Michael Frame’s quiet country existence as Miranda Martin’s house husband and her daughter’s step-father, is suddenly jolted when he thinks he sees a former lover, Anna Addison, while on a holiday.

Anna Addison was supposed to have been killed in an embassy siege in 1975. Why he is terrified of the apparition is made clear only later in the novel. His idyllic life takes another jab when an old acquaintance, Miles Bridgeman, appears out of the blue to talk of the past. A past Michael Frame had buried long ago and never thought of much.

As Hari Kunzru pieces together the story, we get to know of Michael Frame’s former life as Chris Carver, a radical left-wing terrorist and through him and his comrades a taste of the impossible ideals of the 60’s; Chris Carver, barely into his teens and taken in by the leftist ideal of creating a Utopia, renounces his family and joins a radical left-wing fraternity which begins to perpetuate terror in order to set the world right.

Finally, fed up and disillusioned with his group, Chris Carver, who has by now metamorphosed into Michael Frame to escape the law, goes underground. When he emerges from the shadows, he has deliberately discarded his terrorist identity in exchange for a chance to live an ordinary life.

Changing with times

“Chris Carver had tried to escape the state, but Mike Frame had eagerly embraced it.” Just when Mike Frame “seemed like a destination, an end,” the past catches up in the form of Miles Bridgeman who subtly begins to blackmail him about his past.

The story begins in 1998, a time that marks “the end of history and the glorious beginning of the age of shopping”, according to Kunzru. A time when pure idealism has given way to unalloyed egotism. It is a far cry from Chris Carver’s time when an entire generation’s “selfishness was tempered by a more-than-passing interest in renunciation.” Kunzru’s deft strokes mirror the drastic changes wrought in society in four decades. In the sixties even a terrorist had some principles (He phoned a warning before setting off a bomb!) Contrast this with the smooth sophistry of the nineties.

Eventually, Chris Carver, in early life and later as Mike Frame, is as much a “product of the times,” as Pat Ellis, a fellow terrorist who later becomes a powerful minister, is. Survivors who made the choices they made because they seemed best for the times they lived in.

On another level, the novel is also about search for identity. Who is the real protagonist in the story? Chris Carver or Mike Frame? Destructive terrorist or genial gentleman? The lines are blurred as in real life.

My Revolutions , a novel
Hari Kunzru
Penguin India
4.50 pounds
pp: 278