A new age comedy

's death.

The word is rarely seen in conjunction with anything humorous. By the time he's through writing though, Hari Kunzru may well have modified the attached literary stereotypes. Kunzru is a quintessential outsider, even when he's writing with inside knowledge. He's the fly on the wall, an observer with a keen sense of the ridiculous and a talent for complicated farce.

The hero of Transmission "" a tangled new-world comedy where "Cyberstan" connects with Bollywood across a global digital network "" is Arjun Mehta; a 23-year-old virgin with borderline Asperger's Syndrome (AS). Arjun likes online quizzes and coding and decoding complicated viruses. But he adulates Leela Zahir, the Bollywood star with an armour-corseted mummyji.

"Hero" is putting it rather strongly and so is protagonist; "chief wimp" would be a better description since the other male characters are also wimps. Arjun disappears midway through the book but he's sent the global economy into a tailspin and caused an estimated $50 billion in commercial losses before he does his flit.

He is one of the faceless hordes of cybercoolies working on L1 visas in the US. His gig is with an anti-virus company in Redmond, Washington. That's where he self-diagnoses the AS, courtesy an online quiz sent by a female colleague.

AS is a condition of near-autism common to many high-IQ people: it combines apparent difficulty in deciphering the patterns of facial expressions and normal social behaviour with an exceptional capacity for abstract thought and attention to detail.

Many techies wear the badge of AS with pride. But Arjun is terrified that there may be medical consequences so he contacts a female colleague for further information. She takes him under her wing and finally seduces him in one of the funniest bedroom scenes written since Joe Orton was brained.

On the work front, Arjun is suddenly benched. Desperate to regain work-status, he releases "Leela", a virus he has written, into the wild. It has a diabolically clever feature of a continuously mutating signature, which makes it difficult to identify and stop.

As Arjun half-anticipates, Leela jams up the world's networks, halting planes, trains, sewage treatment plants and ATMs. It also has the other unintended effect of imparting global notoriety to the "sexy little bint in a sari", who shimmies across millions of screens as the virus takes effect.

Arjun hopes that he will be rehired after he makes a couple of cunning suggestions about how Leela can be combatted. Unfortunately, he isn't. His former boss, a paranoid who sends hysterical emails, takes the credit. And other people have already built on the source code of "Leela01" and developed a multitude of mutant virus-strains.

After that, he's on the run, doing an epic journey, heading north from Washington State to Canada. Only, he ends up at the Mexican border, about 4,000 miles south, after a hilarious odyssey. There, Arjun goes off-camera as the Swat team erroneously shoots a Korean teenager, trying to collect the bounty on his head.

Meanwhile Leela goes into seclusion after the storm breaks. She is "locationing", that is, shooting on location in the Scottish Highlands. The formidable Mummyji arrives at the director's urgent request to soothe her beti's ragged nerves after Leela has a nervous breakdown. Bhai, who has funded the movie (and incidentally owns the hero), was a little terse when calling to express sympathy for his poor, frazzled heroine.

Gabriella Haydon-Caro, perhaps the strongest character in the book, also arrives in the Highlands. She's handling PR or rather disaster-control for the Bollywood outfit and thus provides the ideal outsider-perspective for Kunzru's Bollywood item to really bump and grind. It is through her bemused eyes that we watch Leela and the Bollywood crew.

Gabrielle's companion, Guy Swift, runs a new age media company, which has zero revenues, some remnants of VC funding. It is under "dot-bust" pressure to downsize and also develop revenue streams. Guy drops a series of accounts in hilarious style: warning "" don't read about the encounter with the Sheikh on the golf course if you have over-delicate religious sensibilities!

Guy's trials and tribulations and the resolution of his life and that of Gabriella form two more discrete streams of narrative. Thus, the book has an interesting structure. It can perhaps be best described as four sliced and diced novellas with narratives that intersect and move away at various points. Practically every line is funny, and the whole is surgically joined with brief sections of acid editorial comment.

While the story hangs fairly tightly in terms of plot, the narratives become a little weaker towards the end. This is perhaps because Kunzru is always a gentle satirist. He lacks the savage cruelty of an Ian Banks or Tom Sharpe, which is probably required to construct the really nasty denouement that would have been the perfect finale of this very funny book.

Techies might find the nuts and bolts of the virus description, a little short on detail, even if the asocial milieu of a digital antfarm is captured perfectly. They may even find the concept of Leela banal since it's obviously inspired by the Melissa virus, which commemorated one techie's encounter with a Florida stripper. But that's a complaint only somebody affected by AS would make.

TRANSMISSION

Hari Kunzru
Hamish Hamilton
Pages: 280,
Price:Not mentioned