'You say you want a revolution...'

Hari Kunzru's new novel is a powerful depiction of the idealism and despair of the 1960s counterculture.

There's a scene in Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions where Chris Carver, a young member of the counter-cultural revolutionary struggle in late 1960s/early 1970s Britain, is in a graveyard looking for an identity he can steal.

A tombstone bearing the name Michael Frame "" a child who was born in the same year as Chris but died as an infant "" catches his eye. "Resting where no shadows fall" reads the epitaph.

It's a nicely ironic touch, for though "Michael Frame" is the alias under which Chris will live an inconspicuous suburban family-man life for nearly two decades, he will never quite escape the shadow of the past. Years later, as he turns 50 in the England of the late 1990s, he regards the two people he is closest to "" his partner of 16 years, Miranda, and his step-daughter Sam "" with a bemused detachment.

"Unlike me, Miranda has the knack of living in the world," he reflects "" a busy entrepreneur, she increasingly stands for everything he was once opposed to, or thought he was opposed to, and she doesn't know much about his past.

On another occasion, he marvels at Sam's lack of imagination, "the unbroken borders of her world", and wonders if her ambition of becoming a corporate lawyer can be properly considered a dream. Back in his own youth, dreams were more radical, concerned more with bringing alive a Utopian world of the imagination than coming to terms with the imperfect real one.

If a restive interior life was all Michael had to deal with, it wouldn't be so much of a problem, but as Kunzru's book opens, ghosts from the past are taking corporeal shape.

First, during a holiday in France, he glimpses a woman who is a dead ringer for Anna Addison, a comrade and sometime lover from his revolutionary days, supposedly killed while participating in an act of terrorism.

Shortly after this, an old acquaintance named Miles Bridgeman re-enters his life and subtly blackmails him for reasons that are not immediately clear, and Michael/Chris knows he must escape all over again.

From the story's present "" located in 1998 "" carefully woven flashbacks take us to Chris's youth in the 1960s as he is drawn into the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Here, Kunzru's writing is at its most vivid, bringing alive a time when it was possible to believe that the world could be made a better place "" so what if the process would require enormous sacrifices, and so what if it was hard for anyone to describe what this "better world" would actually look like.

But as in any revolution, ideologies collide and lines get blurred. Initially, the group of radicals Chris belongs to resolves never to hurt people, only damage property "" he takes active part in their plot to bomb the Post Office Tower "" but this slowly changes.

By the time some of his friends have become involved with the People's Front for Liberation of Palestine, Chris knows that he lacks their zeal and commitment.

"We're damaged people," Anna tells him at one point, summing up the true anarchist, "there would be no place for us in the world we're trying to build." But Chris doesn't share this purity of purpose and must eventually go his own way.

My Revolutions is a poignant story about a lifelong struggle between idealism and pragmatism. A key to the book lies in Kunzru's clever use of the word "revolution", in different contexts "" including a revolving restaurant where a key scene takes place, and Chris's perambulations in a prison courtyard and around a monastery stupa in Thailand.

But especially notable is the suggestion that all ideologies eventually amount to going around in circles; that being too fixated on change can result in never changing anything at all. There's a moving passage where Chris speaks of seeing a NASA image of the earth for the first time "" of the protective tenderness he feels towards "the green and blue disc surrounded by infinite blackness".

"We were on the world's side, on the side of life," he says, and one feels for him here, but it's worth considering that the blue-green disc is, after all, an endlessly and meaninglessly revolving body of gaseous matter, indifferent to human causes and conflicts.

As the pragmatic Miles cuttingly tells Chris/Michael, "Let's say I don't believe in anything. Well, one great advantage of that is not wanting to blow anything up... that's what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by."

However, Miles underestimates the persistence of the radical stance, for he says during the same conversation, "In a couple of years it will be a new millennium and with luck nothing will happen anywhere."

Kunzru doesn't underline the point, but it's impossible not to think here of 9/11 and of a different kind of terrorism, also built on the principle of eliminating anything that doesn't fit one's vision of Utopia. Despite the specificity of its time and setting, My Revolutions has much to say about the forces acting on our world today.