Speculative dystopian climate-thriller combined with a sweeping intergenerational Indian family saga, three narratives braided together.
The philosophical kernel, an epigram from Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism and Ideology:
Once the choice has been made to organize economic, commercial, and property relations at the transnational level, it seems obvious that the only way to transcend capitalism and ownership society is to work out some way of transcending the nation-state. But how exactly can this be done? (485)
In the context in which Piketty poses this question, it comes across as a social-utopian project – surely “transcending capitalism” must be the goal of such a global project. But in Vara’s novel, an algorithm takes the place of the nation-state and citizens are refashioned as Shareholders, whose livelihoods depend on the digitally dispensed currency of Social Capital. Is it believable that the world would hand over the reins of politics over to artificial intelligence? Given the respective popularity ratings of ChatGPT and US congress, I have to admit that it does feel believable that some version of AI will eventually gain enough public trust to play a role in policy.
Vara’s novel, though, distributes most of its attention in the backstory of the algorithmic state and the resistance that brews at the periphery, leaving life under artificial intelligence to the imagination – which is probably for the best. Instead, we read the biography of the title character, King Rao, as he grows up as a Dalit in rural India in the sixties. Vara has described in interviews how she wanted to write an account of her father. (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/vauhini-vara-interviewed/) These chapters are the most vivid and realistic in the novel – they culminate in a series of conflicts that almost seem to allegorize modernity’s trajectory from resource extraction to the breakdown of trust in institutions that haunts contemporary life.
The novel is most captivating in the early sequences, where the juxtaposition between the three narrative threads feels most enigmatic, and in the final seventy pages or so – when Athena’s motivation and character come more clearly into focus. The middle of the novel occasionally feels like it gets lost in the exuberance of capsule biographies of side characters – reminiscent of Dickens or Pynchon in the way that minor characters are rich and complex but challenge the momentum of the novel.
I’d rather read a novel with too many ideas than too few, though. Overall, it comes across as a poetically written novel that brings philosophical richness, the density of history, a tapestry of sympathetic characters to bear one another. One passage that stands out recounts an explosion of details from the perspective of Athena.
But what it should mean to be a person among people–to be a social animal, with an obligation to kin and species–is the greater question. In this wretched state of mind, alone in the Margie, even the fizz of a can of soda opened under a passing guard’s thumb, like a child’s first breath, is beautiful to me.
Athena is imprisoned and muses on the value of social connection while confined in a prison named after her mother. Her brain is overwhelmed with information overload because she has been hooked up to all the data of the internet, which is available at the speed of thought.