is possible that could happen in America. For those of uswho’ve come from outside, our picture is slightly different. We are often quite surprised at how firmly they believe in their systems, their traditions and how robust they thinkthey are. What we’ve discovered in the last four years is that those systems and traditions are not robust. The experience has been of a country in collapse.

There is a writer called Nassim Nicholas Taleb who talks about the Black Swan event, which is the unexpected event that destroys all your predictions of the future. I think we are at a moment where all sorts of things, which once seemed unreasonable and impossible and were the products of paranoid fantasy, are now in full flight. Just a fewmonths ago, there were unmarked cars in New York and Portland picking up (Black Lives Matter) protestors off the streets. We have also a completely failed response to the pan- demic where people are looking at being in quarantine for another six months.