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Red Pill by Hari Kunzru   {Reviewed by STELLA} A middle-aged writer living in Brooklyn with his human rights lawyer wife and three-year-old daughter is having a crisis. He has writer’s block and is deeply subsumed by a malaise that he can’t shrug off. When an opportunity comes to attend a writers’ residency in Berlin, this seems the perfect way to escape the mill of the freelance writer and the distraction of family life. He’s had the first-book success, but time has passed and the pressure is on to produce the next work. The romantic notion of the lone writer in a creative hub situated on the shores of Lake Wannsee seems ideal. Yet the Deuter Centre is not what he expected. There is no ‘being alone’: participation is expected with the other residents and staying in your room is frowned upon. He is encouraged to take his place in the library, to converse with others, most of whom he finds unbearable, and to eat in the dining room. His work on the new book about "The construction of the self on lyric poetry” becomes more elusive than ever. As our narrator’s inability to write continues, his downward spiral escalates. Initially, he walks around the village, the lake, and through the grounds of the house in a contemplative mood, really avoidance, delving into the history of the German Romantics, in particular Heinrich von Kleist. His obsession with Kleist’s suicide pact keeps his mind occupied. As the director of the Centre becomes increasingly vexed by the writer’s non-participation, our narrator’s resistance ratchets up a level. He avoids the other residents, pretends to be writing in the library and spends his spare time immersed in watching a violent crime drama, Blue Lives, on his laptop obsessively. His paranoia is on the rise and he suspects he is being watched — and maybe this is so — the Deuter Centre has security cameras and a slightly oppressive air. Cut to the second part of the book, an interlude in the narrator’s story. He meets Monika, the cleaner at the house, by chance at a cafe in the village and while, at first, she resists his attempts to talk with her — he’s desperate for human connection in this foreign place where nothing is going to plan — she succumbs, possibly out of pity or empathy. This interlude entitled Zersetzung (Undermining) tells Monika’s story of being in an all-girl punk band as a drummer in East Berlin and the workings of the Stasi as they infiltrate what they deem to be disruptive forces and anything that resonates with 'freedom' or the West. From rebel to informer, Monika’s story is realistic and tragic. Kunzru is starting to draw us a picture, one of obsessive paranoia and authoritarian dictates. And here the novel ramps up. Our narrator meets the director of Blue Lights at a party. Anton is as fascinating as he is frightening, and the writer’s obsession with him deepens to a dangerous level — one where he will lose his mind. Anton is a monster moulded by cynicism and extreme views dressed casually in a cloak of bonhomie and intellectual gymnastics, toying with the writer and using the popular culture channels of his show and his fame to inflame extreme behaviour. When our protagonist is thrown out of the residency programme and instructed to fly home, he instead starts to follow Anton, culminating in a confrontation on a remote Scottish Island, a confrontation which will eventually get him home to Brooklyn, in time to usher in the 2016 American election. The title of the book is drawn from the film The Matrix, in which Neo is offered the red pill or the blue. The red pill will free his mind and allow him to see reality, horrendous as it might be, while the blue will let him live in blissful ignorance. Kunzru’s Red Pill feels more prescient than ever, as the world is rocked by the rise of the alt-right worldwide and the subsequent recognition by the liberal left that something is not right, that the comforts of the past decades have opened a window that has let in a foul draught.