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Gods Without Men, by Hari Kunzru
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The California desert. A four-year-old boy disappears, plunging his parents into the public hell of a media witch-hunt. But the desert is inexplicable and miraculous, and the family's fate is bound up with that of all those who have travelled before them through this brutally powerful landscape. Multilayered and a compulsively readable, Gods Without Men is a heartfelt exploration of our search for pattern and meaning in a random and chaotic universe.
- Sales Rank: #154739 in Audible
- Published on: 2011-10-11
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 874 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Multi-layered story that distracts from an excellent story at its heart
By Ripple
Quite literally at the heart of Hari Kunzru's latest novel stands not a person, but strange geographical feature in the California desert - three large rocks known as "The Pinnacles". If you've ever looked at a feature of the landscape and wonder what it has meant to those who have gone before, then you will find a similar stance here. Kunzru's episodic narrative takes in various points in time from 1775 to 2009 all of which centre around this rock structure which has had different meanings for different generations. There are echoes of the past in each new version, but no more than that.
It's hugely ambitious, and much more so that the other Kunzru novels that I have read, although it shares with his other books the playful but insightful writing style. He's a writer that has a real feel for human nature. However, for me, it doesn't quite succeed in rising to its ambition. It leaps back and forward in time frame from chapter to chapter in a manner that is disorienting and I couldn't help wondering if it would have been more effective presented as discrete short stories that shared a similar stimulus - which is effectively what it is.
Where I was most frustrated though was in the imbalance of the weight and emotional connection to the different threads. By far the dominant thread surrounds the disappearance of an autistic son of a wealthy New York couple set in 2008. The story covers both the father and mother's side and the lead up to the disappearance and the subsequent media furore. It's frighteningly realistic and disturbing with real emotional heart. The problem as far at the book is concerned is that it is such a terrifically well told story that I started to yearn to return to these events when Kunzru wants to draw the reader back to another time.
The other main theme was, for me, less engaging. "The Pinnacles" became a focus for the hippy movement in the 1970s and a cult of extra-terrestrial worshipers gathered there. While this element of the book has more in terms of threads to the past and the present day, I was never emotionally engaged in the characters or their plight. It's just a weaker story than the child abduction thread.
Amongst the other elements to the book are a Spanish report from the 1770s about the progress of the missionary attempts to bring Christianity to the native American tribes in the area, the meaning of the rocks to the native American tribes and, once more in the recent past, the story of an English rockstar fleeing his debauched life and, briefly, a young Iraqi girl's role in a local marine camp where she role plays a middle east village for military training.
These last two threads are also potentially interesting but never really get played out to their full extent. Yes there are themes of displacement and abduction throughout, and there are some generational links of the families involved, but that aside, the sense I had was of a story broadening out without ever quite coming back together again.
If you are looking for a multi-layered, complex novel, then Kunzru's engaging writing makes this a good choice - in the hands of a lesser writer this could have been an unholy mess - but my overriding sense was one of frustration that the focus kept drifting from what would have made fascinating stories in their own right which was slightly disappointing.
31 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
A book to be savoured and enjoyed..
By FictionFan
Beautifully written, this novel takes us on a journey through time, where we meet a diverse cast of characters all of whose lives are affected in some way by the location in which they find themselves, the empty and mysterious Californian desert.
Each of the various tales is lovingly told and our sympathy is demanded for, and easily given to, each of the characters: from the original Native American inhabitants, to the new-age followers of the UFO cult of the Ashtar Galactic Command, right up to the lost and lonely rock star of today. And our main sympathies lie with the young couple, Jaz and Lisa, whose autistic son, Raj, mysteriously disappears during a trip to the desert - a disappearance that echoes earlier incidents in the history of this strange place.
I think this is a book that may mean different things to different readers. For me, it was about the search for faith. The characters bring so many gods to the desert over the years, and it seems that the desert absorbs them and weaves them into its mystery. Each of the characters is fundamentally changed by their experiences in this place - their existing beliefs shaken by what happens to them there. But the book is not preaching a particular line - the overwhelming feeling left at the end is that, for the author as well as for some of the characters, the question of whether there is something beyond the rational remains unanswered, perhaps unanswerable.
