A New York writer with middling talent is having a mid-life crisis. He is using anxiety about the world as an excuse to put his needs above his wife and young daughter. The unnamed writer gets an opportunity to write at a three-month residency in Berlin. Instead of embracing it, the writer acts out, refusing to work. He starts living like a teenager, and binge watching an ultra-violent crime drama called Blue Lives.
Much is made of his residency being adjacent to the place where the Final Solution was planned. At a pretentious party, he meets Anton, who is to become his nemesis. Anton is the fascistic creator of Blue Lives, and intent on creating a cultural, and maybe literal Fourth Reich.
At this point, the book, and our unnamed writer disappears down the rabbit hole. We begin to wonder how reliable the narrator is, as the shadowy Anton starts to mess with his life. He makes odder and weirder decisions that take him further away from his despairing wife. The novel is set in 2016, leading up to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of populism and acceptable racism. Although the writer is correct in the way the world is going, it is hard to feel sorry for his self indulgent behaviour. Overall, this works better as a novel of ideas than a story.

At the start of the novel, the unnamed protagonist of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill admits that he is going through a mid-life crisis. He is a moderately successful academic and writer, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife Rei, a human rights lawyer, and their three-year-old girl. Yet he feels unfulfilled and increasingly anxious about the state of the world. This continuous state of anxiety places a burden on his marriage and saps his creativity. Then the opportunity arises for him to spend a few months at the Deuter Centre, situated on the Wannsee in Berlin. This could be a perfect opportunity for him to reboot. Rei actively encourages him to spend a few months away from home – provided he comes back ‘whole’.

The Deuter Centre, however, turns out to be quite different from what he expects. The Centre is situated close to the villa where, at the “Wannsee Conference” Reinhard Heydrich outlined his nefarious “final solution to the Jewish question”. And although the ideals of the Deuter Centre, founded by an ex-Wehrmacht general, appear to be in direct opposition to Nazi-Fascist thought, the Centre’s “forced” communal approach and disturbing surveillance measures are not worlds away from the strictures of an extremist regime.

The narrator’s sense of oppression grows and turns into paranoia. Even as he works on a treatise on the “lyric I” in German Romantic literature, he increasingly questions not only his own self, but also the very basis of the value we give to human life and human dignity. Things come to a head when the narrator makes the acquaintance of Anton, a film director who has gained notoriety for a violent cop series airing on German TV. The narrator is horrified but not too surprised to discover that Anton is a leading figure of the alt-right. Through him, the narrator discovers a subversive hostile culture that plans to dominate the world in increasingly unsubtle ways. As the narrator’s sanity unravels, he believes himself to be in a personal battle with Anton and all he represents. But is this all just paranoia or is truth closer to a nightmare than we are ready to admit? There are certainly some autobiographical touches in the novel which suggest that the narrator’s fears are not that far-fetched.

On his arrival at Wannsee, the narrator, almost literally, stumbles upon the grave of Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist, one of the exponents of the German Romantic movement, was hugely influence by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant which he came across in 1801. This shaped Kleist’s subsequent literary career, but also cast a tragic shadow upon his life. In fact, Kleist interpreted Kant’s view as implying the impossibility of ever establishing an objective truth. This led him into the dark alleys of an existential crisis from which he never fully recovered. He would eventually die by his own hand, in a murder-suicide planned with Henriette Vogel.

Kleist looms large in the novel and, indeed, the vicissitudes of his life could be the key to understanding the predicament of the narrator. Kleist’s unhappiness at his lot could, at one level, be deemed to be a pathological condition – the narrator himself, at one stage, floats a theory that Kleist suffered from PTSD. But there is no denying that Kleist’s crisis was also an existential one, born out of a legitimate philosophical concern.

The same could be said of the narrator’s crisis which is not only pathological but also an existential one. More importantly, it is possibly a crisis which all men of goodwill should be going through at the moment. Faced with inequalities, injustice, human suffering, the refugee crisis, the trampling of fundamental freedoms and the resurgence of the far-right, can we really discount the narrator’s fears as mere paranoia?

“Red Pill” invites discussion not just thanks to its subject matter, but also through its approach. Although, at first glance, the narrative appears a relatively linear one, the novel becomes exhilaratingly complex thanks to its riot of cultural references. The nods to German history and 19th century Romanticism are clear, but its web of associations draws into it some other unlikely bedfellows. Thus “Red Pill” of the title is specifically alluded to only once in the text – but that is enough to link it to the choice between the “blue pill” of blissful ignorance and the “red pill” of truth mentioned in the movie “The Matrix”. And besides that, there are more abstruse references to political philosophy and figures of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. I would be comfortable describing this as a “novel of ideas”, but it could equally be considered a psychological thriller, an adventure story, a romance or, even, a dark comedy. And, as a lover of the Gothic, I could not help also perceiving echoes of the German Romantic sub-genre of the “secret society novel”, variously referred to as the Bundesroman or the Gehimbundroman. This reference is suggested by the narrator’s increasingly feverish research into the “dark web” and the far-right groups which haunt it – an aspect of the book which reminded me also of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and Numero Zero.

Admittedly, the plethora of meta-levels sometimes make the novel seem unfocussed. In particular, I have in mind the segment of the book describing the experiences of Monika (the Deuter Centre’s cleaner) under the GDR. Taken on its own, it makes for a harrowing and moving read. It also fits in well with the narrator’s concern about the “surveillance regime” adopted at the Centre. In the context of the whole book, however, the need for it is not too clear. Perhaps Kunzru’s idea is to show us that danger of extremism is not limited to the right end of the political spectrum. But then again, the novel neither invites nor provides clear answers, and is so much the better for it.

