Book review: The Buddha of Suburbia

This is another of those cases where a well-known book has been around for a while (since 1990, in this instance) but it takes a special offer to get me to catch up with it. Worth a read though in the case of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, a coming-of-age novel about Karim, a bisexual mixed-race boy of English/Indian heritage growing up in the 1970s. The starting point is his father Haroon's midlife crisis, which unusually ends up affecting many more people than his family circle: Reinventing himself as some sort of vague mystic, he leaves his wife for another woman, but his pronouncements are taken to heart by the people of the suburbs who flock to him for advice. Moving with his new girlfriend to somewhere more central, they take Karim with them the couple of significant miles into London, and he tries to make something of himself in his late teens and twenties.

It's an entertaining book built largely around a cast of eccentric characters, both British and Indian in origin; some of its story of course comes about as Karim encounters different responses to his race - being narrated to by someone who's so obviously English in outlook and attitude it's almost bizarre to have him be treated as either excitingly or dangerously exotic by others. But a lot of the story's flavour is dictated by the setting rather than the characters' racial makeup, the fashions and politics of the '70s defining Karim's life as much as anything else. As such it works on a couple of interesting levels.