Mostly, reviewing involves writing about books that are fairly good or fairly bad. The skill with these involves the manner in which you express the fact of the book’s near hit or near miss without being needlessly brutal or too weakly honeyed. On the rare occasion a book is just terrible, the important thing is to make sure you’ve made the book’s poor quality clear, but not excessively clear. Reviewing becomes a truly daunting task only when the novel you’re asked to write about exceeds all expectations, when it’s as close to flawless as possible.
This is the task I am faced with here. Because This is Where the Serpent Lives, by Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a future classic, pure and simple. It’s one of those novels that renews your faith in the possibilities of novels, generally. Reading it (or being forced by annoying interruptions such as eating or sleeping to put it down), you think, ‘Ah right, yes, this is what novels are supposed to be, this is the whole point.’ This is Where the Serpent Lives, which Mueenuddin took many long and no doubt grindingly difficult years to write (his last, a story collection called In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, came out back in 2009 to much international acclaim), has been entirely worth the wait.
Following a number of interwoven characters, initially the novel reads almost like a short story collection itself, offering various, contrasting lives in modern Pakistan that only later loosely tie together (even this careful, controlled looseness conveys Mueenuddin’s glorious lightness of touch, his masterful confidence, and speaks, formally, to the heat, as well as the gossip and storytelling styles of the culture he evokes).
Mueenuddin moves effortlessly through the intricate worlds of Pakistan’s castes and classes, from cocaine-soaked parties and American educations to cucumber farming, arranged marriages and feudal law. Biblical imagery abounds, right down to the tempting bitten apple of an iPhone.
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This is modern Pakistan’s answer to Underworld, Middlemarch, Midnight’s Children – a true state-of-the-nation novel. Yet more even than these, in his style and, most particularly, in his almost agonising comprehension of human folly, Mueenuddin (and, for once, this hackneyed comparison is more than the usual hyperbole) is immaculately and intimately Chekhovian. Simply put, the novel is a triumph.
