First of all, I would like to thank the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

The book tells the story of a fictional world, as its environment and economic systems collapse and humanity is forced to adopt increasingly creative ideas to govern itself. The story is told in the first person by Athena, the daughter of King Rao, who is recounting four timeliness in parallel - the present, where Athena is detained in some obsucre way, the events preceding it, where she struggles to understand her role in the world and how she can make it better, the distant past, where her father's formative years shaped his personality, and the nearer past, where her father established the technology empire that eventually led to the establishment of the new form of governance.

If push came to shove, I'd have to say I liked the book. It has some interesting ideas, especially around the shareholding governance. It is also sufficiently dynamic (mostly) in its storytelling to keep the reader interested. Finally, it touches upon some topical questions, like the role of government, the inevitably (?) of inequality, the tension between realising oneself and trying to good for the world, where egoism ends and others begin, the role of terrorism in social change, etc etc. There is something realistically nihilistic and fatalistic in the book, and actually I like it - it basically says (at least to me) that we struggle and that we should struggle, but we might not achieve much.

The reason for the pushing and shoving is twofold. First and foremost, the story doesn't really hang together well. It comes across as episodic and patchy. It's never clear what the point of some of the diversions is (like the story of King Rao's first sexual escapades, or the detailed background story of Abdul, or the descriptions of the witch doctor bits). Uneven is the best way to describe it. Some parts are punchy and well scoped (like the description of the series of small decisions that led to establishing the shareholder government). Many others are not. I particularly found difficult many of the parts about the village life - top protracted and not always clear in their intent. Lastly, much of the story is derivative. The best way to describe it could be as a mash up of The White Tiger, The Stone Mattress, and the history of Apple/Microsoft/IBM and their founders.

It's not a book I'm sorry to have read, but it's also not a book I couldn't have lived without.

PS: reading some of the reviews online mentioning how horrid some of the scenes are, and how unnecessarily cruel they are, should spend a bit reading newspapers from India, or better yet, any of Rohinton Mistry's work. In my opinion, this narrative is almost offensively mild and westernised in its depictions of Dalit life in rural India in the 1960s.

A mix of historical, speculative and dystopian fiction, ‘The Immortal King Rao’ follows King Rao from his childhood in a family of Dalit coconut farmers in 1950s India, through the creation and rise of his tech-company-turned-corporate-global-government, to his final years raising his secret daughter, Athena, on a deserted island.

As with most novels with multiple timelines or stories running concurrently, I found myself more drawn to some sections than others. The early scenes of King’s childhood in India are very effective in establishing the background of his character, and these scenes also have some interesting insights into life in 1950s India, though once the other 2 sections start to progress and unravel the story these flashbacks begin to feel a little non-essential, slowing the pacing of the novel.

The second of the parallel timelines, showing King and his wife Margie creating a tech company from her house and their rise to become the most powerful figures in the world, is at its best when it avoids coming too close to reality. Scenes of King and Margie nervously pitching their first computers to potential investors and celebrating minor victories are fun, but Vara uses this timeline to tie into real-world issues in a way that feels a little too heavy-handed - the reference to Goop and Margie befriending Gwyneth Paltrow feels particularly forced, as do multiple references to the “45th President”. Vara’s anti-capitalist messaging is effective without these real-world references, and they slightly feel like labouring a point that was already clear. While her ideas here are interesting, the real-world references serve only to take you out of the carefully-constructed world of the novel.

The final timeline (the latest chronologically, though we are introduced to this section from Chapter 2) opens with Athena being held in the cell of a detention centre three days after her father’s death. The world, at this stage, is run by King’s company ‘Coconut’, and civilians are ‘Shareholders’ who labour in exchange for ‘Social Capital’, determined by the algorithm’s prediction of the value they produced. This is an Ishiguro-esque dystopia, where technology is king and ‘influencer’ is a valuable profession. Athena, raised in secret on a deserted island by her elderly father, seeks to venture out to the world of the ‘exes’, those who have rejected society and claimed a group of large islands for their own, away from technology and the watchful eyes of Coconut. Vara has interesting ideas here about what this dystopian future looks like and feels like, and how the exes’ revolution came to be, though these sections do feel a bit too rushed to be really impactful; Athena gains the exes’ trust too quickly, and few characters on this island really impact the direction of the story. There’s a sense throughout that Vara is building up to something big, though this doesn’t ever really materialise - this plot line, and the novel as a whole, ends quite abruptly and left me wondering if it ever really got to the place it seemed to be building towards.

This is a confident and well-written debut novel packed with interesting ideas, though let down by some questionable execution. Vara has a lot to say about technology and capitalism, but I do think that the novel would have benefitted some more subtlety in places - references to the “algorithm” and “Social Capital” are a little on-the-nose, and there’s definitely room in the dystopian sections to swap some of the world-building for some more character-building.

Thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Books for the e-ARC!

This intelligently written book is effectively an intriguing mix of two different genres:

Indian family saga - think say Arundhati Roy’s earlier work) with a US immigrant angle (think Salman Rushdie in particular)

Dystopian tech story – think somewhere on a spectrum between the rather clumsy execution of Dave Eggers and the literary obliqueness of Emily St John Mandel (but borrowing the naming conventions of Margaret Atwood).

One of the more obvious comparisons in the latter is Jennifer Egan, and particularly her latest “Candy House” which contains a remarkable amount of overlap in terms of the underlying tech device which drives the plot: Egan had the Collective Consciousness and “Own Your Unconsciousness” App and Vara the “Harmonica” and “Clarinet”; the tech visionary behind it – Egan had Bix and Vara her eponymous character; the groups actively opposing and opting out – Egan’s Eluders, Vara’s Exes; and even the ambiguous relationship of the tech visionary’s children – Bix’s son Gregory and King’s daughter Athena – to both their father and his technological legacy.

