Author Adnan Khan.Dundurn Press
What is the root of criminal recidivism and does incarceration play a role in perpetuating it?
That’s the question at the core of Adnan Khan’s sophomore novel The Hypebeast (Dundurn Press). It focuses on low-level hustler and recovering alcoholic Hamid Shaikh, who was born in India but spent his formative years in Canada with parents who cut off all ties to their old life. Without a personal sense of history to call his own, Hamid only had post-9/11 media war imagery reflecting back a vilified portrayal of brown men. When he becomes involved with a rehabilitation centre for ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees run by an imam named Abdul, Hamid finds himself on a crash course with his own violent tendencies and the controversial techniques being used to put formerly incarcerated Muslims on a path of spiritual healing.
The Hypebeast marks the Toronto-based Khan’s return to fiction after a promising debut in the film world. Following the release of There Has to Be a Knife in 2019, Khan was tapped to co-write the screenplay for Canadian filmmaker Amar Wala’s feature film Shook, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024. While these projects mined different facets of the Indo-Canadian experience, what sets The Hypebeast apart in Khan’s mind is the fact that his new book is his attempt to write a crime thriller.
“The Hypebeast is similar to things I’ve been thinking about in a lot of my work,” Khan says. “It feels like it comes from the same river.”
Khan knew that he wanted to create something philosophically aligned with three books in particular – Snow by Orhan Pamuk, Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih and By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano – but the actual spark of the novel that was able to unify these influences came from the unlikeliest of places: an automated robocall.
The call was supposedly from the Canada Revenue Agency, but despite the obviously fraudulent nature of the message, Khan was unable to resist the temptation to find out what might be waiting for him on the line. He stayed on the call so that he could speak to a live representative and was mystified by what he encountered.
“I got connected to a guy who just said ‘I’m so sleepy’ and then hung up,” Khan says mirthfully. “That was the creepiest phone call I’ve ever had. It sparked my imagination and I wondered who that man was for a long time.”
Khan started researching how call-centre scams extract money from unsuspecting victims. Slowly, a backstory for a protagonist developed. The swindles that Hamid and his associates participate in – selling stolen goods, tax fraud, laundering money and incredibly, stealing a puma from the Toronto Zoo – all involve victims surrendering control of their lives to a defrauder, and it is telling that Hamid’s crew of con artists similarly struggle with a lack of autonomy.
“I think the key to the book is that these characters are searching for control,” Khan says about the activities in his novel being spurred by cycles of hardship and poverty, “but they’re also trying to get a tight grip on anything that can manifest an outcome. It’s about how that seesaw works.”
Hamid is concerned with social advancement and financial security, desperately seeking the stability that his childhood in a broken home failed to provide; his ex-girlfriend Natalie tells him that these goals have pulled him further away from his relationship with God, which to an extent accounts for their romance deteriorating.
Natalie finds a measure of solace in religion after being introduced to Abdul, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who helps her confront the fact that she has issues with alcohol dependence. Faith and community are a grounding element to Natalie and Abdul’s growing congregation, a way past the moral uncertainties and temptations that abound in the world.
This question of Islam’s modern relevance has been foremost on Khan’s mind for some time.
“I was curious about old philosophy and old thinking being applied to a contemporary context – the way that Islam is talked about as an old, tribal religion,” Khan says. “I wanted to explore Islam’s juxtaposition with the modern world and how they overlap.”
For Khan, the overlap is perhaps most obvious when it comes to the subject of the targeted criminalization and incarceration of Muslims.
“Prisons are not rehabilitative places. That’s not the priority, the focus or the reality.”
“Guantanamo Bay is completely horrifying,” he continues. “We’re just scooping people in Afghanistan and tossing them in with no plan. So many of these people have been picked up by accident and the expectation is that when they return to their country of origin, they’re supposed to just slide back in under the skin of life?”
Khan is gesturing toward the way that stripping people of human dignity can lead them to believe that their options for earning a livelihood are limited. In this way, Hamid and Abdul are positioned as doubles in the novel who struggle with internalized racism as Muslim men in their 30s. Khan believes that this speaks to a deeper, entrenched struggle that Muslims in the West continue to face in the wake of 9/11.
“For Muslim men of a certain age,” Khan says, “anger is the last thing you can publicly show. It’s something that really freaks people out, whether it’s political anger or personal anger.”
“When we talk about self-othering and turning inward, if you can’t articulate a righteous political anger at what’s happening to you, it has to go somewhere – it doesn’t disappear. It stays in the well and poisons the well. You have to figure out a way to see yourself within your wider context, but if your wider context is telling you that you’re despicable or a terrorist, your sense of self is going to be eroded and you’re going to start seeing yourself like that.”
The novel’s treatment of this self-annihilating worldview is unromantic, with Hamid, Abdul and Natalie all witnessing what kind of bitter fruit is borne when “contexts” dwindle down.
“The story of Hamid is the story of a survivor,” Khan says. “He has this instinct to not crumble or bend to external or internal pressure. Sharks will always swim, and even if you cut off their fins, they keep swimming until they die. To me, that’s what Hamid is – the organizing principle of his life is moving forward.”
