Waking The Dread

With his unputdownable sixth novel, Hari Kunzru brings to life our worst nightmares

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

Released in 1999, The Matrix made literal a well-worn philosophical belief—the world around us is only a simulation. In one of its most iconic scenes, Neo, a messiah for the internet age, is asked to choose between two pills, one blue and the other red. While the blue pill would allow him to forever live in blissful ignorance, the red pill offers realisation, an understanding of stark and uncomfortable truths, a chance to see how deep the rabbit hole of technology, control and consciousness really goes.

Speaking to india today via Zoom, author Hari Kunzru confesses he was a fan of The Matrix: “The film puts our sense of reality on pause and reality is then seen as being this constructed thing—I thought it was a fantastic film.” Like Neo, the narrator of Kunzru’s latest novel, Red Pill, also sometimes loses himself in the labyrinth that is the internet but, unlike Neo, he is no hacker. He is a writer who finds himself bored in Berlin. Having been awarded a fellowship at the prestigious Deuter Centre, he hopes to write about the construction of ‘self ’ in lyric poetry. Tragically, however, a full-blown middle-age crisis leaves him too self-involved to work. He spends much of his time binge-watching Blue Lives, an American cop show whose nihilism, he finds, is as disturbing as its violence.