Author Vijay Khurana.Supplied
Dan Wells first came across Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair. The publisher at Windsor-based Biblioasis found it so compelling he stayed up all night reading it.
The book had been shortlisted for the 2022 Novel Prize, which is run by three respected indie publishers and recognizes works that are exceptionally innovative and imaginative. And yet, The Passenger Seat still hadn’t been published.
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Finding this odd, Wells asked one of the partner presses why they had passed.
The Passenger Seat was powerful and extremely well written, the publisher (whom Wells chooses not to name) conceded. What he’d taken issue with was Khurana’s handling of the real-life crimes that serve as its scaffold: the random 2019 killings of three people in northern B.C., by Canadian teens Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky. He felt Khurana’s sympathies were aligned, improperly, with the perpetrators, not the victims, and went so far as to say he considered the book immoral.
Doubting his own reading, Wells gave the novel another pass. He decided he disagreed with the publisher, profoundly. The Passenger Seat was actually a deeply moral work; one that asks, Wells wrote to me in an e-mail, “whether we can ever learn anything from such broken boys/men. I certainly have, and think others will too.” Needless to say, he published it.
I learned all this after reading The Passenger Seat, which I, too, couldn’t put down. It brought to mind many words – nuanced, propulsive, literary, unsettling, haunting – but definitely not “immoral,” a label that strikes me as almost quaint. Books that have been called immoral include Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, The Satanic Verses, 1984, The Origin of Species and American Psycho. Not bad company, really.
Khurana, 42, grew up in Australia, the youngest of three siblings born to an Indian father and English mother. In the late 2010s, after a multiyear stint as a radio presenter for Australia’s national broadcaster, a year in Cambodia and time spent translating documentaries in Germany, he headed to England to undertake a two-year MFA at the University of East Anglia. There, Khurana found himself writing short stories – a form he loves – many of them centred on young men who are, he said during a recent Zoom interview, “dehumanizing those around them,” sometimes through violence.
Shortly after completing his degree, Khurana stumbled upon a news story about the McLeod-Schmegelsky killings. Several of the case’s horrific details aligned with his recent fictional preoccupations, particularly that the boys (who were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds), made a series of videos in which they confessed their guilt. But the recordings failed to establish a motive beyond the fulfilment of violent fantasies and a strong desire to evade responsibility.
Khurana saw in the story the raw elements for a novel. The question was how to go about it. “I didn’t want to retell a real event,” he said on the Zoom call. “But there was something about young men desperate to make a story and only really seeing themselves as they imagine they are seen from the outside, or from the future.”
That is very much the feeling readers get as they move between the minds of his problematic protagonists, Teddy and Adam, their thoughts relayed in a coolly detached third-person voice. As The Passenger Seat begins, the pair, who are a year from graduating high school, steal away from their unnamed hometown in Adam’s truck with general idea of reaching the Arctic coast. Teddy buys a rifle, which establishes the balance of power: Only he knows how to use it, but only Adam has a driver’s licence.
There’s a whiff of radicalization about Adam. Unlike Teddy, he’s never had a girlfriend, and he treats as a bible a self-help book full of incel-sounding advice about exerting control over people, especially women. His thoughts, at least the ones we have access to, mostly amount to inchoate musings on fakeness (Trump? Holden Caulfield?), girls (beautiful ones can’t be trusted) and a desire for “money, and respect.”
Your classic road story is about freedom and self-discovery. Here the mood is tense and bleak, rather than giddy. After the first killings – which, unplanned, take place on a remote stretch of road – the truck effectively turns into a prison, with the sense of suffocation, paranoia and mutual distrust only heightening after the boys turn their phones off to avoid being tracked.
With its endlessly repeating elements – boulders, ditches, trees – the landscape takes on a quality somewhere between myth and video game. Though the setting is clearly Canada (there being only so many ways to get to the Arctic), Khurana confirmed that he saw the highway less as a place than “a way of exploring the ideas. It’s there for the characters to move through.”
Page-turning as it is, The Passenger Seat doesn’t read like true crime, or even a thriller. For one, Khurana isn’t out to solve or explain anything. His red threads remain hanging. For another, the writing is of a quality that, unlike many books in those genres, demands rereading.
Teddy and Adam come from homes that aren’t radically broken, they’re just (with apologies to Tolstoy) unhappy in the usual ways. The open contempt with which Adam treats his shell of a father suggests he has the upper hand in that relationship. Teddy’s parents are married and apparently more economically secure, but he’s long known his mother is having an affair.
This set-up, combined with Khurana’s non-prescriptive approach, gives the novel obvious parallels with Netflix’s excellent, devastating series Adolescence, which in recent weeks has brought the subject of violence committed by (very) young males uncomfortably to the fore.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil,” philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote. That feels like Teddy and Adam in a nutshell. That one can conceivably sympathize with them (I did not), doesn’t make The Passenger Seat immoral. I’d argue it makes it literature.
