Christopher De Bellaigue: In the rose garden of the martyrs

Traders soldiers, film-makers, writers, taxi-drivers and clerics all inhabit the pages of author Christopher de Bellaigue's book In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs.

As much as his book might sound like a cross between a thriller and a romance, it is neither. Instead, it is non-fiction at its most intimate. De Bellaigue has spread out on the pages a heart-felt memoir of Iran. Moreover, it is not the Iran seen on the evening news, at least not completely.

For those in the West, Iran is often the stereotypical Muslim nation wearing a collective black chador. However, de Bellaigue, a journalist who writes for The New York Review of Books and Granta, is married to an Iranian, lives in Iran, and knows it better than most. He has the advantage of living on the imaginary and philosophical line that separates Westerners from the Shia populace.

Just the same, de Bellaigue did not write this book because he felt a strong desire to tell the evolving and often misunderstood story of modern Iran, a story for a Western world increasingly worried by Islamic fundamentalism. De Bellaigue says his desire to write this memoir was much more subtle.

"I think I was at that time in my life when I wanted to write a book and just happened to have chanced upon a subject that I became very passionate about." His book is about "a generation of Iranians that largely have been forgotten, certainly outside Iran. The generation that raised the revolution, fought a war, then lived with the consequences".

De Bellaigue says the book "is a story of a 35-year adventure and the affect it has had on the people". He adds, "It was the confluence of all these elements that brought me to write the book."

Still very much an outsider, a sense of "confusion and wonder" when looking around Iran remains.

So complex is Iranian society, that de Bellaigue says even after almost five years of living in Tehran, bewilderment still occasionally strikes him. The book covers the years from the Shah's coronation in 1967, the revolution that saw the Shah toppled and Ayatollah Khomeini take control of an Islamic republic, the usurping of the Ayatollah, the Iran-Iraq War and post-war reconstruction.

However, it is not a bland re-telling of Middle-Eastern history. At a time when the Western media portray the Middle East in a series of multi-media grabs as a region in turmoil, de Bellaigue removes the veil from the hidden face of Iran.

The collective Iranian face he paints is world-weary and solemn. It is a face set to mourn for a man who died more than 1300 years ago — the Imam Hossein or supreme martyr of Shia Islam. De Bellaigue writes, "I am among a people that enjoy grief, relishes it. Iran mourns on a fragrant spring day, while watching a ladybird scale a blade of grass, while making love."

Nonetheless, he goes on to show that this simple sketch barely scratches the surface of the Iranian psyche. "I think I'm still in the process of trying to understand. I think it is probably a lifetime of hard work. It is not only a closed society but also a contradictory and difficult society to try to get to grips with. You can come away from a person with an impression and then realise later on that the impression you had is entirely wrong and that you have misjudged that person completely for good or for ill."

De Bellaigue has come to accept the double-sided nature of Iranian society. He even allows it to beguile rather than torment him. He says the Iranians' tendency to say what they believe someone wants to hear rather than what he or she should be hearing increases his fascination. And, because he has family in Tehran, he sees "the essential kindness and hospitality of these people".

For de Bellaigue that sense of humanity is part of the attraction of life in Tehran and it is a sense he manages to convey strongly in the almost-300 pages of his book. The people of Iran, de Bellaigue says, may form a closed society but they have not removed themselves from the machinations of the world around them. For example, in relation to the war in neighbouring Iraq, he says, there are two observations.

First the transformation of Shiite holy sites into battlefields has caused great apprehension only "mitigated by the fact that there is now ease of access to these places". Secondly, he says that a hostile Iraq invaded by America, immensely more powerful than Saddam was towards the end of his time, greatly concerns the Islamic Republic. "As for the people here, I find that most of them get on with their lives and are more capable of living through uncertainty than perhaps you or I would expect them to be."

De Bellaigue makes the point that the Iranians have lived a precarious existence for almost 40 years, with war, the threat of war, or revolution. "I think Iranians have a capacity to get on with their lives despite shadows hanging over them."

He says the intricate nature of Iranian society made predicting what might happen in the troubled and often controversial nation almost impossible. Many contradictory things are happening in Iran, including a widening gap between rich and poor, a burgeoning middle class, enormous amounts of oil money, and no appetite for revolution or any kind of opposition.

For de Bellaigue future considerations are for tomorrow. All he hopes now is that his book will "shine some light into a dark corner and try to show that while some images of Iran are right and some are wrong, above all they are incomplete".

* David Gilchrist is a freelance writer.

* Harpercollins, $34.99