Love and Longing in Pakistan: Book review of Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses

(This review first appeared in Hindustan Times.)

If a certain Mumbai tabloid is to be believed, L.K. Advani’s recent spate of political digression was inspired by a biography of Jinnah which he bought at his favourite Khan Market bookstore prior to his Pakistan trip. Advaniji might have been in less trouble today had he picked up a copy of Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie’s new novel Broken Verses instead.

Shamsie’s new novel, perhaps her most accomplished in several ways, could more effectively be used to build bridges without raising the ire of any political group. Without digressing into outright polemic, hewing firmly to the straits of the novel’s intellectualization of politics – as against politic’s intellectualization of literature – Shamsie’s work crosses the divide between Indian and Pakistani (and international) literature to forment a cross-cultural debate of fascinating depth.

In this, her fourth book following the iridiscent In the City by the Sea, Salt and Saffron, and Kartography, the second of which was on Orange’s list of the 21 best novels of the 21st century, she quietly weaves history, politics and familial ties in a novel of barely suppressed rage. In a perhaps innocent upturning of a familiar Mahasweta Devi device – a daughter obsessed with the disappearance of her political activist mother 14 years ago – Shamsie tells a tale in quiet, deceptively simple prose.

A fine poet as well, Shamsie’s prose reads on the surface like an elegant stylist’s attempt at capturing the almost Jamesian elegance and repressiveness of modern-day Pakistan. In Aasmaani’s conversations with her father, or with Ed, or with Shenaz, the surface talk is never just that, it’s like a lichinous pond where the scummy top seethes with waiting life. You have to dive deep below to find true clarity.

Unlike Mahasweta Devi’s polemic novels, bursting with dangerous ideas and the inevitable grinding of individual wills against the collective force of the body politic, Shamsie’s novels are more concerned with observations made from a single clearly envisioned point of view, immersing you surface-depth in a molasses-thick web that grips you harder the longer you stay.

Her prose is readable without being showy for the sake of display. Her characters can often blend into one another, apart from the obviously different ones, like Ed, with his Americanisms. And her sensibility is often stringently British (or should one now say Commonwealthish?) rather than the earthy lore of inner Pakistan voices. There is a mannered beauty to her work, particularly in this very elegantly designed fourth book, that sometimes defies the very attempt at immersion she seems to seek.

She could do with more honest brutality. Obliqueness can only work up to a point before it becomes obfuscation. Let’s say it like it is; the author, if not the characters. At times, her lingering becomes a malingering indecisiveness that you suspect is more an affliction of the writer rather than the characters themselves.

These are minor bubbles in a pool of otherwise iridiscent beauty. Shamsie is a writer with extraordinary sensibility and an inherent quality that is uniquely sub-continental. She defies easy comparison and that itself becomes her greatest accomplishment. She is that most unique thing: a butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis of a shared past (Indian, Pakistani, British) that nevertheless manages to create her own genetic pattern. She deserves all the accolades heaped upon her already, and then some. Read this fine novel to see what literature can do that polemic cannot.

And the next time Advaniji passes through Bahrisons, he could do better than read the new Shamsie. At least, then, if he chooses to quote from the book at length, he’s unlikely to get into trouble with the powermongers that be: true literature is rarely simple enough to rouse a rabble to mutinous dissent. If rabbles read at all.