01 Feb 2013 01:46:54
What Troy was for the ancients, the World Trade Centre attacks and subsequent wars seem destined to become for our own time. The events acquired a mythic aura even as they were unfolding; miracle-stories circulating within hours of the attacks, conspiracy theories springing up days later. In the absence of rational agency on either side, the narrative defaulted effortlessly into the tropes of legend: quests for magical weapons, duelling codes of conduct, ransoms and bounties, eschatological bombast, archaic barbarity. What writer wouldn't want to engage with this material?
As a reader, on the other hand, one approaches it with caution. It isn't easy to get any kind of credible purchase on the subject, as numerous bad books and worse movies have shown. In the case of Nadeem Aslam's new novel, however, the caution quickly proves unnecessary.
Aslam, who was born in Pakistan and moved to Britain aged 14, is an exceptionally gifted writer whose previous books (which include Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil) have already demonstrated an ability to turn his double perspective to powerful effect. He knows his different worlds intimately and seems able to feel their very different kinds of want and anguish on his own nerves, with sharp immediacy. There aren't many writers who can take you inside the heads of, say, a vulnerable young Pakistani widow one moment, and a US Special Forces operative the next, with as little visible effort of impersonation as he does in The Blind Man's Garden.
The book is set in the first few months following the attacks. Its action moves back and forth between the small town of Heer in Pakistan and the mountains of Afghanistan, where American soldiers have begun the fight against the Taliban and the hunt for al‑Qaeda terrorists. At its core is an intricately knotted group of characters based around a school in Heer, whose devoutly Muslim founder, Rohan, still lives in its lovingly tended grounds, though the school itself has been taken over by hardline Islamists. Rohan's recently married son, Jeo, a trainee doctor, sets off for Afghanistan with his adopted brother Mikal, a poetically minded mechanic who knows everything about cars and stars and is secretly, agonisingly, in love with Jeo's wife, Naheed, who also happens to be in love with him.
The two young men – equally opposed to the Taliban and the US – are not intending to fight, but want to help the wounded. However, they have been betrayed even before they set off, and soon find themselves forced to defend a Taliban stronghold against American-backed rebels. In the ensuing battle Jeo is killed, while Mikal is captured by a warlord who sells him as a "terrorist" to the Americans; they proceed to interrogate him, Bagram-style.
The question – and the emotional motor driving much of the book – is whether Mikal will make it back to his beloved Naheed before she is married off yet again. A love story, then, but with the tumult of war in the foreground.
Counterpointing this plot is a quieter, more reflective story centred on Rohan himself. He is an interestingly problematic figure whose religious convictions, though sympathetically portrayed, at one time caused him to withhold medication from his dying wife. He hoped to force her to re-embrace the religion she had rejected, and thereby save her soul from eternal torment. For the same reason, he had also burned her life's work of drawings and paintings.
In him the conflicting passions of pious spirituality and ordinary human love are tragically combined. Still in mourning for his wife, he is as religious as ever, though appalled by the fundamentalists who have taken over his school. He is also going blind – a steady (and symbolically punitive) exile from the realm of earthly beauty incarnated in the trees and shrubs he himself once planted.
His existence is a kind of atonement, though whether he himself ever makes the connection enforced by the larger intelligence of the novel – between his own inflexible faith and the sickening act of violence that finally erupts out of the teenage jihadists at the school – remains doubtful. This isn't the kind of novel in which characters change or evolve much: they are what they are. Complexity tends to be more outward than inward, resulting from the wide variety of human types portrayed (and the very ingenious plotting that brings them into collision with each other), rather than from individual psychological richness. Emotion is done imagistically, via quick, finely sketched details of light and landscape that set small precise moods. Flora and fauna are wonderfully observed – moths "like shavings from a pencil sharpener"; a tree trunk "twisted as though struggling with some unseen force" – forming a decorative braid around the frequently brutal human interactions they coincide with.
The story itself moves in terse jabs of present-tense narrative; short scenes are built around two or three bright shards of action or dialogue that light up whole universes of thought and outlook. Mikal in captivity begs the warlord's men to extract the bullets in his flesh, to no avail. But then "while he slept, a large group of them came at him with scalpels and blades. A rumour had circulated that the Americans had used solid gold bullets." Later, when he captures an American soldier and wants to ask him some questions, the interpreter he finds turns out to be too frightened of the Taliban to speak to an American: "She says they'll cut off her tongue …"
With his outcast affect, cool resourcefulness and impeccable private code of honour, Mikal resembles certain reluctantly heroic Clint Eastwood characters. His dramatic reversals of fortune constantly test (and affirm) his superior courage and decency. Along with the elemental landscapes he passes through, they give much of the novel the quality of an eastern western. Firmly anchored as it is in reality, it isn't above using the heightening devices of romance and picaresque. There are some whopping coincidences, and some unlikely escapades with guns and trucks. Nothing wrong with that, especially when the handling is as enjoyably skilful as it is here, though it does occasionally narrow the scope of one's engagement with the characters. Harder to take is something a little too easily wonderstruck in the general tone; a slight weakness for sonorous, even borderline-hokey, utterance – "Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient" – that at times softens the otherwise tart clarity of the writing.
