For a writer whose latest novel unfolds with a new sense of seriousness, Hari Kunzru shows little sign of losing his sense of humour. Fresh from a trip with the photographer to a children’s playground where he has perched uncomplainingly on top of squashy mounds and gamely wobbled in a rotating aluminium bowl, he lounges at a nearby cafй, sipping sparkling water and casting a wry glance over a career which, at the age of 38, has already secured him a reputation as one of Britain’s most exciting novelists.

“It had come time to tell fewer jokes,” he says. His latest novel, My Revolutions, a tense thriller in which the revolutionary certainties of the early 1970s collide with the compromises of the late 1990s, is a tauter, cleaner book than the works that made his name. Kunzru carefully meshes a story of the gradual slide from radicalism into terrorism with one of the disintegration of a second life built on evasions and illusions about the past. It is a departure from the colourful worlds of The Impressionist, a picaresque inversion of classic tales of the British empire which he laughingly describes as “a big baggy novel full of fart jokes”, and his second novel, Transmission, a broad satire on technology and turbo-driven capitalism.

“A joke is an evasion, in a way,” he says. It directs a scene’s energy towards the punch line, he explains, a moment where everything must be neatly lined up to produce an effect. “You place the banana skin on the ground, the character falls over. That’s an evasion of the ambiguity of most situations, which don’t have this easy, formal pay-off, and I’ve got quite interested in holding open that ambiguity.” Ambiguity is in some sense the subject of My Revolutions, too. “It’s this shift in perspective from somebody at 21 who’s attempting to produce an unambiguous situation, and somebody at 50 who has accepted that the world is resistant to your attempts to impose simple meanings on it.”

Any contemporary novelist writing about terrorism tangles directly or indirectly with George Bush’s ill-starred war on terror, and Kunzru acknowledges that My Revolutions is “a post 9/11 book”.

“Several people have said to me how bleak they’ve found it,” he says, though his new-found seriousness is far from being po-faced. “Ultimately black comedy is the mode I’m happiest in, and it seems an appropriate mode for our times.”

The novel began with a feeling that the late 1960s would be a good period to explore questions about the contradiction between politics as the art of the possible and the impulse to “rip it up and start again”, questions about the process of radicalisation which Kunzru describes as “obviously of key interest to our times”. There is no need to spell out parallels between the journey from 1960s community activism to 1970s armed confrontation and the modern transformation of men from Leeds, or Brooklyn, or Aylesbury into active members of al-Qaida. “Every single reader in the world will bring that entire baggage with them to the book,” he says. “The conversation is already there.”

He is dismissive of the current fashion among New York novelists for Twin Towers books, finding novels full of the “lazy use of 9/11 for cheap emotional effect”, where the only convincing characters are white and middle-class. “I could never really write a novel about some young Muslim guy who decides to get involved with political Islam,” he continues, “because I just don’t have the basic chops to do it.” There’s not only the question of the “furniture”, the nuts and bolts required to make a convincing character, there’s also the question of sympathy. “In order to write well you have to want to engage with the concerns of your characters,” he suggests, “even when they’re monstrous or corrupt.”

Born in 1969, the son of a Hindu from Kashmir and an English woman, Kunzru grew up in Essex and studied English at Oxford before moving to Warwick to study philosophy and literature. Journalism followed, including an Observer award for young travel writer of the year in 1999. But it wasn’t until news of the 1.25m advance for The Impressionist that his literary talent began to make headlines. Publication in 2002 saw critical acclaim and literary prizes, a heady cocktail which was soon joined by controversy after he refused the 2003 John Llewellyn Rhys prize because of its sponsor, the Mail on Sunday. Angered by what he saw as a disjunction between the Mail’s editorial policy and its claim to represent “the decent people of Britain” he suggested that the 5,000 winner’s cheque should be given to the Refugee Council instead. It was also in 2003 that Granta magazine selected Kunzru as one of Britain’s best young novelists, but it wasn’t until the following year that he published his second novel, Transmission. Three years on he has turned away from exuberant set pieces and Grand Guignol characters and started to work within a tighter set of constraints.

“I wanted to write something that attempted a psychological realism, that had a boundedness to it,” he explains. “I didn’t create some cartoonish terrorist group which is massacring people, I wanted to try and hold it in a [realistic] frame … I was writing in a kind of loose way before, an indulgent way - which I was enjoying,” he continues. “I’ve stripped huge sections out of this book, boiled down the language a lot and produced the cleanest prose I could. In my 20s I was attracted by American fabulists and magic realism, a much more grandly rhetorical kind of writing. I’m finding myself ever more interested in an inner, quiet, clean and tight sort of prose. I wouldn’t have been interested in John Banville at 25.” He stretches back in his chair, rubbing a hand on the back of his closely-shaven head. “I remember when Mason and Dixon came out, I was there on the first day, gagging to begin,” he continues. “I didn’t even get hold of a copy of Against the Day.”

My Revolutions is constructed as a nested set of loops - a journey around the motorway that surrounds Paris, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower, the cycle of collusion and betrayal - a structure which necessitated a new approach to writing. “When I realised that a lot of the form of the book was to be to do with withholding information about what had happened, ” says Kunzru, “then I was straight into the situation of needing a much more rigid kind of planning than I’d ever tried to do before - luckily coinciding with a new pin board.” It’s a resource he wholeheartedly recommends to anybody trying to make a book, offering a way of seeing the whole thing at a glance, a way of keeping track of what the reader already knows, and what they still need to find out. He laughs as he explains how he spent a month of his life cutting up index cards and rearranging them in different orders. “It turned into a whole work displacement activity as well. I remember wasting a day travelling somewhere to get the right sort of drawing pins. I had to have see-through drawing pins.”

