KEY POINTS:
The third novel from Pakistan-born, British-based Aslam starts with characters gathering in a corner of contemporary Afghanistan.
Elderly Englishman Marcus, in his home with books nailed to the ceiling, helps Lara, a Russian woman searching for the story of her dead soldier brother. Then comes David, the American gemstone dealer and ex-CIA agent, Dunia the teacher and Casa the inflexible extremist named after the hero of a Victorian poem. They meet or re-meet in a land of "fabled orchards and mulberry forests", now crammed with violence and death to the point where even vines and trees seem reluctant to grow in case their roots touch a landmine. An extreme image?
Everything in this book is extreme. In the opening few pages, a woman who falls asleep with her feet accidentally pointing towards Mecca is beaten with a tyre iron for her "disrespect". The Taleban order all the books in a city to be thrown into an abandoned school for destruction. A respected cleric buries a series of wives alive so he can replace them with younger girls. Even an ant painted in a mural is obliterated for fear it seems idolatrous.
The past is equally lurid. A wife is made to cut off her husband's hand and then is stoned to death for the "blasphemy" of owning Islamic calligraphy decorated with animals. A girl is raped by a soldier, abandoned as a spy by her lover, then forced into prostitution to support her child. So it goes on. The country where poets used to assemble to write lines to orange blossoms is now an abattoir and a charnel house.
The child forcibly fathered by Lara's murdered brother on Marcus' slaughtered daughter may be a truck bomber. Violent death is everywhere, graphic and inhuman. Aslam narrates his story in language that alternates between florid and bloated. His characters don't speak; they recite aphorisms: "The goal is to have a goal, honesty the striving for honesty". There's a great deal of passion - and a great deal of polemic. Islam is essentially anti-science. America will never understand the savagery in the rest of the world. Almost all religious ideology is fundamentalist rant. Afghanis "need education, or they'll go on being cruel without realising it".
The paradox and pity of this narrative is that virtually everything - events, feelings, attitudes, behaviour - is so inflated that it's nearly impossible to believe in or to engage with the characters. A whole lot less would have improved things a whole lot more.
The Wasted Vigil
By Nadeem Aslam (Faber $37.99)