This is a weird but somehow wonderful confection of ideas that brings together a collage made up of Heinrich von Kleist, the lyric 'I', the decision about the Nazi's Final Solution, the old East Berlin, the Matrix, a TV show that sounds like The Shield, paranoia (or is it?) and the re-emergence of alt-right politics that culminate in the 2016 US election. Somehow Kunzru - just about - makes it hold together though, I'd have to say, a touch more coherence would have been preferable for me.

What unifies it all is the voice of the narrator whose struggles with personal freedom, and subjectivity as literary form lead him in strange directions. Throughout, this book manages to be beguilingly intelligent and also just a bit bonkers - but in a good way! I certainly felt that a closer acquaintance with German literature and thought might have served me well as some of the references, I fear, were not picked up by me.

All the same, this is clever but has heart - definitely a book for our times.

This book is a spectacle, a wild romp, insanely intelligent, full of references and meta-levels and ideas - just give Hari Kunzru this year's Booker, will ya! Our narrator and protagonist is an unnamed NY-based writer struggling to produce new work - this is starting to affect his marriage, so when he obtains a stipend for a fellowship at the Deuter Center in Berlin, he perceives it as an opportunity to overcome his troubles by distancing himself from his usual environment. His application stated that he wants to do research on the subjectivity of lyric poets, but his own self falls apart as his stay turns into a disaster: He is confronted with the Center's oppressive policies of transparency and openness, disturbed by the destiny of a cleaning woman who was tormented by and working for the Stasi, haunted by the recurring sight of a poor refugee and his daughter, and when he finally ventures into the heart of the city, he meets an alt-right activist who plays with his mind - or doesn't he?

Our unreliable narrator starts from a place of mental instability and vulnerability and is again and again confronted with ideologies and belief systems that challenge his world views, namely the importance of human dignity, which drives him mad: He is shaken to the core by the loss of moral certainties, going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, liberal and alt-right filter bubbles, fake news and real threats to democracy and the values of the Enlightenment. (Needless to say that at some point, Trump will enter the narrative.) There is a real shift happening, there are real dangers to the way of life we know, the values we hold dear - Kunzru explores the friction between understandable fear and paranoia and how people can be pushed over the edge, drowning in quicksand, questioning the very concept of reality.

The text operates with an abundance of motifs and themes and cleverly connects them, thus creating an exciting narrative puzzle: The founder of the (fictional) Deuter Center, a former Wehrmacht general, became a successful entrepreneur in postwar Germany, rich and lauded by politicians, his signature product being a white color with extreme opacity (can you cover up your war crimes in the name of white supremacy by inventing an opaque white color? And btw: There really is a well-known German company named Deuter, and they produce backpacks, so you can, you know, carry around your baggage - Hari Kunzru, evil genius). The premises Kunzru describes in the context of the Deuter Center are actually those of the American Academy where the author spent some time; it is located at the Wannsee, so where the Wannsee conference was held and Reinhard Heydrich proposed the "final solution to the Jewish question" - history is haunting the people we meet in this story (the GDR and its system of surveillance and oppression also plays a pivotal role).

While sitting in his room and struggling with the Center's ideologically rigid regulations that strictly monitor his output and contributions, the protagonist becomes obsessed with Heinrich von Kleist, who shot himself at the Wannsee in a murder-suicide plot with Henriette Vogel. Again and again, he wanders to Kleist's nearby grave, ponders the poet's hysteric disposition and contemplates his work, namely The Prince of Homburg and The Marquise of O - as the story goes on, he partly starts to mirror Kleist, and while the novella isn't explicitly mentioned, Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas seems to be a steady companion piece to the narrator's upcoming crusade (you could also make a case for The Broken Jug). The many references to German literature (including Goethe's über-famous Wanderer's Nightsong II, e.g.) and politics (not only to WW II and the GDR, but also to the Wirtschaftswunder and the RAF, e.g.) can easily be decoded and (re-)contextualized by Germans, and I'm curious how readers from other countries will perceive it. Hari Kunzru does a fantastic job working with these themes and depicting Germany, IMHO.

Another pastime of the narrator is watching a nihilistic cop show which, as it turned out, was created by Anton, the alt-right activist who will become his nemesis: The show, the narrator muses, is intended to prepare us all for the upcoming world without empathy - which made me think of the Alfred Hugenberg who turned the Universum Film AG (UFA) into one of the biggest propaganda tools of the Nazis. And where does the protagonist encounter the enigmatic alt-right troll? Of course: At the Berlinale. The narrator becomes obsessed with Anton, his opinions mess with his mind, and he starts to unravel...

The protagonist is half-Indian and married to a woman with Japanese heritage, just like Kunzru (his wife is writer Katie Kitamura) - and in a way, most of us will probably feel connected to the narrator, who has to witness how people who despise his values (empathy, honesty, solidarity etc.) and celebrate a dog-eat-dog mentality in which debasing others is a legitimate display of power gain more and more power (hello, Trump-GOP and AfD). Will the Enlightenment be reversed, will our democracies collapse (again)? Kunzru meditates about the connection between the human penchant for mysticism (Norse mythology, German Romanticism, etc.), the power of manipulation and the disorientation we are currently experiencing. The title-giving "red pill" refers to the concept explained in "The Matrix" (the narrator also talks about the world as "simulation"): Morpheus offers Neo the choice between a blue pill (blissful ignorance) and a red pill (true reality) - you can watch the scene here.

I could go on and on about the many ideas the author has played out in this work - this is a fascinating, smart, timely read. I hope many people will pick it up and Kunzru will get lots of recognition for it.