Hari Kunzru blends blues music, racial politics and time travel to remind us why we love fiction

All through his life, Robert Johnson, an itinerant blues musician and guitarist, who lived between 1911 and 1938, remained unknown. The discovery and recording of his music in the early 1960s catapulted Johnson to considerable posthumous fame, and the accrual of many a legend around him. Charlie Shaw, the mysterious singer, the search for whose lost song drives Hari Kunzru’s rich and moving new novel, White Tears, lives in fiction, but is much in the same mould.

Like Johnson, Shaw’s music lives on even after death – but this is a novel that amalgamates several themes and genres. So we never really know Shaw’s exact fate, except that he appears to have an insistence on telling his story his own way, to reveal his music at his own chosen moments. Shaw does this in unusual ways, for his music was never formally recorded – yet his song seeps in through the novel’s pages. This is reflective not just of the manner in which blues music has travelled and become popular, but how truths necessarily emerge through the cracks of history, despite a broken justice system.

Music and friendship

The beginnings of the novel are innocuous. In the first pages, Seth spends a lonely childhood, with a father who is a single parent more attentive to a needy younger sibling. It is when he moves to a college on the liberal East Coast that he meets Carter – a scion of the wealthy Wallace family which has made good in construction, and reaped huge benefits from contracts won during America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The young men strike up a friendship when Carter catches Seth eavesdropping on fellow students’ conversations using unusual recording equipment, sophisticated and unobtrusive in equal measure: “a directional mic mounted on a parabolic reflector” (Kunzru is precise on such technical terms, one of those small but essential things that makes this novel work).

Seth’s tracking of every sound he listens to and records, as he travels and walks around the city, with his mic and portable recorder, makes him often, as Kunzru writes, “lose his grip on time.” He picks up sounds that are at first unnoticeable and then those that go farther back in history. A fact stated in the opening pages that give the novel its first strange magical feel.

In their friendship, the young men are linked by their love for old blues music. Carter collects old records, and listens especially to black musicians – for their “music was more intense and authentic than anything played by white people”. Seth learns to love this music too, for it is sufficiently far back in the past not to trouble him.

To the Wallace family, Seth appears a hanger-on. He is regarded with distaste by Carter’s brother, Cornelius, and their parents. Carter’s sister, Leonie, for the most part treats Seth with some supercilious amusement.

Charlie Shaw’s lost song

The straightforward narrative of these initial chapters does give away the novel’s method to an extent. It is in the mention of a moment that turns out not to be a moment at all, in the sense one remembers such things: a moment as a clearly delineated occurrence or event in a memory span. What emerges is an undefined moment, when Seth, walking along New York’s Washington Square picking up the city’s sounds, is stopped dead by a chess player suddenly singing a blues song: Believe I buy a graveyard on my own.

The song, Seth’s accidental discovery of it, is a pivotal moment, and it will turn several lives around. Though when Carter and Seth technically modify the song and upload it on a blues music sharing site, neither of them have an inkling of this. In what could almost be a contrivance on the author’s part, they list the singer as Charlie Shaw.

Magic, mystery, science

Kunzru’s novel mixes mystery and magic (commensurate with what is ordinarily inexplicable), with some pseudoscience. The past, as you realise several times on reading this novel, can indeed catch up with you, and what is past can, at breathtaking pace, turn into the present. Besides these temporal shifts, there is the play of what could be called “karma” – the consequences of one’s actions can lead to a comeuppance in this life, or the next. There is also in some places a reference to Marconi’s theories on sound waves, and how waves never really disappear but dissipate in space and can be “recovered”.

In several of Kunzru’s novels, beginning with his first, The Impressionist, his play on identities and their fusion, the very interchangeability of identities has been a concern. The Impressionist begins with a revealing epigraph from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, when the lama tells the young orphan: “Remember I can change swiftly.” And yet he can also willingly return to his own self. Pran Nath Razdan, the protagonist of The Impressionist, thrown out of the family home in early 20th century British India, realises he can and must take on multiple identities to survive and thrive.

Time travel

In his review of Kunzru’s novel Gods Without Men in the New York Times, the writer Douglas Coupland classified Kunzru’s novels as “Translit” – a term for books that span time periods and historical eras as well, fusing these on the same page at times. Gods Without Men begins in a benign neighbourhood in suburban New York and moves to the Mojave Desert in southwestern US; events in the book also move from past to present, with fantastic pseudoscientific theories of alien presence and UFO visits that once influenced ancient civilisations.

White Tears, Kunzru’s sixth novel, shifts gear to move into the past suddenly, which happens soon after Carter’s accident. Seth then realises he must go into the past, not merely into Carter’s immediate past, but also into the past that will reveal the mystery of the unknown blues singer. This is when the novel too takes on multiple identities: a ghost story, a detective tale, and a narrative that mingles themes of race, history and present day racial politics in the United States. And as with Gods Without Men, there is some esoteric “science” too, with the mention of inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s theory of sound waves that never really vanish but are retrievable, for time is relative and cyclic.

Seth’s search begins from where JumpJim has left it – and the novel backtracks into time, making it fuzzy. So that, for instance, Seth on his way to meet Leonie remembers only later that he had bumped into JumpJim just before this. The quest for Charlie Shaw holds the key, or rather several keys, to this novel’s mysteries. It’s a chase that leads Seth to several red herrings too, before JumpJim makes a second appearance.

In any other writer’s hands, this sudden manifestation of JumpJim in a bus “not going north, but south” would have appeared contrived, complete with a certain overemphasis on establishing the bus’s actual destination. Perhaps Kunzru does indeed add on such contrivances to play up the noir angle – seen in, for instance, the dingy, nondescript bar where Seth meets JumpJim the first time, its vanishing the very next time Seth passes it, and then, months later, JumpJim’s appearance in trench coat in a bus.

Lost histories and atonement

Of course, the novel is not just about the lost history of the blues. The effort to resurrect forgotten stories of blues musicians is fairly recent. Committed activists have been working to restore them, marking and restoring graves, and rewriting American and blues history to accord such musicians their rightful place. Kunzru’s novel also acknowledges the convoluted history of race in the US.

The Wallace corporation earned much of its profits from its construction work, beginning from the 1930s onward in the Deep South, before the family moved to Washington DC and later to New York. Most of its present-day profits come, as Kunzru’s novel shows, not just from construction bases for the military but also from high security incarceration facilities across the US, where Afro-American inmates outnumber every other group.

One of the older Wallace progenitors in this novel appears to suggest that if the blacks can be enslaved no longer, they can now be incarcerated. In the past, it used to be “days for dollars” when the blacks had no money to pay their way out of a rotten justice system. But the blues and its discovery have sounded a mysterious death-knell. The Wallace family comes to be haunted by it as the past catches up, swiftly and inevitably. Carter, for his part, had seen the darkness, but his atonement, his “white tears”, would never quite be enough.

White Tears, Hari Kunzru, Penguin Books.