Grievances of marginalised people

 

Why young people join terrorist organisations like Isis? Bhutto reveals the plight of poor and downtrodden in Pakistan and England. How does it feel to be told you’re worthless by society and locked out of the opportunities afforded to a privileged few?

Her topical novel released amid the controversy surrounding Shamima Begum, the teenager from east London who travelled to Syria to join Isis in 2015.

Fatima Bhutto, whose grandfather Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and aunt Benazir were both prime ministers of Pakistan, while her father Murtaza, an opponent of Benazir’s government, was assassinated when Bhutto was 14.

Bhutto tells the story of three young people in Pakistan and England. The story begins in Karachi where in 2016, Anita, daughter of a maalish wali (masseuse for wealthy women and lives in a slum) and Monty lead wildly contrasting lives. Across the city Monty attends the American school and spends summers in London where his super-rich parents own vast properties. The third character Sunny who while growing up in Portsmouth, on England’s east coast, if desperate for his Indian father’s approval, confused about his own sexuality and subjected to racism in school. Bhutto writes “All his life, Sunny never felt he belonged to Portsmouth.”

Bhutto reveals the injustices and indignities of poverty faced by Anita. IN Karachi Monty’s mother’s maid are purged on whim and casually condemned to destitution.

In Knightsbridge, Monty sees a couple carelessly toss a coffee cup into the road where an elderly Sikh man is sweeping who kept his eyes downcast away from the couple and adjusting himself around them.

These feelings are exploited by Jihadis who lure Bhutto’s trio of protagonist to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq. Monty wilts in the desert sun, Sunny’s angst threatens to propel him to acts of monstrous violence and Anita is transformed into somebody else entirely. All three are representative figures worn by global capitalism and preyed upon by charlatans promising revenge and redemption.

The novel displays the controlled indignation at the state of our world about the way inequality is an incubator for alienation and anger.   

 

 

The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto, Viking £14.99, 432 pages.-A0YN