Review: Mohsin Hamids new book The Last White Man is just a touch insipid – The Hindu

Mohsin Hamids new book, The Last White Man, questions whiteness at a time when Black Lives Matter is delivering change, but it is surprisingly lightweight

Mohsin Hamids new book, The Last White Man, questions whiteness at a time when Black Lives Matter is delivering change, but it is surprisingly lightweight

One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown. Thats the opening sentence of Mohsin Hamids tale about race and difference. Anders never discovers how or why he changed colour. But it changes his life utterly.

Anders rings in sick rather than go to his job as a trainer in a fitness gym. His partner, Oona, a yoga teacher, tells him that he looks a different kind of person, utterly different. She is initially deeply uncomfortable at the idea of having sex with a dark man, even one she knows so well. Oonas mother is even more repulsed by the idea of intimacy across racial barriers, even though all that has changed is her daughters boyfriends skin tone.

The book cover

When Anders eventually ventures back to work, he believes other people, other white people, view him differently, less trustingly. He feels unsettled about the most basic of issues: who he is.

But he is not alone. More and more people suddenly, and without explanation, lose their whiteness. Some of the more fantasist websites and message groups promulgate wild conspiracy theories which given the absence of a conventional explanation find a ready audience.

Extremist militia groups take to the streets; law and order collapses; a race war looms. But as the transformation in peoples appearance becomes almost universal, a new normal takes hold. The idea of whiteness becomes little more than nostalgia for a lost era.

Against the odds, Hamids novel ends on an uplifting note pointing to the possibility of overcoming racial differences and relishing our shared humanity. Thats a comforting notion, however implausible it may be.

Author Mohsin Hamid| Photo Credit: Reuters

The novel is also about loss and grief and parenting. Anders terminally ill construction worker father is immediately and instinctively protective of his newly dark son. Oonas mother, in contrast, is caught up in right-wing conspiracy theories, though in time she too makes an accommodation with the new order.

The story is not dated or located, but it is clearly about the United States today shaped by Black Lives Matter and Americas continuing failure, even after electing a black president, to overcome racial fault lines. Mohsin Hamid divides his time between the US, the UK and Pakistan and is best known for the widely-acclaimed The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel set in Lahore and published 15 years ago.

Also read |Yes, well, Im terrified: Mohsin Hamid in conversation with Tishani Doshi

Once again, Hamid addresses in this novel one of the commanding global issues of our times demonstrating the ability of creative writing to encourage us to look afresh at ourselves. He talked in a recent interview with The Observer about how his new novel is rooted in his experience of being a Pakistani man in America in the aftermath of 9/11: This experience of loss, which the main character, Anders, has in my book, was something I felt very strongly at that moment. I went to elite universities, I lived in cosmopolitan cities. I wasnt white, but I was, you could say, white enough. And then after 9/11 all that changed. When things didnt go back to how they were it got me thinking: what is this thing white America that I used to have a probationary membership to?

Hamid addresses in this novel one of the commanding global issues of our times demonstrating the ability of creative writing to encourage us to look afresh at ourselves| Photo Credit: AFP

But The Last White Man is not of the same calibre as Hamids earlier work. It is topical but surprisingly lightweight. It is slender in all sorts of ways: not so much a novel as a novella, barely 40,000 words in length; short on the development of character; and all round, just a touch insipid.

Hamid purposefully avoids the word black. Those who change colour turn from white to dark. It seems they adopt new facial characteristics too, so this is not simply a darkening of skin colour but a racial transformation. However, that is not fully spelled out.

The Last White Man

Mohsin Hamid

Penguin Random House

599

The Last White Man has been written in the style of a fable, with a deliberately nave writing style, and an almost complete avoidance of speech marks. It speaks to centuries of white privilege; of building social status and identity on not being the other; of the deeply ingrained racism that continues to blight even the most economically advanced democracies. But it is a fable which is a reflection rather than offering a clear lesson.

The Black Lives Matter movement has achieved global resonance and has helped to deliver change. It has prompted a spate of books about race, most of them non-fiction, and many of more substance than this slim volume.

Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC India correspondent and a visiting professor at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai.

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Review: Mohsin Hamids new book The Last White Man is just a touch insipid - The Hindu