The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton & Company)

Born with his eyes wide open to a mother who died soon after his birth and a father who is disliked even by his own family, the ugly new baby needs an advantage and his stepmother provides it. Raj, she calls him, and his educated uncle gives the name its English translation, King.

King Rao is “a big name for a little runt,” his family says, but within a matter of years the child lives up to it. Through cleverness and chicanery his grandfather became owner of a coconut farm, even though he is a Dalit, one of the Untouchables. King Rao is the smartest of the grandchildren and he’s told often that someday Rao’s Garden will belong to him. 

This never happens. King Rao is sent to school, moves on to University, and is sent to the U.S. for graduate school. Out of a village that is “a hot wet nothing,” comes a man who will change the world and ultimately preside over it. 

Already known as a programming genius in India, in the U.S. King Rao becomes a software programmer who makes personal computers a staple in every household. He learns how to collect and use data in a way that gives him unprecedented power. When nationalism threatens to destroy the world, he presents his plan, Shareholder Government that unites every country and is guided by the Master Algorithm. “Algo” makes decisions based on the data provided by Social Profiles that every Shareholder, as in every person on earth, has from birth. The most successful Shareholders sit on the Board of Corporations and the chairman of the board is King Rao, a man who has taken on the status of a god but who is human enough to fall.

It’s his own mind that’s to blame for his ouster. King Rao has developed a means to connect human brains to the Internet but fails to realize that old brains no longer have the plasticity to make this happen. People die, King Rao evades responsibility, and a revolution is averted only by his voluntary exile.

Although this may sound like a run of the mill dystopian novel, Vauhini Vara isn’t the sort of writer to follow that path. She’s braided together three separate strands that take their turns in forming an intricate and diabolically clever plot. Life on the coconut farm with its traditions and inevitable dissolution continually alternates with King Rao’s rise, success, and eventual dethronement in the outside world, and then lapses into the idyllic life he shares with his young daughter on a lonely island. 

Once again hubris gets in the way. King Rao has given his daughter the Internet connection that once led to his downfall but even more dangerously, he has devised a way to filter his mind into hers. Not only is Athena constantly deluged with the Internet, she’s also a receptacle for her father’s brain--his thoughts, his memories, his consciousness. As all this flows into her,  King Rao quite literally begins to lose his mind.

Athena escapes, but with a terrible and inescapable knowledge. Like the system it toppled, Shareholder Government is based on consumption which has brought the planet to Hothouse Earth. Ever-increasing temperatures will destroy the world in a few generations unless corporate greed is stopped. She’s also the only one who knows that King Rao is not immortal.

Vara has constructed a heart-wrenching tragedy that has nothing to do with her human characters. It’s the beauty of the world, in Rao’s Garden and on the dreamlike island that demands our love and grief. “The sun, spraying its sweet, glittering light;” the intricate white lace that covers the world and enchanted an astronaut when he viewed the earth’s clouds from outer space; the beauty of an island that has been reclaimed by forests and fields of ferns that reach shoulder-high, where racoons and deer have no reason to be afraid; a Garden with a thousand trees, each one of them a source of food. 

The Immortal King Rao holds too many facets of contemporary life to be seen only as a novel. Vara, who was once a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then business editor of The New Yorker, isn’t just an astute observer. She’s put the pieces together in a way that feels uncomfortably like a prophecy--and a tragedy. This is a book that will keep you awake at night, staring into the dark and looking for answers.~Janet Brown