In truth, horror

FICTION: The Patience StoneBy Atiq Rahimi, translated by Polly McLean Chatto, 136pp. £12.99

A WOMAN KEEPS vigil by the bedside of her wounded husband. It is wartime. The room is bare and the woman is praying. A child cries. Afghani writer Atiq Rahimi sets the scene as if giving stage directions. This is not surprising as The Patience Stone, winner of the 2008 Prix Goncourt, is an urgent, heavily theatrical work. It is an important and shocking polemic; it will outrage readers for the truths it reveals. The woman is tending a husband who has treated her badly, yet she risks her life – and, until she moves them to safety, the lives of her two small daughters – to care for him. It is a duty that goes beyond love; it is a duty bound by fear and anger.

Most emphatic of all is the realisation that the narrative is set not two centuries ago but in present-day Afghanistan where, apart from some exceptions, a woman is one of two things; an object owned by a husband or an object available to rape – unless of course, she happens to be a working prostitute. Then, she is an untouchable deserving simply to be either shunned or butchered on the spot. Rahimi does not make the woman particularly sympathetic; she is shrill, angry, resourceful and only now, as her husband lies mute and possibly dying, free to voice her thoughts. Gradually as she relives her horrible life, aware that her husband, if he is still alive, has no option but to listen, her story seeps out.

It is dramatic, a monologue waiting to be staged. Rahimi also introduces moments of additional drama such as when soldiers burst into the house and threaten to rape her. She saves herself by claiming to be a prostitute. Her story is one that must be told. It becomes obvious that this woman, for so long forced into acceptance of a brutal male society, is now ready to explode. The ironies increase and multiply. Rahimi makes powerful use of ancient cultural references. He evokes a world trapped by its own cruelty. Excused her habitual silence, the woman voices every slight, even to her husband’s dislike of her aunt. The tension builds.

This is a raw work and the third novel from Rahimi, who escaped from Afghanistan in 1984 at the age of 22 and fled to Pakistan before settling in France. He first came to prominence with Earth and Ashes, a novella of extraordinary beauty, translated into English from the original Dari, an Afghani language. Shortlisted for the 2004 International Impac Dublin Literary Award it was a worthy challenger, except, at only 54 pages, it was an unlikely winner against Tahar Ben Jelloun's magnificent This Blinding Absence of Light. In Earth and Ashes, an old man accompanied by his little grandson, attempts to visit his son who is working as a miner. The man wants to tell him about the attack on the village in which the old man's wife, his other son and his mining son's wife have been killed. The horrors have left the little boy deaf.

Rahimi's screen version of Earth and Asheswas in the Official Selection at Cannes in 2004. That wonderful first book with its insights into the horror of life in Afghanistan was followed by an extraordinary narrative, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear(2006). Set in Kabul in December 1979, shortly before the Soviet invasion, it is the story of a student fleeing for his life. It may be Rahimi's own story; either way, it is also the story of Afghanistan.

It is as if the story is acted out against the pattern of the valuable rug, a family heirloom, that serves as the narrator/student’s passage to freedom. Not only is the carpet currency for paying the trafficker who aids his escape, the student is wrapped up inside it. There are many moments of magic. “My grandfather used to say,” recalls the student, “that, according to Da Mullah Saed Mustafa, when you’re asleep your soul leaves your body and wanders around. And if you wake up before your soul has come back to your body, you get trapped in a terrible nightmare where you’re paralysed and totally powerless . . . and you stay like that till your soul returns.” The student remembers being told by his grandfather that his grandmother had suffered a heart attack “because she tried to get up before her soul returned to her body”.

There are terrible beatings, and the student describes the sensation of pain, Later, he is given sanctuary by a woman who defies the rituals of her culture in doing so. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fearwas also written in Dari. It is Rahimi's finest work to date, far more of a work of art than The Patience Stone, Rahimi's first book to be written in French.

In the earlier book, the student's first-person narrative conveys a haunting sense of bewilderment. The Patience Stoneconsists of a third-person narrative driven by description that is detailed, almost businesslike, and by the woman's shrill outpourings. While A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear slices its way through the reader's mind, The Patience Stonebludgeons one over the head. It is not subtle; it can't be. It is a haranguing tale, conscious that it must be heard. In this, it is desperately important, although the telling often verges on melodrama, such is the theatricality of the tone. Nothing, however, can distract from the intent. Rahimi makes inspired use of the sang-e sabur, the black patience stone which in Persian mythology is used as a form of sounding board to which to tell one's secrets. The woman explains the use of the stone: "tell all your problems, all your struggles, all your pain, all your woes . . . to which you confess everything in your heart . . . And the stone listens, absorbing all your words, all your secrets, until one fine day it explodes." It is so ironic that the husband who has used her merely for impersonal sex must now, if he is conscious, listen to everything.

He lies inert. But one secret, one truth – the paternity of her children – becomes too much and he explodes into action. Relentless and dramatic, driven by anger and a need to be heard, Rahimi’s dark new book may lack the beauty of his earlier ones, but its truth is overwhelming.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times