Yahya Bas, the hero of Guy Gunaratne’s new novel, “Mister, Mister,” is a tricky character to pin down. Is he an idiot, poet, jihadist or all of these at once?
As Gunaratne answered this question and found Yahya’s voice, the author’s own self-conception evolved. “This book fundamentally changed how I think about my own identity,” Gunaratne, who was born in Britain to Sri Lankan parents, said during a recent interview in central London. “This self-inquiry, which comes with an extended period of writing, led me to assert parts of myself that had gone unaffirmed.” Now, Gunaratne identifies as nonbinary, and uses they/them pronouns.
“There are passages within this novel where Yahya is trying to lend language to how he feels about his own desires for others,” Gunaratne said. “That might run the risk of being misread if you weren’t aware I have a fluid relationship with desire, sexuality and gender.”
“Mister, Mister” begins with a shocking act of self-mutilation as Yahya, a young man in his 20s who is being held in a London detention center after returning from Syria, cuts out his tongue so that he can recount his own story in written missives without interruption. Yahya’s action is designed to thwart his interrogator, known simply as Mister, who wants to take control of his story by fitting it into a preconceived arc.
“I can put down what I really mean to say now, God willing,” Yahya muses. “And this time, Mister, you may even have my consent to hear it. Though, I know, you’ll be wary. Not least, because you’ll have no control over what’s to be said.”
Yahya’s determination to avoid being misrepresented was a response on Gunaratne’s part to “the narrative the media was telling — that there was a requirement for people who had been radicalized, whatever that word means, to fit a profile of a young, disillusioned male, who is filled with such hate that they would want to leave the country and come back to hurt.”
“Mister, Mister,” which Pantheon released in the United States this week, was acclaimed in Britain when it was published there in May; The Guardian called it “thrillingly ambitious.” Its London setting and themes of social and political exclusion continue a powerful exploration of alienation that Gunaratne began in their first novel, “In Our Mad and Furious City,” which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018 and won the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2019.
Gunaratne, 39, uses the German word “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” to describe their literary objectives. It “translates to working through history both emotionally and almost physically to get to the point where you’ve not just processed it,” they said, “but it becomes very much how you speak about yourself and each other.”
Gunaratne vividly recalls attending their high school in northwest London the day after 9/11 and interacting with friends, many of whom were of Iraqi, Afghan and Moroccan heritage.
“We would go around telling each other how we felt about it,” they recalled. “I remember one of my friends was asked how he felt and he didn’t say anything, but just applauded.”
At the time Gunaratne did not think that their friend was the kind of person “who would grow up and get in a van and mow people down.” But they are not so sure anymore.
Gunaratne understands that many people may be shocked by the level of anger that can lead to this kind of radicalization. But “I was around a lot of that sentiment growing up,” they said.
The invasion of Iraq inspired a political awakening. Gunaratne marched in protest against Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister at the time, for his claims about the extent of Saddam Hussein’s military resources.
“I suppose it’s a subject matter for me because it bothers me on some deep level, particularly because of a lack of accountability,” Gunaratne said. “A lot of these people should be in jail in terms of the politicians involved.”
Lisa Lucas, Gunaratne’s editor and publisher at Pantheon, said she was determined not to make any concessions to American readers, even knowing the author’s perspective may resonate differently in the United States. “The reality is we come to a book like this to understand other people, to understand other voices and to learn new languages,” she said. “The job is not to make the work less sophisticated so that the reader has an entry point. I think the work is to frame what you are about to read in a way that excites the reader.”
Before turning to writing, Gunaratne studied film and television at Brunel University London, and later, journalism at City, University of London. At the same time, they met their partner, Heidi Lindvall, with whom they now have two young children. Together with Lindvall, who is Swedish, Gunaratne set up a film-production company and began making documentaries, including one about the suppression of news media outlets in Sri Lanka after the civil war there ended in 2009.
But writing had long been a passion for Gunaratne — ever since they first began showing their mother little plays they wrote as a 10-year-old. “I would write in the back seat of my dad’s car when he drove us around at night,” Gunaratne said. “But I never really once thought that I could be a writer.”
This feeling began to change when Gunaratne read about Lee Rigby, a 25-year-old British soldier who was killed in London in 2013 by the Islamist terrorists Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. What began as something that they wanted to write about “in a very private way” evolved into their first novel, “In Our Mad and Furious City.”
“It made me want to look back and stare down our past as a country, but also as an individual,” they said. “I don’t want to write blindly, ever.”
That novel was set over 48 hours, whereas “Mister, Mister” encompasses 25 years of recent history, beginning with the first gulf war. Gunaratne found inspiration for the new novel in the 19th-century picaresque tradition of writers including Charles Dickens (in a nod to him, the detention center where Yahya is held is called Bleaker House) and Machado de Assis. Like many of their characters, “Yahya draws his world and characters idiosyncratically, distinguished with idiolects and memorable tics,” Gunaratne said.
Both of Gunaratne’s novels are distinguished by their acute ear for colloquial speech patterns. “Growing up in London, I would express myself with words that didn’t originate from my own condition,” Gunaratne said. “They came from the Jamaican tradition or the Bengali tradition. I would mix it in with Irish and all this other stuff.
“It was an exciting thing to be on those London buses with school kids from all over,” they added. “We loved the way we spoke, which somehow felt violently liberatory.”
Gunaratne felt a similar sense of freedom writing “Mister, Mister,” describing it as a “transformative experience” in terms of their identity. “If I speak about desire or bodies or relationships I know that I am being more understood now within the context of the pronouns I use,” they said.
