The Buddha of Suburbia is divided into two parts: In the Suburbs and In the City.

Each locality in the novel is precisely depicted in terms of class markers: Karim is desperate to escape suburban stagnation but sceptical of pretentious social climbing, hierarchies and authoritarianism. The journey from a boy’s bedroom in Bromley to ‘the centre of this old city’ charts his struggle to ‘locate ’ as a new breed of Englishman, but Karim is also navigating his way around the class system. The opening paragraph announces not only that Karim has emerged ‘from two old histories’ but also that he is from the ‘South London suburbs and going somewhere’. The Buddha of Suburbia zigzags north and south of the river, from periphery to core of the city, as Karim tries to find himself: no locality turns out to be quite what either he, or the reader, expects. He has lived on the same page of the A-Z all his adult life and, with the exception of the Bradford setting of his film My Son the Fanatic, all his films and novels have been inspired by the city. The young Kureishi moved to west London to study philosophy at King’s College and had his first plays performed at the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square. His father, who came from an aristocratic Indian family, was employed by the Pakistani Embassy in London while his white English mother worked in a shoe shop. Kureishi, like Karim, was born in Bromley in 1954. London’s unglamorous suburbs have attracted much less literary attention than the city proper, and it is rare for a novel to flaunt its suburban origins in the title. So this is a particularly a good moment to look back at less discussed but equally significant aspect of The Buddha of Suburbia: its treatment of class and the links between class and place. Now, in large part because of Kureishi’s work, multiculturalism is mainstream. A lot of critical attention has quite rightly been paid to this. In 1990 there were hardly any English novels about growing up as a mixed race child so The Buddha of Suburbia and Kureishi’s first film with Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette, were important interventions in the debate about what it means to be British in the wake of postwar immigration. Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Guignol's Band I & II

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The buddha of suburbia