The Buddha of Suburbia (book)

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The Buddha of Suburbia, written by Hanif Kureishi, won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel, it has been translated into 20 languages and was also made into a four-part drama series by the BBC in 1993, with a soundtrack by David Bowie.

It was first published by Faber and Faber in London, England in 1990 (Paperback, 1991, ISBN 0-57114-274-5).

Hanif Kureishi’s two novels ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ and ‘The Black Album’ are about initiation, (black, Asian) British youth, pop culture, ‘the condition of England’ and London.

Due to the orality in ‘The Buddha’, the historical events and the many dialogues, full of colloquialism the reader gets the impression of realism. The novel is highly episodical; juxtaposition and collage are the techniques that Kureishi uses. ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ is said to be very autobiographical. It is about a hybrid teenager, who is desperate to escape suburban South London and make new experiences in London, in the 1970s. Gladly he takes the unlikely opportunity, when a life in the theatre announces itself. When there is nothing left for him to do in London anymore, he stays in New York for ten months. Returned to London, he takes on the offer of a part in a TV soap opera and the book leaves its reader on the verge of Thatcherism.

The suburbs are “a leaving place” (BS) from which Kureishi’s characters must move away. To Karim London - even though it is geographically not far away from his home - seems like a completely different world. Therefore his expectations of London are great. In ‘The Buddha’ the move (in)to the city (and later on through the city) seems to be like an odyssey, or even a pilgrimage. On the first page Karim introduces himself as follows: “Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere.” (BS, 3) This motif is reinforced throughout the novel.

Pop music is an important theme in Kureishi's novels. One could even say, that his novels have a soundtrack. London itself is associated by Karim to a sound. “There was a sound that London had. It was, I’m afraid, people in Hyde park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors’s ‘Light My Fire’. There were kids in velvet cloaks who lived free lifes” (BS, 121).

Through his work with two theatre companies, Karim gets to know new people from completely different backgrounds, like the working-class Welsh-men Terry who is an active Trotskyist and wants him to join the party, or Karim’s lover Eleanor who is upper middle-class but pretends to be working-class. Through the latter group of people, surrounding Eleanor or Pyke, he realises that these people were speaking a different language, because they received a good education, which was not valuable in the suburbs.

In the Buddha other characters and their struggle to make it in London are described, too. Kureishi shows Eva, who wants to climb higher on the social ladder, as if she was at war with the city: “Eva was planning her assault on London. […] she was not ignored by London once she started her assault. She was climbing ever higher, day by day. […] As Eva started to take London, moving forward over the foreign fields of Islington, Chiswick and Wandsworth inch by inch, party by party, contact by contact,…”. (BS, 150/151) Latter in the novel the main character's father (an Indian immigrant, a boring bureaucrat living with his family in a grey London suburb) is suddenly discovered by the London high society, that is hungry for exotic distractions, and so he becomes their Buddha-like-guru, though he himself does not believe in this role. His son does not believe in him either, and at the same time has his first erotic experiences. A rather funny novel on cultural, class and gender differences, and how the British way of life copes with these.

Within the problems of prejudice and racism lies one of the themes of initiations-novels: The question of identity. Furthermore London seems to be the perfect setting for the protagonists’ “often painful growth towards maturity through a range of conflicts and dilemmas, social, sexual and political.” (Bart Moore-Gilbert, 2001, 113) These characterisations mark Kureishi’s novels as examples of Bildungsromane and novels of initiation.

Even though the Buddha is set in the seventies and ends just before the Thatcher era begins, Kureishi was writing it under the direct influence of the outcome of Thatcherism. It is not surprising then, looking back, that he can see the roots of conservatism already in the seventies. In this sense, the portrayal of homosexual or bisexual characters – like Karim – can also be read as a protest against Thatcher’s homophobic policies.

ISBN 0-14013-168-X (Paperback). Penguin publ., USA. 1991.