Word: britishisms
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...post-colonial Britain - its Karachi-born taxi drivers, jack-booted skinheads, coked-up admen and firebrand mullahs. His latest work, now playing at London's National Theatre, dramatizes his 1993 novel The Black Album. Set in 1989, during the furor over Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, it follows a British Pakistani college boy torn between the delights of sex and Western culture and the lure of Islamic fundamentalism. The book is a fresh and funny bildungsroman, capturing an antic '80s London. Sadly the play is clunky and shallow, flattening its characters to the very stereotypes that Kureishi's better work...
Back in the early 1990s, when Kureishi first started going to extremist London mosques for research for The Black Album, scribbling down notes at Friday sermons was weirdo stuff indeed. Today, with London still scarred from the 2005 bombings by British-born terrorists and the far-right British National Party winning seats in recent European parliamentary elections, the novel seems spookily prescient. Though its themes of radical faith and alienation endure, Kureishi's mosque visits didn't. One Friday, he recalls, the mullah at a mosque in London's East End warned that "there are spies and journalists...
Kureishi has been attracting controversy since his Oscar-nominated screenplay for 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette, about a young, gay British-Pakistani making it - and making out - in Thatcherite London. The discovery that he could shake things up was wonderfully liberating, particularly for the son of a Bombay intellectual stuck commuting from a dreary London suburb to work as a civil servant in the Pakistani embassy. "My parents' generation were immigrants, who nobody noticed, and who didn't want to be noticed," he says. "Then came my generation." The boy who was called "Pakistani Pete" by a teacher for whom...
...second-generation kids ... we weren't planning on becoming accountants. We wanted to get stoned, get laid and be cool, like everyone else. When I was 15, Kureishi was the only writer I'd ever read who seemed to be aware of this huge British demographic. He wrote about us not as if we were exotica, but simply as a self-evident part of British life...
...people when I was a kid - a quarter of their lives," he says. "You're a soccer fan, you go shopping, watch TV and you're a Muslim." The England Kureishi chronicles - indeed, helped create - is a country where Islam, curries and brown skin have become as British as Earl Grey tea and rain...