Like The Buddha of Suburbia Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album is yet another novel devoted to the inner workings of a young mentality forged in the furnace of Thatcherism and traditional Asian family living. This particular story explores the ideological divide that has and will characterise British thinking for a long while to come. In the wake of capitalism's victory over socialism and communism, today's social battlefield is being played out between post-modernism and fundamentalism. That is, the argument runs, are humans capable of creating their own truths or even living without truth, or should they be living to what are claimed to be preordained truths?

The main character in The Black Album, Shahid, is consistent with many of the characters of Kureishi's other books in that he is a teenager who rejects the Protestant work ethic of his Asian background in order to fulfil his ravishing hunger for literature, ideas and art etc. Thus in order to gain a college education, Shahid moves away from his comfy family surroundings of Sevenoaks to a pretty rundown block of flats in London.

Amongst the flotsam of wierdos and minorities that fester around him, Shahid quickly catches the attention of his nextdoor neighbour, Riaz an Islamic fundamentalist and fellow student. Shahid reciprocates the interest invested in him, immediately taking a shine to Riaz's sense of purpose and the cohort of strugglers he has deployed ready to risk their livelihoods for their God. This gives Shahid what he has long been looking for: a sense of belonging. However it is not long before the hidden contradictions in Shahid's life begin to surface.

Shahid represents the post-modern dilemma, for the purpose of his application at college is to provide an excuse or purpose for living: the inevitable question that any post-modernist needs to answer once they have stripped all value systems to their barest assumptions and irrationalities. And for Shahid while one part of him sees Riaz and his all encompassing Islamic diatribes as comforting for providing an answer, the other part denies that there can be such a thing as the answer. Instead there are only answers, the nature of which shift and slide in line with different experiences of pleasure, pain and other people's ideas.

So whilst appreciating the sense of purpose that Riaz and the fundamentalists have, Shahid finds it hard to reconcile their absolutism with his desire for different truths, creativity and above all pleasure. This contradiction becomes magnified in importance when Shahid makes the acquaintance of his lecturer Deedee Osgood, a white middle class Camden based arty lecturer: the archetypal post-modernist democrat. More than just acquaintances they go on to share sexual relations, drug induced experiences and as many heathen pleasures as one could imagine.

The crucial point in the story comes when Riaz and his fundamentalist cohort start challenging the authority of Osgood, arguing that Islamic fundamentalism, or the message of God, is the only thing that can deliver the oppressed minorities from white hegemony. Osgood finds Riaz's brand of absolutism intolerable, but finds Shahid's adherence to it even worse and so gives him an ultimatum: them or me. Having previously been able to live quite comfortably with the cognitive dissonance resulting from his juxtaposition, Shahid forced to make a choice, despairs. The choice is to lose Osgood with whom Shahid shares, makes sense and gives purpose to all his experiences of drugs, sex and ideas or lose his overwhelming sense of family that he shares with the fundamentalists. In the end Shahid ends up doing what most of Kureishi's egocentric characters do: nothing.

As a consequence of Shahid's lack of conviction, he ends up being alienating by both sides. However, Shahid eventually returns to Osgood, which is unsurprising as he silently resisted much of what Riaz had said throughout the book. However his rather passive resistance turned into unintended active resistance when Riaz found much to his horror that Shihad had imbued a script that he had been typing up for Riaz with pornographic verse. Viewing this as an affront to God, Riaz sends his blood thirsty henchmen to teach Shihad a very serious lesson.

Eventually the fundamentalists find Shihad with Deedee Osgood in a house that Deedee is borrowing from a friend. They take Shahid and start to do damage to him when who should appear at the top of the stairs all staggering and Star Wars like, but Thatcher's creation and Shahid's older brother: Chili. Chili, the iconic 'greed is good', sold out to western values, lover boy: a comical character indeed. A self-loving poseur and head of the family business, whose failure in making sense of the Protestant work ethic by which he lives his life, was driving him to coke addiction and all sorts of trouble. He represented what is still by and large the mainstream in nineties societies, that is the anomic Thatcherite automaton, whose affluent but soulless lives are only just made about bearable by the sight of others leading a more miserable existence. Here is a quote that does much justice to the nature of Chili:

Not that Chili… could ever be described as an orthodox defender of his community. One of his black girlfriends did once persuade him to go to an anti-racist demonstration; and when the National Front yelled, 'Get back, Pakis!' Chili, wearing a mink-coloured suit, had annoyed everyone by taking out his fat wallet, waving it at racists and shouting, 'Get back to your council flats, paupers!'

Chili eventually saves Shahid from the fundamentalists, which is rather befitting because despite the ideological debate, we are still living in an era deeply stained by the days of Thatcherism. The message coming from this book though is that if all post-modernity can do is deconstruct one absolutist doctrine to have it replaced by another, then it doesn't amount to much. Proving the error in ideologies is not hard, teaching people to opt for a world of freedom, tolerance and uncertainty is the challenge. All in all, yet another fascinating read dropping off the conveyor belt of a new breed of writers who have mixed contemporary politics with youth culture to great effect.

Hanif Kureishi
The Black Album
Faber and Faber: London
1995