MISTER, MISTER

Poetry and terrorism color this tense coming-of-age story.

Yahya Bas, the son of a British woman and an Iraqi man, is raised as a Muslim in London by an uncle and several women who share a kind of refugee home. His father disappeared after returning to the Middle East in 1991. His mother is mentally disturbed and constantly sews until one day, Penelope–like, she begins undoing stitches. His uncle teaches Yahya about poetry, which he begins writing as a teen under the influence of the Iraq War and images from Abu Ghraib. He becomes a popular propagandist at pro-Muslim rallies. When the novel opens, Yahya is in prison, responding to interrogation from the titular “Mister” by writing his life story. The sense that the detainee faces some grim reckoning—although Gunaratne suggests otherwise by making him the first-person narrator—sustains the main thread of suspense. Allusions to the Beatles recall the Islamic State foursome given that nickname. Yahya travels overseas along a route taken by would-be jihadists. As in their first novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), the author draws on actual news reports; here, in particular, stories of British jihadists who seek to come home. But the book—which recalls aspects and certainly the title of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist—goes beyond political disenchantment, exploring questions of religious and racial alienation, the power of art and oratory, the consolations of community. Gunaratne creates in their narrator, Yahya, a perceptive, sensitive character with an energetic and affecting voice. Most important, the author avoids cant or easy answers, underlining the inescapable ambivalence of such lives by closing with an ironic nod to David Copperfield, “Whether I turn out to be the hero of my own life, or the villain of yours, these pages will show.”

A penetrating view of the legacies of extremism.