That takes him into a territory of alt-right message boards and conspiracy theorists, a cyber kingdom in which Anton looks at home, and in fact appears to be posting under a variety of names. Indeed, the narrator soon believes he’s being laughed at, and later, unable to let his humiliation go, he starts to stalk the man on the web. No such luck Anton sees human life in terms of the “squeamishness” felt by those who aren’t tough enough for truth, and the narrator doesn’t have the right stuff. They talk, head to a restaurant, and the narrator has the sense that the producer is about “to initiate me into a mystery, offer me the red pill.”
Red pill blue pill meaning series#
Anton is the showrunner of a “Shield”-like TV series about a bent nihilistic cop. Just before leaving Berlin, the narrator has a chance meeting with a man called Anton, and uses the encounter to justify his fears. We have to believe that maybe he really is being watched at the same time, we want to shake him into sense, and with each page he grows ever more puzzling. “Red Pill” depends on Kunzru’s skilled use of a seemingly unreliable narrator.
Each longs for a few months of peace each hopes that he’ll not only write something but also get his head straight. He broods, and when he’s offered a fellowship at a Berlin think tank his wife is happy to see him go. Both conditions feed off each other, and make him believe that he’ll be unable to protect his family from any waiting malignity. Yet he finds himself suffering from both writer’s block and a nameless dread, as though “something profoundly but subtly wrong” is about to happen in the world at large. The narrator of Hari Kunzru’s clever but exasperating sixth novel lives in cushioned Brooklyn safety, a progressive member of the creative classes, an essayist and teacher, a husband and a father. Keanu Reeves’s character faces a choice: Take the blue pill and continue his happy illusory life, or the red one and see the world as it actually is, in all its dizzying, violent, chaotic glory. The term comes from “The Matrix” (a film I found so intellectually vapid that I couldn’t finish watching, however brilliant its visuals), and has since gained currency with everyone from men’s rights groups to the alt-right to Elon Musk.
The title of this novel, for those of us who are hopelessly behind on our memes, refers to the process of discovery that the book’s unnamed narrator undergoes - or thinks he undergoes. There are no actual red pills in “Red Pill,” not even a cherry cough drop.
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