A bewildering pastiche

There ought to be a word for people who set out to overturn stereotypes and end up reinforcing them.

In a recent interview with The Hindu , Nadia Akbar claimed her debut novel, Goodbye Freddie Mercury , was borne out of her exasperation with what she calls “orientalised junk that is written for western audiences where subcontinental characters are just characterisations”. It is, sadly, the most concise summary of her novel.

This raises a critical question. Who asked Akbar to explain Pakistan to the world?

The book intermittently ventures to translate the troubled postcolonial landscape of the country through such scholarly forays as “It’s hard to explain Third World chaos. It just looks like shit” and “In Pakistan, we shop to survive”, as well as “In Pakistan, boring lives lead to bad manners”. The social commentary, billed to be “audacious” and “sexy”, is delivered through unimaginative expletives of the kind that appear jaded by one’s early teens. But when everyone from Marlon James to DBC Pierre season their plotlines with a prodigious use of the f-word, what is the problem here?

The plotlines.

Plotlines in Goodbye Freddie Mercury repeatedly and viciously attack their own credibility. The novel opens by referencing the honour killing of Qandeel Baloch, and then never mentions it again. This sets the tone for what is a baggy, bewildering pastiche of events that are brought to us through the voices of the two protagonists — Nida and Bugsy.

Bugsy is a radio jockey, whose experiences seem to draw on Akbar’s, since she used to be part of Lahore’s first English music radio station. Bugsy leads a sheltered, posh life, protected by his father’s powerful position in the Army. He has an air conditioner in his bathroom. Since novelists must work particularly hard to make such characters relatable, Bugsy’s trauma is a Salman Khan-style car accident, for which he has had to accept no responsibility. This veneer of emotional turmoil is expected to make the reader take him seriously. It doesn’t happen.

Nida, on the other hand, is a middle class college student whose trauma peg is the untimely death of a beloved sibling. Like all good, bored girls, she falls for a bad boy and a racy lifestyle. Enter Omer, the playboy scion of one of the most powerful families in the country. Since Nida’s character is about as well-defined as a toddler’s finger-painting, she is unable to discern what a manipulative man-child Omer is. He too has an air conditioner in his bathroom. Not that this detail is a dealbreaker, but you just know a cautionary tale about crossing class lines is ahead when a novelist dresses up one character with baffling opulence and relegates another to envious spectatorship.

As the narrative voice alternates between the protagonists, both in free fall, stock characters — a gay, rich fashion designer, a corrupt, rich politician, a sleazy, rich relative — are introduced without sufficient reason and then made to abruptly disappear. The backdrop, like a bizarre merry-go-round, includes a random suicide bombing, a political rally full of cross-eyed supporters, a wedding, and even the Panama Papers. The budding romance between the protagonists moves towards a formulaic resolution, but in keeping with the brazenness of the rest of the novel, it ends on a repulsively tragic note.

For a novelist who describes herself as “flying the flag for desi women 24x7”, it’s unfathomable why her female lead is such a blanched vegetable of a character, who flits between indecision and inertia. Whenever the narrative comes fractionally close to an internal dialogue about taking charge of her life, Nida quickly distracts herself by asking for a cigarette or throwing up into a potted plant. We are left with just a pretty face who is “cool” because the men around her insist so. On a serious note, Akbar must reflect on the role of sexual violence in her fiction. If gang rape is used to close a character’s arc without even a passing thought on the rape culture endemic to South Asia, the writer should be held to be singularly irresponsible and tactless.

Goodbye Freddie MercuryNadia AkbarPenguin/ Hamish HamiltonFiction₹599

Mercifully, there is very little of Freddie Mercury in the novel. There is some half-hearted exposition about how Mercury aka Farrokh Bulsara is “ours, yaar, he’s ours”, notwithstanding his own reluctance to acknowledge his Indian roots. Mercury is reduced to a metaphor, symbolising the hunger of rich, young people in poor, brown places to be white.

In that respect, the real victim in the novel is the city of Lahore, eulogised in trite, affected lines such as “how awesome Lahore is, beautiful in its Third World rot.” Narratives centred on Pakistani cities enjoy a dedicated Indian readership, thanks in part to the popularity of recent novels such as Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi, You’re Killing Me! and Sarvat Hasin’s You Can’t Go Home Again . Lahore, in this book, is subtracted into an inconvenience.

As a debut novel, this is a bad attempt at good writing. Akbar will hopefully write better books, about more challenging subjects like the “real people of Pakistan” who, as she writes in the book, “don’t live in chilled glass-houses and smoke hash all day”.

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