Interview by Alastair Mckay
The last time I saw Hanif Kureishi was at a reading by the author JT Leroy. It was a peculiar event, at which Leroy - a teenage rent boy turned author - was supported by a cast of celebrities: Marianne Faithfull was there, and Samantha Morton, and Beth Orton. Kureishi was in the audience because he had spent an afternoon in Leroy's company, at the house of a Freud (Bella), along with Nick Cave and others, and when I cornered him to express misgivings about the peculiar cult which surrounded the truckstop prostitute, he was unequivocal. The writing was the thing, he said, calling it "a mixture of lowlife and very erudite reading".
Kureishi's New Book - Something To Tell You
Kureishi has every right to be buoyant. His new book, Something To Tell You, is an epic tale in which the consistent themes of the author's life - love, sex, politics, multiculturalism, the whole soft touch - are played out in a story that stretches from the Grunwick dispute of 1976, when the Asian workforce of the Grunwick film processing lab protested over pay and conditions, through the Thatcher years, to the moral flabbiness of the Blair-Bush project. It's a confident novel, blurring fiction, autobiography and recent history, with little explosions of dissent: Kureishi notes how the traditional Indian restaurants are designed to reproduce colonialism for the British masses, while also satirising the "trashy media class" of which he is at least a part-time member.
Kureishi's Views on Multiculturalism and Radical Islam
Kureishi isn't quite in JT Leroy's class when it comes to biographical reinvention, but he has always mixed erudition with a fascination for low-life. Looking at him now - cropped grey hair, deep indigo jeans, Al Capone brogues - you might not connect him with the taboo-stretching rebel who remoulded his own experience into The Buddha Of Suburbia, but the pop sociology of Something To Tell You is welcome after a period of painful - some would say exploitative - introspection.
Fond as he is of irony and ambiguity, Kureishi is an unequivocal supporter of multiculturalism. "It's the idea that people are allowed to do whatever they want, be whatever they want, say whatever they want, have whatever culture they want. As long as they don't become violent and impose themselves on other people, it's a fantastic idea. And now we've really gone backwards. I heard somebody on the radio saying: They don't integrate'. Well, the f***ing royal family doesn't integrate. Rich people don't integrate. Why is it only the Muslims who are not integrating?"
Kureishi was one of the first writers to identify the dangers posed by Islamism in his 1995 novel The Black Album, and his 1997 film, My Son The Fanatic. But he understands the appeal of Muslim extremism. "Radical Islam was a movement of liberation. It really came out of colonialism. My father identified with the Muslim League, because this was a way of keeping the Brits out of India, and an identification with other Muslims, who would then create their own state, which became Pakistan."
The Writer's Mid-Life Crisis
You might call Something To Tell You a novel born out of a mid-life crisis, if people hadn't been saying that about Kureishi's work for a decade. But he doesn't disagree with the suggestion. He is 53, and turning 50 made its mark on him. The book is his attempt to consider the past half-century, "which is really the history of immigration, and cultural change, and people like my father getting off the boat and coming in to England. And here we are 50 years later arguing about whether they should have Sharia law in Dorset. How could you not be fascinated by that? It's not only a crisis for me but a crisis for the country, i.e., what sort of Britain is it? What's the identity of Britain? It's the mid-life crisis of our country."
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