The year before he was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus published another remarkable book, La Chute (The Fall)* .As with L'Étranger, it is a first-person narrative and the voice is compelling - perhaps even more so because it takes the form of a monologue addressed to a particular listener. Meursault tells his story, but La Chute's Jean-Baptiste Clamence holds court in an Amsterdam waterfront cafe, choosing to describe his fall to a chance acquaintance. What could be seen as a confession is instead an attack on complacency.
The clue to Camus's intention lies in his use of a quotation from Lermontov. " A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait but not of an individual: it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression."
Moshin Hamid's timely post-9/11 second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, borrows the tone - candid, vaguely inquisitorial - of La Chutebut places the content firmly in that of today's new plague, the threat of terrorism. Fear, suspicion and revenge emerge as the themes in a narrative that looks to cultural tension and the issue of identity in a time in which no one can claim not to have enemies, or indeed, not to be one. It is a curious performance, unsettling certainly, sophisticated and formal, if unoriginal and obviously overshadowed by Camus and his text, which is now just over 50 years old and still pertinent - as may be seen from this new book.
Changez is a Pakistani, Princeton-educated, and now back home in Lahore. "May I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding? I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy gorilla who presides over the fate of this establishment," announces Jean-Baptiste Clamence at the beginning of La Chute. Changez is less sardonic. "Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something: more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services." Determined politeness shapes Changez's courtly approach and he sustains it in the face of little encouragement from his wary American listener, who asks few questions, aside from Changez's opinion of Princeton. Yet it is sufficient. "What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that questions requires a story."
He goes on to explain how he was recruited by an all-conquering, all-powerful and globally greedy company, and on graduating from college found himself with a highly-paid job. He makes clear his love for the US, and particularly for New York. "In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the colour spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker. What? My voice is rising? You are right; I tend to become sentimental when I think of that city. It still occupies a place of great fondness in my heart, which is quite something, I must say, given the circumstances under which, after only eight months of residence, I would later depart."
His monologue ebbs and flows between memories, observations, some sense of the effort required when sustaining a largely one-way conversation and most awkwardly, the long sequences in which Changez recalls his love for a disturbed young woman who is intelligent, beautiful, possessed of literary ambitions, but unfortunately for him, is still obsessed with her dead boyfriend.
BY FAR THE most interesting aspect of the narrative is when Changez, who can recall what it was like to be later accused of being an Arab, describes what he saw while in a hotel room in Manila following an assignment. "I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realized that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one - and then the other - of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased." Aware of the fury flooding the face of his listener, Changez, Scheherazade-like, persists, still polite, still carefully direct in his subtle barbs, such as suggesting that should his American listener feel that the waiter is hostile, "I would ask you to be so kind as to ignore it; his tribe merely spans both sides of our border with neighbouring Afghanistan, and has suffered during offensives conducted by your countrymen." All the while, he looks to the tensions existing between Pakistan and India.
Changez's New York life falls apart; his unconvincing romance collapses because he is unable to compete with a ghost; he loses his job; and his colleagues reject him for his own mistakes and for the wider reasons of his race. Previously he had been a good-looking exotic; the rise of terrorism transforms him into a potential suspect.
It is a pointed, almost allegorical book. Hamid has looked to an earlier master, and has tailored it to the moment. If it does not quite succeed as art, Changez's life functions as a metaphor for darker happenings, yet his narrative does achieve its polemical intent. Look for the enemy, he is everywhere and in all of us.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
* La Chute, English translation by Justin O'Brien, Penguin edition, 1957
The Reluctant Fundamentalist By Mohsin Hamid Hamish Hamilton, 184pp. £14.99