An old house in a village in Afghanistan is at the heart of this unusual novel. There is an orchard of apricot trees and an avenue of Persian lilacs.
On the other side of the orchard is a large body of water, which we in South Africa would call a dam. The interior of the house has beautiful murals painted by an old master.
When the Soviets invade and then the Taliban take over, Marcus, the doctor who lives in this house, hides the frescoes with a coating of mud. They are saved, though some damage is done by gunfire.
Many years later Lara, the sister of a Soviet conscript in the 1979 invasion, turns up searching for her brother who she heard used to know Marcus’s daughter, Zameen.
By this time Marcus’s wife, Qatrin, has been stoned to death, and Zameen has been abducted; Marcus too has been searching for Zameen and his grandson. The fractured nature of people’s lives is therapeutically addressed in an unused room of the house where Lara, in her anguished state, lays out on the floor pieces of the damaged fresco, reconstructing an image of lovers in a garden.
Afghanistan has been at war for decades. Aslam writes: “Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and, following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war — how it affected the hand that pulled it from the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough —”
Aslam deals with the causes of this intractable conflict, looking at all sides through the lives of ordinary folk caught up in it. This includes an ex-CIA operative who knew Zameen and her son; he brings news of her death, but the son has vanished into the orphanages and madrassas of the Taliban.
The excesses of the latter are shown as well as the moderate Islam practised by Qatrin, Marcus’s doctor wife, and Dunia, a young female teacher at the school. For them Allah is revered, but women are free, or should be.
Aslam’s writing is measured and richly poetic. He creates a complicated and suspenseful plot in which he balances brutality, cruelty and dogmatic insularity with the sanity and compassion of Marcus’s house, where peace has been holding out through all the madness that afflicts his village.
This peace is anchored not only in Marcus the man, but also in the house, in its ceilings and the cellar of an outbuilding where the microcosm of their lives is connected to ancient learning and spirituality.
A library of books has been nailed to the ceilings — impaled — to keep them safe from the Taliban. In the cellar a huge, ancient head of a stone Buddha lies on its side. Too big to move, they had to build around it. These dreamlike images bring a degree of solace.
But it is a pity that Aslam implies that the causes of the wars in Afghanistan since 1979 have been ideological and religious.
No mention is made of oil pipelines through that country to the oilfields of Uzbekistan and other neighbours, and the fight to control it.
Aslam’s imagery is as memorable in its way as Marquez’s in One Hundred Years of Solitude. There is more than a little magical realism too.
In the case of the books nailed to the ceiling Aslam lets the reader know that even a bullet cannot penetrate a book, much less a nail driven in by a woman in a demented state.
But the impossibility of it is not the point; Aslam shows us the desperation of one driven to save these repositories of knowledge, poetry and myth in this unforgettable image which he returns to throughout the novel.
This is a moving and sobering book, hauntingly beautiful.