Another comparison that sprang to my mind overall was to Preti Taneja’s Desmond Elliot Prize winning “We That Are Young” which is a recasting of King Lear to the family (and particularly the daughters) of an Indian oligarch (in this case though “Tempest” serves as potential but less explicit template): albeit that novel is almost entirely set in India.

I also was reminded a little – for very different reasons – of the Booker and Women’s Prize shortlisted “Great Circle”, of which I remarked there were at least 5 good novels in the book – which added together lead to a book that was simultaneously too long and unsatisfying in every aspect. Here I think its clear there are two potential novels interwoven (plus a whole Piketty style meditation on capital, even a digression into indigenous American beliefs), but Vara makes a choice to keep the overall book to a managable length so leading to a novel I thought was actually pretty well executed with some really clever links (one example below); albeit at the expense of including storylines which seemed extraneous (but were at least brief).

The eponymous subject of the book is from a family of relatively well-off but Dalit coconut farmers – as oldest son of the oldest son (albeit his father, married to the sister of King’s mother who died giving birth slumps into languor after King’s grandfather’s death – leaving King’s Uncle to take charge) he is the heir apparent to the business – one becoming increasingly lucrative under his Uncle’s Patronage, although always struggling with anti-Dalit prejudice. He is also, as result partly of his heir status and partly due to a family disaster (of which we learn much more later) sent off for an English language education and thriving in his computing studies at University is recruited as a graduate student in the US.

There, together with his graduate sponsor and his sponsor’s daughter (who in turn becomes his lover and wife) the three of them set up a nascent personal computing business, which starts with more of a home kit Sinclair/ZX feel but overtime combining say the PC selling skills of a Microsoft, the design genius of Apple and the data monoploy of a Facebook – their firm named Coconut – becomes the world’s most valuable firm.

The final step to world domination starts when a financial crisis/COVID hit US government agree a plan to effectively outsource most of their work as government to a small group of large firms (Walmart, JP Morgan and of course Coconut). These firms , who form a Board of which King Rao becomes chair, then over around 10 years sign similar agreements for around a third of the world before (and this is where the backstory takes its extreme/dystopian turn) effectively setting up as a supranational organisation and effectively abolishing national states, with King now CEO of a kind of supercharged version of the British East India company (as an aside this linkage, and the way that the latter was largely responsible for the perpetuation of a Caste system which would otherwise have died out which also permits one of the many discussions in the novel of societal structures and hierarchies - is a perfect example of the control and intelligence that the author brings to her writing and the way she dies up the seemingly disparate storylines).

Overtime the book then heads firmly into the kind of binary/extreme changes which characterise the dystopian genre. Society evolves into a combination of capitalist tech utopia and Chinese style state surveillance and control – with individuals deemed as Shareholders and with money/taxes replaced by a form of Social Capital, all moderated by an all purpose Algo(rithm) which also runs the legal system – an Algo I would describe as all powerful although it seems unable or unwilling to really deal with the threat of climate change, which at some point in the history of the novel has passed a tipping point.

King Rao’s fall comes when he pushes too hard and too early a product – the Harmonica – which contains an injection of genetic code to allow individuals to access the internet from their thoughts. Some resulting deaths invigorate the long running resistance to the Board/Algo and leads to a deal whereby Rao has to stand down and the Exes are allowed to go off grid on a group of globally distributed Islands – the Blanklands, portrayed to those still under the Algo world as badlands but in practice a kind of principled anarchic/pure communist society.

The story is actually told/written down by Rao’s daughter Athena who (we learn almost from the first chapter) is under arrest charged with the murder of her father and is drawing her case together for judgment by the Algo no behalf of the collective global Shareholders.

Athena was born after King’s wife died from a frozen embryo - her name is based on the Zeus/Athena legend although Miranda would be a better name as King Rao (whose legend only grows in his exile – including the belief he has found the key to prolonging his life, hence his nickname) raises her in exile and complete isolation on an island. There she realises as she grows up that he has used her as a prototype for his next development of the Harmonica – the Clarinet, which allows people access to each other’s memories and which also forms Rao’s real answer to how to achieve immortality for himself and ultimately for a humanity he feels is doomed (by the storage of stories and memories – something which becomes a closing coda to the novel).

Athena then rebels against her father and joins the Exes where she encounters more of her past than she expects, while having to navigate (my phrase) the Brave New World they are creating.

Athena’s access to Rao’s memories facilitates the multi-strand nature of the novel with chapters moving between a number of different timelines: Rao’s upbringing in India in his sprawling Dalit family – which includes a number of strands which I felt were left rather hanging and which I was really unsure added to the novel; Rao’s early time in the US which was one of the strongest sections I felt; Athena’s own early life – this part can at times be exposition heavy as she sets out what she has learnt from her father of his own back story albeit it is interesting over time how this links to what she currently discovers both from other but more so from her father’s own memories; Athena’s time with the Exes – this part was interesting albeit not always convincing (perhaps like Miranda she adapts a little too soon to meeting people for the first time) and at times a little didactic as we get a theory of capital relationships, and its interaction with technological change, through the ages.

Overall I felt this was a novel which could easily have not worked but instead held my interest throughout to the extent that many of the criticisms I had of individual elements were secondary to my overall enjoyment.

This book was a let-down as it felt like it had much more to offer. The story and writing is excellent but the execution failed. This was disappointing as there were high hopes for this novel.