Q3 Outside Reading #6

Mike has driven past to the little town on the coast that he visited with Miranda and where he thought he saw Anna. Because it's the very early morning, he doesn't go to Anna's house just yet. Instead he flashes back to his past again. Chris was scared of what he was doing. The new group he was part of was planning an assasssination and Chris wasn't comfortable with that. He took the money that was supposed to be used to get more weapons and ran away with it. Before he did though, Chris stopped to talk with Miles. "And then I told him. The names of the members of our group. The addresses of our safe houses. I gave him what details I had of the next action. I told him where to find our cache of arms" (Kunzru 255). After spilling his secret, which he knew Miles would share with the government, Chris took off and became Mike Framer. He traveled all around Europe and found out through the papers that Sean was dead and the rest of his group was arrested. Anna was the only one who got away, but she was later found killed at a protest.
Back in the present, Mike is being hounded by Miles. Pat Ellis refused to oblige to Miles' demands and instead spilled what she knew about Mike. Miles tells Mike that if he would just do one interview about his true past, then he could smuggle him out of the country to start over. Mike wasn't sure what he wanted to do. He finally knocked on Anna's door and found out that it really wasn't Anna, that she'd been dead this whole time. Right then he knew he wanted to come clean, and not just to the interviewer, but to Miranda too. "Miranda picks up on the third ring. It's me. Oh, God. MIke?Where are you? Chris, I tell her. My name's Chris" (Kunzru 277). THe sotry ends there, with Mike telling Miranda about his past.

Q3 Outside Reading #5

Now that Sean is out of prison, things are really starting to pick up. They are starting to use bombs to prove their political points. In order to finance the bomb making, they've taken to stealing high end cars and selling them. Chris and his friends wanted to take it slowly so as to not hurt someone, but then Nixon announced that he was sending troops to Cambodia. Chris and his friends were against the killings so they started bombing places that were associated with it. With the bombing they left notes saying why they did it. "A BOMB TO HALT THE MONEY MACHINE. Nixon invades Cambodia. More blood on his hands. Bankers and arms companies pull the levers" (183). They took care that people weren't around when the bomb went off because it was against their politics to kill people. They bombed many places but the media didn't mention it. Then they decided that for the media to cover, they had to bomb somewhere known. Chris and Anna went to the restaurant called Top-of-the-Tower, a very fancy upper class restaurant. The media didn't know who bombed it, but they now started covering the other bombings, which is what they wanted in the first place.

In the present, Miles took Mike to meet Pat.  Miles wants for someone, whether it's Mike Pat or Anna to tell him about what happened back then so he can become famous by writing about it. At first, Pat didn't recognize Mike, or as she would know him, Chris. "Then she made the connection. I could see it happen, the loss of traction, the sudden skid on the ice" (205). Miles could blackmail Pat because she was trying to work in the government, he could blackmail Mike by threatening to tell his family and he wants to hear Anna's story because she was one of the leaders. After seeing Pat, Mike drives to go see Anna. He wants to know all about why she's alive when she was suppose to be dead. 

Q3 Outside Reading #4

We're in the present (the flashbacks have been confusing so I thought I'd clarify that) and Mike gets the call from Miles. Miles pays for Mike to go to London and they visit Patty Ellis' speech. Back in the day, Patty was part of Mike's revolution group. Although she wasn't a main part of the group, she was helpful because she was a lawyer. Mike recalls, "She's not someone I can trust" ( Kunzru 166). Patty is now working with the government and Mike suspects Miles took him to her speech to jog is memory, which it does.

We're in a flashback and we see how Chris' revolutionary group is changing. They've always had the same goal, which is making the government see how they were wrong and that there was a need for social change. The difference is that his group is tired of waiting around for change and they are resorting to violence to get noticed. Mike says, "The night after that, we drove to Chelmsford, then Colchester, setting fire to a recruitment office and a Territorial Army storage depot" (Kunzru 174). They heard of a group of Facists that were meeting at a club and CHris' group resorted to violence again to prove their point. "We aimed bricks and dugup cobbles at the windows. Soon orange smoke was billowing out of the pub and chocking men were staggering out to be met by a rain of blows", Chris explains (Kunzru 155).