Hanif Kureishi’s Delightful Novel The Last Word

'Harry Johnson gazed out of the window of the train at the English countryside and thought that not a moment passed when someone wasn’t telling a story. And, if his luck held for the rest of the day.
 Harry was about to be employed to tell the story of the man he was going to visit. Indeed,he had chosen to tell the whole story of this important man, this significant artist. How, he wondered, with a shudder, did you begin to do that? 

Where would you start, and how would the story, which was still being lived, end? More importantly, was he, Harry, capable of such a task?  Peaceful England, untouched by war, revolution, famine, ethnic or religious disturbance. Yet if the newspapers were correct, Britain was an overcrowded little island.’

Thus   starts   Kureishi’s   new   novel   ‘The   Last   Word’   spread   over   approximately   300   pages published   by Faber   and   Faber  in  2014.   Hanif  who  has   also   written  novels   like   Buddha  of Suburbia,  The Black  Album and  Intimacy, this  time  goes out tell story  of two writers,  one Mamoon, an Indian born giant of English in his seventies at the end of his life and writing career and other Harry young, energetic biographer who has written Nehru’s biography who has been asked by his agent rob to write book on Mamoon’s life to boast up his writing career.
Mammonliving with his second wife Liana, after his first wife Peggy’s death, is fond of cricket, tennis and woman, the only difficulty for Harry is to control himself because Mamoon is not an easy person to talk, sometimes he becomes unbearable.

   On the other hand Rob, the agent is pushing Harry to find out the naked truth about the great writer, so that he could attract most number of readers, Harry finds himself in most difficult situation of his life, but then there is caring 50 year old Liana, who is always there to guide him about what to ask and when to ask from Mamoon.

Yet, Harry feels he is alone and misses his girlfriend Alice a fashion designer with low education, and later on he finds a companion Julia working at Mamoon’s house, daughter of Ruth, who is more interested in sexual intercourse than anything   else.   When   Harry   narrates   to   her   about   Mamoon’s   latest   work   the   story   of   five dictators, she isn’t interested in it, only to spend more time she listens it.

  One day Harry finds diaries and letters of Peggy in the story room, covered in layers of dust, he thinking that this could be the breakthrough in great writer’s personal life, picks them and goes through them. He finds shocking stories in those diaries. Peggy a quite, articulate and academic girl with alcoholic parents met Mamoon in London and helped him to negotiate and it was her who persuaded Mamoon to stay in London and start his career as a writer.

 Going through the diaries and feeling the sufferings faced by Peggy, Harry is reminded of his sufferings, he remembers how he caught his mother lying naked in some other man’s arms, who seeing Harry scolded him out of the room. At nights Harry feels womanly ghosts talking to him first he finds it’s his own mother but then finds it is Peggy.

 But Rob doesn’t want this stuff, all he wants from Harry is to ring around gossipcracy of agents, publishers and writers, to stock up with   many   stories   of   infidelity,   plagiarism,   literary   feuding   and   deceit,   cross-dressing,backstabbing, homosexuality, and in particular, lesbianism, as he could.

While Mamoon is the ideal person for all this, as Hanif writes:‘At present Mamoon was fascinated by stories of formerly ‘normal’ women dragged to the ‘other side’ by ‘les Sapphics,’ whom, he seemed to believe, had ‘mesmeric’ powers.’

 Then you find the literary giants from Dickens to Hughes as they and their work is mentioned by Mamoon and Harry during their talks and the writer concludes that literature was a killing field no decent man has ever picked up a pen.

The  novel  is   full   of   emotions   and   sufferings   of   human   souls,   Hanif   has   beautifully   shown through his novel, how one’s past chases him, there are certain harsh and bitter memories in life which always stuck up with people and there is no way to get rid-off of those memories as they have become part of.
 There is wit, sex, joy, emotion and life’s real face in this novel and there is always a last word to say…. The unspeakable truth…..Speaking the truth, while I was going through this novel my eyes were filled up with tears, I felt this is not just Harry’s or Mamoon’s story but it is the story of everybody and anybody.

Like his previous novels Hanif won’t let his readers down in this novel, his every word has a meaning and each of them is full of life. He has masterfully told a story where a reader starts rethink about himself. It is not just a story about two people’s sexual desires, but about people’s attitude towards life. And one could feel that Hanif’s words have the charisma to touch people’s souls.