The British government tolerates the Kurds right now. No longer are they consigned by the pens of our diplomats and mandarins to the middens of geopolitics. They excel at killing Islamic State fighters, they keep a lid on the grander imperial daydreams of Mr Erdoğan, they give women equal-ish rights and AK47s. At least here, the Foreign Office can say, Brylcreemed Blairite liberal interventionism worked out all right. No more Halabjas. Drilling rights for British oil. Splendid.
“When it comes to Kurds, the brightest minds consciously make themselves dim,” says Rafiq, patriarch of the Hardi family. A rich doctor in 1970s Baghdad who treated “Marx’s Capital as though it were juvenile love poetry”, he went on to found the Communist party of Kurdistan. Straining under anti-Kurdish persecution, and with customary terrible timing, he fled his homeland’s “century of apostasy and Leninism and nationalism” straight into revolution-era Tehran, necessitating another midnight escape, losing his family wealth in the process and consigning his three children to an émigré childhood of frostbitten weekend demonstrations at London embassies. The book follows the three Hardi children as adults through 2010s Dubai, London and New York as they come to grips with the capitalist world their father failed to defeat. We meet unwilling housewife Siver, desperate banker Mohammed and hacker genius cum digital nomad Laika (named after the unfortunate space dog).
Agri Ismaïl’s debut melds the systems novel (lists of materials, equations, obsessive numerations, brand names, chemicals, financial deals, humans as mere reactionary flotsam in a sea of information) with the immigrant novel of dislocation and second-generation rootlessness. It’s a brilliant conceit, and this is a book of big, heady ideas: how 20th-century concepts of communism and solidarity have been run through the digital shredder of the 21st century; how technological change has created refugees out of all of us, as we hide our true selves from the digital panopticon; how tyrannies both political and personal can be infinitely strengthened by the endless freedom the modern world provides.
Our main character, Siver, moves to post-invasion, socially conservative Baghdad, then escapes her Iraqi husband’s demands that she accept an 18-year-old second wife by fleeing to post-crash Dubai, a “neoliberal dream without any cultural baggage” where the metro stations change their names with each new sponsorship deal. British humanities degree in hand, she is reduced to selling haute couture in a mall, “a cosplay of 50s America on steroids”. This is the novel at its free associative best, as Siver’s electronic interactions with her mother, Xezal – a woman whose husband pawned her jewellery to print ink-stained Marxist screeds – are interleaved with the story of her own childhood and marriage.
Middle child Mohammed cyphers his way through the Kremlinesque world of Tory/Lib Dems coalition-era London finance – Britain’s most egalitarian, race-blind industry – schmoozing and backstabbing, trying to save his job by executing a deal involving an Islamic credit card. He thinks he’s a wheeler-dealer, but he’s barely keeping his head above water in the split-second, fleeting algorithmic churn that claimed tech and finance first in the late 2000s, then buzzsawed its way through the rest of us.
The final third of the novel reads as a fervid, DeLillo-esque internet-browsing session from 2011 – hipster memes, Arab spring, webcamming, Occupy Wall Street, Bin Laden execution, Thanks Obama! – as little brother Laika makes nanosecond-advantaged trades from a Manhattan penthouse through a fibreoptic umbilical cord to the NYSE. “Proximity to the centre still matters,” he opines, and as long as lines such as “Time had become polychronic, with all possible events happening at once” don’t put you off, you’ll be richly rewarded with a searing portrait of 21st-century masculinity in total collapse.
There’s a novel I want to read, written in Ismaïl’s flinty, wry prose, about the destruction of a marriage by political ideals, a rich doctor falling foul of totalitarian regimes in two countries, of life as a Kurd in Iraq as the Ba’athist regime spirals into ignominy. This book, however – proudly, unrepentantly – is not about surviving war or dislocation or the trauma that comes after. It’s about immigrant families being torn apart by the tidal forces of money and the post-ideological world that money created, captured in intense, minute, unflinching detail.
Ismaïl is very strong on the interior desolation of immigrants from marginalised, ethnically cleansed communities, showing a collapsed family unit that doesn’t know it’s collapsed, and painting the poverty of their existence. How they fool themselves by taking minute references in pop culture as a western testament to their existence; how betrayed they feel when they realise their stories of survival and persecution don’t count for anything when you can’t pay the bills in south London or Dubai or New York. All history’s “struggles have been whittled down to fit into each and every heart, burdens to be carried alone”. All we can do is not drown. What kind of life is that?
• Hyper by Agri Ismaïl is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.
