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A book for our times

Hasan Suroor

We Need to Talk About Kevinhas a resonance in the context of the 7/7 bombers.

— FILE PHOTO: AP

U.S. author Lionel Shriver with the 2005 Orange Prize for fiction for We need to talk about Kevin.

A BOOK published three years ago has found a new resonance with many Britons on the first anniversary of the London bombings. The book has nothing to do with terrorism but it raises many of the same issues about human behaviour (why, for example, people end up doing things that seem so much out of character with their "normal" appearance?) that political pundits, social scientists and ordinary Britons have been wrestling with in the wake of 7/7.

The book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, deals with a fictional massacre of innocent people in a U.S. suburb one afternoon in the spring of 1999. Kevin Khatchadourian, teenaged son of an educated and well-heeled American couple and with no apparent grievance with the world, goes on a killing spree — murdering his own "loving" father and doting baby-sister before tottering off to his school where he kills nine other persons including seven of his classmates and one teacher. There is no obvious motive for his actions, and the question on everyone's mind is: Why would a "normal" boy from a "respectable" family do a thing like that? When his mother, Eva, asks him in jail why did he did it, he himself sounds puzzled. "I used to think I knew. Now I'm not so sure," he answers. Was there something inherently evil about Kevin? Or did the society around him — his parents, peers, teachers — fail him?

The four suicide bombers who caused such havoc in London last summer were, like Kevin, "normal" and educated young men from respectable families. They helped with community work, played cricket, had plans for further studies and showed no sign of disaffection or alienation — let alone any tendency toward terrorism.

As their families, friends, and neighbours have never tired of saying, they were "nice lads," well-behaved and a lot of fun to have around.

So, what went wrong? What made them do what they did? Those who knew them and those whose job it is to crack such conundrums are as puzzled as Kevin's mother was. Kevin's creator — Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin — can get away saying that she does not know the answer ("The answer is that there is no answer," she said of her character's behaviour). But in the case of the London bombers there is a need to find the answer and address the issues that motivated them so that other seemingly "nice lads" from "respectable" families do not go down the same route.

Ms. Shriver is an American writer who divides her time between London and New York. We Need to Talk About Kevin, published by a small American publishing house after being turned down by several publishers, went on to win the £30,000 Orange Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary prize for women writers. It has been one of the most intensely debated novels of recent times, especially in women's circles, with Ms. Shriver being praised as well as criticised for breaking what the BBC described as a "major parenting taboo": a mother confessing to hating her child from the moment he is born.

She pushes the acceptable limits of parental moral code even further as her protagonist, rather than feeling guilty or responsible, sees herself as a victim of her son's criminal action.

"We Need to Talk About Kevin is a book that acknowledges what many women worry about but never express — the fear of becoming a mother and the terror of what kind of child one might bring into the world," said Jenni Murray, chair of the Orange Prize jury pointing out that it would "resonate" with everyone who had had a child or thought about having one.

Ms. Shriver, who herself has no children, has been accused by some of distorting the very idea of parenthood and the responsibilities it entails. There have been two contrasting and almost conflicting responses to the novel, as though two sets have readers have read "two completely different books," she writes on her website (talkaboutkevin.com).

"One camp assesses a story about a well-intentioned mother who, whatever her perfectly human deficits in this role, is saddled with a `bad seed,' a thoroughly evil child from birth whose ultimate criminality only she seems to perceive but is helpless to prevent ... Even in retrospect, nothing this poor benighted mother might have done differently would have headed off her son becoming one of those infamous high school murderers ... The second camp of readers appears to have read another novel entirely: about a mother whose coldness is itself criminal, and who bears full responsibility for her son's tragic rampage as a teenager. Having allowed an ambivalence about the whole parental enterprise to poison her relationship with the boy even as an innocent baby, this mother is an object lesson. Parents get the children they deserve."

But as many Britons have found. there is yet another way of reading her novel: as an exploration of the human mind, and its quirks. The book is a tribute to the intuitive power of literature. Read it, if you can.

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