Yasmina Khadra: The Swallows Of Kabul

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Just pages into this beautiful, brutal novel about the death of love, of a country, a husband and a wife, we meet a man called Moshen. He is first seen at the stoning to death of a woman accused of prostitution, a regular event in the Afghanistan of the Taleban.

Where once he had experienced rage and disgust at these regular public executions, Moshen now feels only muted, selfish despair. He watches — and there is no turning away for fear of being thought critical of the regime — with detachment.

Such events "make him conscious of his vulnerability, they sharpen his perception of his limits, they fill him with sudden insight into the futility of all things, of all people ... The light of his conscience has gone out."

So why not let he who is no longer allowed to own a conscience cast the first stone?

The stone that Moshen throws casts the ripples that will help to destroy much more than a poor prostitute, her face hidden in a sack.

Before the casting, Moshen was the loving husband of Zunaira, once a women's rights lawyer, now a woman imprisoned not simply (or simplistically) by a burqa but by a rule more iron-clad and inflexible than any corset yet invented to contain womanly whims.

It could well have been Zunaira's hidden face her husband smashed with his rock. The effect, once Moshen admits to his wife what he has done, is much the same: their once loving and equal marriage turns bitter and violent, much like the society they now live in.

Reading Khadra's novel (Khadra is a pseudonym for a former Algerian Army officer) you can't help think of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, published in 1986, a work of science fiction.

In Atwood's story a woman wakes up to a world in which women no longer have rights, money, or careers. They wear long garments. Their faces and bodies are hidden.

It was an imagined world that, but for the fact it was a Christian-based world, pre-imagined the Muslim world of Afghanistan under Taleban control.

Khadra does the opposite: he looks back on a world that could not be imagined and became real, in which his fictional characters betray each other and themselves in their attempts to survive.

Yet out of a place bereft of such things, Khadra has composed an elegy for a country which is both beautiful and achingly compassionate.



William Heinemann, $34.95

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald writer