At the moment it’s covered with “several clusters of stuff” that might turn into one thing or another. “It looks nice,” he says, “I don’t know whether it’s going anywhere yet …” Perhaps what he needs is to find the next “Hari Kunzru protagonist” - the central character at the heart of each of his three very different books who’s trying to work out how he would be different if circumstances were changed.

According to Kunzru, despite huge differences in subject and style, all three of his novels are circling around the same concerns about meaning and value.

“The thing that is entirely consistent through the books is this question of what remains the same for a person through all possible circumstances, and what changes,” he says. “How much of your self and your sense of yourself are dependent on context - time and place, the cultural furniture of what’s around you - and how much is innate. As someone who doesn’t believe in an immortal soul that’s a live question.” He grins. “I’ve got a nasty feeling that I’m going to repeat that again and again.”

September 7, 2007 — A day after chopping $200 off the of the most advanced model of the iPhone, Apple is trying to appease angry customers who paid full price for the gadget by offering them a $100 store credit.

In a letter on the company’s Web site, Apple boss Steve Jobs apologized for the misstep and acknowledged he had received hundreds of e-mails from iPhone customers who were upset about the price cut, which came only two months after the eagerly awaited portable device hit store shelves at $599.

“Even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price,” Jobs said.

Jobs said customers who bought an iPhone - a combination cellphone, music player and Web browser - and didn’t receive a rebate would be eligible for a $100 store credit toward the purchase of any product at an Apple retail outlet or at its online store.

Soon after Apple unveiled the price cut late Wednesday, Internet message boards began filling up with irate missives from technophiles who felt ripped off.

IPhone owner Bethany MacMillan said yesterday that she was only a bit miffed by the markdown.

“The iPhone makes my life so much easier,” MacMillan, who works at a production company, told The Post. “The thing that’s interesting about the $100 credit is I can just go buy more products to feed my love of Apple.”

Besides bruising Apple’s image a bit, the surprise discount sparked some concern on Wall Street that demand for the product isn’t as juicy as expected.

Apple’s shares fell 1.3 percent yesterday to $135.01, on top of a 5 percent drop Wednesday.

Some analysts warned that the $200 discount might not be enough to entice consumers.

The two-year service contract customers must sign with AT&T - which has a reputation for service problems - remains a big drawback, observers said.

AT&T has a five-year, exclusive pact with Apple.

“Apple’s AT&T relationship needs a major overhaul,” said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, who thinks the company “is probably unlikely” to meet its goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. janet.whitman@nypost.com

A SPITFIRE aircraft that fought in the Battle of Britain will fly low over East Lothian this Saturday in honour of a Czech airman killed in the war and the woman who loved him.

Juliette Liska, now 85, will be standing by the graveside of her fianc, Vaclav Jicha, in St Martin’s RC Cemetery, Haddington, in memory of the airman who was killed in a wartime crash over the Lammermuir Hills.

Ms Liska survived a German labour camp and went on to marry another man, but she never forgot the love of her life, whom she met at a flying club in Prague before the war.

“He was a very serious man, but I understood him very well because we were both pilots,” said Ms Liska, who was captured by the Germans in 1943 then became a translator for the American forces after the war ended.

Mr Jicha fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 to escape the Nazis and ended up flying missions for the Allies. After the occupation of France, he worked in Britain as a test pilot and was awarded both the DFC and the AFC.

In the closing months of the war, the Czech pilot was posted to RAF Kinross and it was from there that he took his last flight, on 9 April, 1945. Mr Jicha was one of three people on board a flight that crashed into the Lammermuir Hills in deep snow.

He survived the impact, but froze to death trying to make his way back through the snow and was found six days later by a shepherd on the hills.

Meanwhile, Ms Liska did not know if her fianc was alive or dead. On returning to Czechoslovakia after the war, she finally learned the truth about what had happened.

Following the wishes of her family, Ms Liska married, but she never forgot her wartime sweetheart and has made several visits to his grave. This year, poor health following a fall almost prevented her from making the trip, but she was determined to come to visit the grave.

Inspired by her determination, Bill Nicholson of the Spitfire Club and Jack Tully Jackson, a local historian, arranged for the flypast at 2:30pm tomorrow.

The spitfire, which is in Scotland for the Battle of Britain fundraising ball at Leuchars, was at the Battle of Britain and its body is pockmarked with shrapnel holes.

Bill Nicholson said: “I contacted the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight and told them the story of Vaclav Jicha and Juliette Liska and they agreed to arrange the flypast.”

Standing in the East Lothian cemetery where her fianc lies alongside other airmen, Ms Liska wondered if it might be the last time she will make the trip. “This is a lovely place, a peaceful place,” she says, admiring the freshly planted flowers around her fianc’s grave.

“I think I will ask to have my ashes sprinkled here alongside Vaclav. But I don’t think I am ready to join him yet.”

She said she was looking forward to watching the planes flying above the cemetery on Saturday and will do as she always does when she visits the grave: “I will speak to him in Czech.”