‘Radicalism isn’t a fever or a rash. You don’t wake up with it one morning’: Novelist Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways is one of the most striking novels this year has had to offer. Bhutto’s latest book is her fifth full-length publication, following a poetry collection, a memoir, a work of journalistic non-fiction, and her debut novel. In a review of the novel, Sanam Maher wrote, “It is exciting to see how Bhutto has grown as a writer in the five years since her debut novel.”

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that Bhutto the novelist has developed a stronger, more grounded voice while pulling off an ambitious vision in The Runaways. The novel is one about youth – its possibilities and its blinders. Set for the most part between present-day Karachi, Pakistan and Portsmouth, United Kingdom, it introduces young people who must navigate isolation, poverty, race, and familial complexities as they try to carve a place of meaning for themselves in the world. It is a text that takes the reader along effortlessly, revealing and concealing in equal measure as it moves back and forth in time between 2014 and 2017. Bhutto spoke to Scroll.in about the empathy the novel seeks from readers, the differences between poverty in South Asia and in the West, issues of class in Karachi, the reasons youth may be drawn to radical forces, and how she feels about redemption. Excerpts from the interview:

The Runaways reminded me in so many little ways of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Is it strange to have a novel come out relatively close to yours and see reflected within it some of the themes you’re grappling with as a writer? Do you think similar books end up entering a conversation with one another?
I started writing The Runaways in 2014, and there was nothing out then. I haven’t read Home Fire, so it’s difficult for me to answer this question, but I think as a writer you want your book in conversation with as much as it can be. The books I was in conversation with as I was writing this were not necessarily books about radicalism at all – and by that I mean the books I was reading at the time – for example, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. That’s a novel I read again after a long time while I was working on The Runaways. Ultimately though, I think The Runaways asks something of its readers that they haven’t been asked before in terms of the empathy it demands of you.

In the opening pages, there are numerous clues embedded within what is essentially Anita Rose covering a short distance on foot. As a writer, how do you come up with the minutiae (looking over her shoulder, trying to obscure her face, stepping away from the guard, etc) which build tension in a text – that doesn’t give away too much at the beginning but still lays the ground for storylines to come?
I think it’s a question of instinct, as a writer you’re so embedded in the world of your characters you possess a fluency that comes from thinking about these people – their lives, their joys, their sorrows, their everything – all the time. But it’s also a question of revision – of trying things and seeing if they work and then redoing them and redoing them until they’re right.

As a reader, I’m very suspicious of writers who have a book out every year. It’s too short a time to build what I personally want to read as a reader – it’s not enough time to polish, to question, to observe. And I think that impatience shows itself to the reader – you feel it. The same way you feel it when you know that they haven’t rushed, that they’re not racing to deliver a manuscript but to truly engage with the worlds they’re constructing, Rachel Kushner for example. Kushner is a revelation to read because of this deliberation. She does everything beautifully and you are in awe of her on every page.

Sulaiman Jamil – Sunny’s father – “loathes” the kind of poverty he encounters in Portsmouth in the United Kingdom more than the poverty he’s previously seen in India. Can you talk to us a little about how poverty in the two places differs, and why an immigrant in particular may be troubled by poverty in an adopted land?
In our part of the world, or even in the east or the global south, we live much more intimately with the lives of others. We are closer to each other’s sorrows and fears – you are confronted with that sorrow when you leave your home, when you’re sitting at a traffic light, at the office, everywhere. We are closer to each other’s joys too, we don’t have the distance between people that you find in the West where life is so orderly and constructed so as not to be inconvenient or disturbing. And what you see when you live in this way is that all men are fragile and vulnerable. No man has protection against fate. You cannot look away, you cannot divorce yourself from the sadness of poverty, of violence, of fear.

But in the West, poverty is locked away in welfare offices, in church basements, in food banks and you imagine you can divorce yourself from it, you can hide from it. You can build a world that tells you that you will never be in a welfare line or that you live in an up-and-coming neighbourhood and you can build a thick layer of pretend insulation and look away. You do not have to interact with the homeless and the hungry because you can construct borders between their fates and your own. I think the poverty of the West is shocking in many ways to us because we don’t imagine they are afflicted by poverty at all. And they are, and they are deeply frightened by it.

Sulaiman works hard to ensure Sunny has the chance to attend what he considers a decent school. Sunny is drawn into radical philosophy by conspiracy theories such as birth control contaminating the water supply which causes women to turn infertile and emasculates men. Why doesn’t a middle-class education equip Sunny to see through the propaganda?
When your country doesn’t offer you a vision, when it doesn’t include you in their construct of their version of society and the future, you will take any vision that is offered to you. That is the lesson we should have learnt about radicalism. Nothing else. People are not radicalised because they are Muslim or because they are Hindu or Christian. People are radicalised because they are cast out to the peripheries of their societies and are isolated. They are alienated and made to feel they are somehow different, that something intrinsic about that society or nation doesn’t apply to them. They’re humiliated, not once but a thousand times, constantly excluded and talked down to. Being middle-class or educated doesn’t immunise you from feeling pain.

Neither Sunny’s father nor Monty’s are religiously conservative. According to you, why would their sons (who have the benefit of increased exposure, being born a generation later) be drawn to radical philosophy?
I’ve largely answered this above, but radicalism isn’t a fever or a rash. You don’t wake up with it one morning and there you are – radicalised. It builds over a lifetime of humiliation, of isolation and pain. I think it has very little to do with religion. It has to do with power, with belonging, with loneliness and very much to do with pain.

The Runaways engages with poverty and class in Karachi, and what dehumanisation – and always being seen as part of a servile class even when you are children and not old enough to work – can do to people growing up. Can you talk to us a little about what you drew from when you wrote about these themes?
From living there, from watching and not looking away, you see these things all the time. I want to write about the things that people look away from, I always gravitate to what I’m disturbed by. If you ask me whether I find Monty’s world interesting – one of privilege and comfort and ease – I don’t really, I think it needs to be investigated and questioned thoroughly but I’m interested in Anita Rose’s world. In Layla’s world. I want to see those worlds as they are – in conflict with each other, they exist in great tension to each other.

The significance of the epigraph (I don’t want to reveal too much to the readers here) only becomes clear halfway through the novel. Did you always know that you wanted to use that epigraph by Mahmoud Darwish? As a writer, what do you hope a reader will draw from an epigraph?
I didn’t always know I would use it. I love poetry and especially the Arab, South Asian and Latin American poets. Darwish is one of my favourites and I was re-reading some of his poems midway through writing and I came across Rita and the Rifle and those lines shook me. They spoke so deeply to this world, to Sunny, to Monty, to the longing and the way these characters are lost, and I knew I had to use it.

I suppose I hope readers will take a mood from an epigraph, a feeling, a sentiment. Something that speaks to the book they are about to enter. Maybe it’s even a warning. For my last novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, I used a poem by Nazim Hikmet and it too set the stage for what you were about to read. In that case, it was a poem about losing one’s home. In this case…I can’t tell you, I don’t want to give it away.

Was it inevitable that the characters would find themselves at an extremist camp in Mosul? Was it simply a perfect storm in each case that led them there? Do you think it’s likely that any or all of them could have been rescued or rehabilitated in time
No, I don’t think any of them they could have been rescued, sadly. They had to end up there because of the course they set themselves upon, the pain they felt that led them to war against their worlds. Against the world, even. But do I believe they could be rehabilitated? Yes, I believe very much in redemption.