Online misinformation is said to be one of the defining problems of recent times. It is believed to have contributed to the rise of nativist demagogues from Donald Trump in the United States to Narendra Modi in India, not to mention the lurid conspiracy theories that sustain Covid denial and anti-vax movements around the world. No less a personage than Britain’s prince Harry has declared it “a global humanitarian issue”.
The hinterland between truth and lies holds a particular fascination for Amitava Kumar, a US-based Indian author who made his name as a writer of reportage before turning his hand to fiction. His new, semi-autobiographical novel is an anxious meditation on “fake news” and political mendacity in general.
A Time Outside This Time is set in 2020: Trump is still in office, and the coronavirus pandemic is under way; it’s a time of “radical uncertainty about every aspect of not just our polity but reality itself”. Satya, a novelist on a writer’s retreat, resolves to write a book titled Enemies of the People, about the corrosive impact of populist rhetoric – “a novel about reading the news”.
The halting tempo of Kumar's narration suggests he's far from comfortable in the digressive and fragmented mode of fiction writing he has chosen to deploy
The focus intermittently shifts from Trump’s America to Satya’s native India, where misinformation on Facebook and WhatsApp is widespread, and baseless rumours can lead to vigilante attacks and lynchings. The country’s Muslims, vilified by Modi’s Hindu nationalist propaganda, are particularly vulnerable. While writing his book, Satya dips in and out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and notes that the concepts coined in that novel – Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak – proved eerily prescient.
Satya’s enquiry centres on two case studies. First up is the story of his friendship with Farooq, a student from Pakistan who was harassed by the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11, and who may or may not have been a serial liar. Next, he interviews a police informant involved in the assassination of a senior figure in the left-wing Naxalite guerrilla group. The assassin had cultivated a close friendship with the insurgent before double-crossing him. (Kumar is drawing heavily from his own back catalogue: his breakthrough book in the US, 2009’s Evidence of Suspicion, was an investigation into the war on terror, and he has a longstanding journalistic interest in the Naxalites.)
This material is pegged to the book’s overarching theme via some fairly underwhelming musings on deception and unconscious bias: “facts can lead you in any direction, it just depends on the kind of story you want to tell”.
These cogitations are interspersed with references to well-known studies into human behaviour, courtesy of Satya’s partner, Vaani, who is a psychologist. These include the notorious Milgram experiment involving the administering of electric shocks, which seemed to suggest an innate human propensity for cruelty; the theory of the “bystander effect”, which posits that people are less likely to help a fellow human being in need if there are others present; and research indicating conservatives are constitutionally more fearful than liberals, and therefore more fixated with physical safety.
Reflecting on these studies, Satya ponders the fragility of human solidarity in the face of authoritarianism and sectarianism.
The novel serves up a repetitious litany of truisms and platitudes that reads like a peculiarly dull brand of cant
From trite Orwellian allusions to pop psychology factoids, we are very much in the realm of the deeply unoriginal. The prose, meanwhile, doesn’t quite convince. The halting tempo of Kumar’s narration suggests he’s far from comfortable in the digressive and fragmented mode of fiction writing he has chosen to deploy. His storytelling is punctuated with artlessly self-aware and vaguely apologetic metacommentary: a pause in the narration is preceded with “I should pause here to explain something”; a chapter made up of fragments is preceded with “Here are collected fragments…”; a digression ends with “End of digression”.
Straining a bit too hard to speak to the moment, the novel serves up a repetitious litany of truisms and platitudes that reads like a peculiarly dull brand of cant: “In our world, we are surrounded by lies”; “Truth bends like a twig standing in a glass of water”; “[P]itched against fake news, the truth of fiction”; “[W]e are living in a world of accelerated and often false media. Literature, in its battle to find out what is real, has to lock horns with how news educates and misleads. Literature can become news by making news.”
If it all sounds wearyingly familiar, that could be because we’ve been deluged with books and think-pieces on “post-truth” politics over the past six years. Kumar’s somewhat belated contribution brings nothing new to the party.