This may make the book sound like a heavy read, but the wonderful prose, the fascinating tales, the occasional flashes of humour and, above all, the sympathetic characters all combine to make this a book to be both savoured and enjoyed.
29 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Too Much and Not Enough
By A reader
What an annoying, unsatisfying book. Kunzru wastes our time setting up a premise, or several premises - and then lacks the courage or imagination to resolve any of the questions he raises. I might flatter the author by hypothesizing that the absence of an ending or an explanation is itself the point: that the human condition is to spend our lives wandering in the desert seeking in vain for answers to the big existential questions, as we soothe ourselves with religion in the meantime. If the book were simply about the myriad ways that we delude ourselves into thinking there's something bigger going on in the universe, if it were merely a commentary on our capacity to invent one god myth after another and then bow down to it as if it were real, I could live with that, although it wouldn't be news.
But I'm not feeling magnanimous, because Kunzru took me on a wild goose chase through that long, hot desert, all the while making tantalizing insinuations about that something bigger without ever taking a stand. Something does happen in this book: an autistic child is mysteriously kidnapped in the desert, mysteriously comes back months later, and mysteriously begins to become normal. And this event mirrors an earlier one in the book in which another child is mysteriously kidnapped in the desert and later returned. Kunzru invents a real mystery, and then surrounds the mystery with many variations on the theme of self-deluded religiosity. So, are we self-deluded, or not? Did something happen, or didn't it? Are our religious myths an attempt to rationalize or explain real paranormal phenomena or the existence of extraterrestrial life? Are all these things true at the same time? Kunzru doesn't say. GODS WITHOUT MEN is a giant cop-out.
The trip itself is mostly boring, filled with disparate, deeply flawed and often unlikable characters who come and go, leaving loose ends dangling, just as the ending and the central mysteries of the story are left dangling. Kunzru takes many chapters to bring us to the central drama of the Punjabi-Jewish couple with the autistic son and how their life implodes when he mysteriously disappears in the desert. It's the only part of the story that feels authentic, which makes sense because the husband, Jaz, comes from the Sikh culture that certainly has things in common with Kunzru's origins. Had it been fleshed out, the tale of Jaz's identity crisis and his struggles to find his footing in a foreign culture would have made a good book. Alas, Kunzru instead decided to saddle us with a huge number of sub-plots, if I can even call them that, some of which might have made interesting short stories, but in this context simply add pointless pages to an already meandering mess. Each time I turned the page and was introduced to someone new from another unrelated time period, my heart sank. I plodded through the book because as a Vine reader I had an obligation to finish it and review it, but I did not enjoy myself and I was glad but disgusted when I was done.
At his core, Kunzru is a political writer. He is deeply disturbed by racism, sexism, imperialism, religious fanaticism, and the good old-fashioned mob rule that permeates both this book and human history. His description of the pernicious effects of internet gossip mongering in fostering a mob mentality is very realistic. Kunzru is furious about these things, and I don't really blame him. But it renders almost all the characters either victims or perpetrators: losers and lesser losers.
On a positive note, I appreciated Kunzru's imaginative allegory about the evils of Wall St. and how the web of interconnections in the global economy might manifest in the unlikeliest of places, providing us with a concrete example of that metaphysical chestnut "All is One." His treatment of the grieving parents' separate styles of response to both the disappearance and recovery of their son was very interesting. The rational, computer geek husband strives for answers and emotional detachment and is practically driven crazy by the absence of an explanation, while the emotional, artistic wife becomes a New Age jargon-spouting zealot who invents and commits herself to a metaphysical explanation to erase her discomfort with not knowing. The nature and patterns of belief in a world full of contradictions and mysteries is a great topic for a book, and Kunzru does a good job of satirizing the phenomenon of religious cults - and religions in general - with their code words, rituals, deification of individuals and "magical thinking."
In the end, Kunzru's overstuffed bag of topics, his unwillingness to tell us whether there really was something extraterrestrial going on in the desert, or what really happened to the autistic child, might have bothered me less if Kunzru had the discipline to whittle down his many subplots into a select few that he explored in depth, if it were more fun to read, if the characters themselves weren't superficial archetypes or stereotypes. It's not just ideas that matter in a book; it's how they're presented. Where was the editor?
I can't recommend GODS WITHOUT MEN.
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