A grim take on global guilt

FICTION: Burnt ShadowsBy Kamila Shamsie Bloomsbury, 367pp, £14.99

DAILY LIFE has become even more terrifying. It is no longer sufficient to keep watch for a speeding car or a carelessly discarded cigarette. Menace stalks the innocent as freely as the guilty.

“Earthquakes and floods were one thing – but to start having to calculate the effect of a bomb or an aeroplane, that was something else entirely. What size of plane? What weight of bomb? If a man walked into a lobby with dynamite strapped to his chest? If chemical gas was released in to the ventilation system?”

Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie’s bleakly cautionary fifth novel tracks the invisible enemy, the terrorist with a message and no particular target, just humanity in general.

Late in the narrative, Hiroko, the central character, a survivor of the horrors at Nagasaki and a survivor of life, finally concedes defeat when helplessly announcing in the wake of 9/11 to her best friend’s granddaughter, “I want the world to stop being such a terrible place.”

Whereas the polemic of her fellow countryman Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalistis highly rhetorical, Shamsie calls upon her considerable command of disciplined irony to examine how we arrived at where we are now, this beaten planet. She takes as her starting point a blinding burst of white lights that killed 75,000 Japanese and left its legacy on the generations that followed.

On that summer’s day, August 9th 1945, a young Japanese woman, Hiroko, contemplates her German lover who has left her only for the day. He has just asked her to marry him. He walks off to return some borrowed books “And then the world goes white” and he disappears into death.

But Hiroko, the bird patterns of her mother’s silk kimono burnt into her back, lives and begins an odyssey shaped by history and global politics.

This is a book of our times and the legacy of global guilt. It is grim, methodical; a type of pathologist’s report sustained by history and the stories dominating today’s news pages. It is making sense of the chaos and the cruelty. Hiroko is a heroic character but she is also symbolic, an example of how people endure and absorb and defy the facts.

The narrative spans almost half a century, entire lives are played out and end; some abruptly by some vicious twist of timing, others as peacefully as a swimmer pushing off the pool’s edge. Shamsie looks at the differences dividing cultures as well as the basic humanity which unites them, us; everyone.

The scene shifts from Nagasaki and its ghosts, the living ones as well as the dead, and on to Delhi. There another of the central characters, and the most engaging person in a novel of troubled, ambivalent individuals, Sajjad Ali Ashraf, attempts to decide “the exact celestial point at which Dilli became Delhi.

“Dilli: his city, warren of ‘bylanes and alleys, insidious as a game of chess’, the rhythmically beating heart of cultural India (he wasn’t merely dismissive of opposing views, he was inclined to believe they were only made in jest), the place to which his ancestors had come from Turkey over seven centuries earlier. . .”

Sajjad, who appears to have wandered from the pages of EM Forester's A Passage to India(1924), although that novel would seem not to be fully endorsed by Shamsie, is used throughout the narrative to explain many of the nuances an outsider could miss.

The Delhi sequence is vital to a novel which has an epic time scale and immense ambition. Not only is Sajjad intelligent and human, he is sufficiently ordinary to respond with a convincing humility.

He is also a filter; the message of the novel is so complex that Shamsie could easily have allowed it to slide into meaningful polemic. The facts are there, as is the history, the terror and our reality. The world of this novel is our world. Shamsie has plotted it like a thriller and although the hyper choreography of the plotting is too neat, almost clinically efficient, there is no doubting Shamsie’s grasp of either the cultural and political chaos, or the unifying fear.

The Delhi sequences not only look at the changes emerging as British colonial rule hands over to bubbling internal strife, it also establishes the characters, some of whom will endure for most of the story.

Above all Shamsie uses it to balance two very different women who will become life long friends. The idea that Hiroko would travel to Delhi to meet Ilse, now Elizabeth Burton, the half sister of her dead fiancé is daringly handled and just about plausible if only because of the efforts Shamsie takes in conveying the young Japanese woman’s natural defiance.

Meanwhile, the disintegrating mess of the Burton marriage staggers on.

Shamsie often gives the impression of being more interested in what her characters are thinking than in what they are saying. But it is not a major fault as their stories, which continually merge and sub-divide, drive the plot through its dramatic shift of scene and time.

Yet again Afghanistan becomes the place where all hatreds converge. A drive through the mountains brings two boys intent on becoming heros closer to an angry adulthood. It is interesting to watch as Shamsie allows a boy, Raza, teenage son of a Japanese mother and an Indian father, with a gift for languages pass himself off as an Afghan. Nationality becomes as interchangeable as a coat. The plot shifts and turns, it abounds with ambivalence and coincidence. Time passes.

Burnt Shadowscan spin in a sentence. Shamsie exerts a Miltonic control, not only is she watching her characters, she is guiding them through time, tragedy and contrasting cultures. There are flashes throughout of Michael Ondaatje's narrative technique, although Shamsie's images are stark, they are briskly despatched.

She seldom pauses, it is an action novel. Nor does she aspire to the elegiac grace of her fellow Pakistani Nadeem Aslam's superb third novel The Wasted Vigilwhich was published last summer.

Shamsie really does convey the idea of a world in upheaval. Reading The Wasted Vigilleaves the reader struck by an unbearable sadness at the injustice and the folly; Burnt Shadowsis tougher.

There is an intelligent urgency about the narrative which suggests that global politics is a nasty game of cricket in which the innocent always pay for the evil man’s lies.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times