The Wasted Vigil Book

Verdict: mixed feelings. Let me sort them out.

A. The principle

If we did not want a story with some, and perhaps lots of, generosity towards those we call "enemy" then we could all settle for W's version of current world events: we are good; they are evil (or childish, uneducated, uncivilized natives); and, they are motivated to destroy us because they envy us our goodness. So what I want from a novel is to help me understand the inner workings and outer actions of someone who I cannot seem to understand. Thus, one test of a novel is how well the author is able to provide a kind of narrative generosity towards antagonists. This will be my test.

B. The good news

I found this novel thoughtful, important, and I can probably use it for my Afghanistan class. If Kite Runner is like fast food, then this is a multi-course meal made from scratch, served over a long evening with dear friends. Really, there is no comparison between the two. Nadeem Aslam is in a different class; his ambitions are great (but, probably beyond his current reach.)

This is the best novel I have read on post-soviet invasion Afghanistan. Although I do not think it is as powerful as two non-fiction books, Zinky Boys and Unexpected Light. Even Zinky Boys and Unexpected Light do not have the one element that I think makes this book so worthwhile - an extended treatment of the Talibani mind-set. One of the main characters is an orphan who has trained as a Taliban and whose mind and heart Aslam probes as an omniscient narrator. For me, Aslam's really fails to provide "Casa" with a tangible and fuller biography. Nevertheles, the almost complete absence by any writer in any genre to treat the Taliban as of this earth, as products of world history, makes Aslam's effort very impressive.

Another main character is a Russian, Lara, whose searches for the whereabouts or remains of her brother - a Soviet soldier. Lara allows Aslam to ground his history back to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1988). Our world, dominated as it is by the lone super-power, is one in which the only thing that seems to matter is what happened just before and after 9/11/2001 in NYC. Not only Lara, but also the British character Marcus, allow Aslam to extend back past 9/11/01 and thereby weave a longer and thicker history.

The CIA and US special-forces are there in the form of two US characters, David and James. The long dialogues that occur near the end of the book between various combinations of Lara, David, Marcus, David, and James are really the heart of the book for me. In these dialogues, Aslam is able to earn his way to a few beautiful and laser like sentences. It is to his credit that Aslam takes his time to deliver some simple truths uttered by his characters. When the words come out, they do so with great profoundness. Aslam's timing is precise because has given his readers the full back stories of each main character and helped his readers to understood the full stakes that each character has in the dramatic and tragic events that unfold.

There are astoundingly beautiful sentences here - even if I also think that as a young writer Aslam has yet to understand how to simplify language to achieve full effect. Too often the historical, the literary, and religious references - while giving the book a certain depth and resonance - get in the way of the narrative and in the way of the greater purposes of the book.

C. The bad news

While Pushtoons, Afghanistan, and the Taliban get a voice here, I don't think that this voice is as generous as it needs to be. On page 319, Aslam writes, "Pull a thread here and you'll find that it's attached to the rest of the world." I am convinced that this idea - an idea that is less about threads or connections and more about a thinker's/writer's generosity - explains why it took him 8 years to write this book. I have heard that he wrote book-length biographies of each of his main characters. He wanted to give each of them a history, a context, a motivation that drives their quest. His thorough construction of characters allows him to raise a point on one page and then to wait a hundred pages to raise it again. So intricately woven together are his threads.

His main characters - Marcus, Lara, David, and Zameen (a Brit, a Russian, a USer, and a mix of Brit and Afghan)'each have this multifaceted density. Another set of characters are given some robustness but they are not as tightly spun. These include Qatrina, Dunia, and Casa (all Afghans). Two more characters, are woven in to the story but have nearly no threads to which they are "attached to the rest of the world." These are the two Afghan "warlords" - Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan - leaders of their family/clan who have been enemies for more than 50 years and who serve as the shorthand for W's evil in this book.

Aslam, in my reading, is able to generate extraordinary generosity for Marcus, Lara, David, and Zameen; some for Qatrina, Dunia, Casa, and James; and almost nothing for Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan. In the Kite Runner, Hosseini inability to un-knot the Taliban, make the Taliban character a bedrock, a dead-end of the analysis. So also here, Aslam's inability to provide a meaningful and generous story to the motivations of Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan turn characters into caricatures. Their lives are bed-rocked, dead-ended, and not "attached to the rest of the world." (Much to his credit, Aslam tries to give their deadly feuding a context but this effort feels utterly strained to me and comes across as an afterthought.)

There are other problems with the book. For example: (1) I found some of his literary and historical references to be a little pretentious and I therefore allowed myself to glaze over such passages. (2) There are some rather pronounced plot problems near the end of the book having to do with how Casa rejoins the original plan. (3) The starched and unconvincing words that Aslam puts in James's mouth at the end of the book. (4) Most of the graphic violence is at the hands of Afghans. These scenes are depicted with visceral, concrete detail whereas the violence of the Soviets and the USA is made abstract via plane "bombings." The bombings are conveyed with large, sweeping brushstroke; they cannot and do not move the reader in the same manner. (5) All the major non-Afghan characters (but none of the major Afghan characters) are adults; wisdom often flows from Marcus and sometimes from Lara but never from an Afghan character. Aslam's selection of the wise quietly tells us more about how he regards his fellow south-Asians than his erudite forays into the history, poetry, and culture of these lands.

But these problems are perhaps minor, fixable, and easily forgivable given the vast ambition of the tableau.

The central problem is, in my view, an unwillingness or an inability, ultimately to act upon the wisdom that Aslam's writing reveals: he is not always able to show that when we "pull a thread…it is attached to the rest of the world. As I said, Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan are thread ends.

D. Anticipating the criticism

If generosity to antagonists is a principle by which we can evaluate a world-view or a novel, then at one end of the continuum, we have W's view of the world - a view that is plain, simple, and sharp but utterly vapid. The message here is "We are of this world and they are not." Further towards the pole of generosity but still too close to W's view is Hosseini's Kite Runner. Closer to the pole of generosity, but still not near enough, is this novel by Aslam.

If this novel leaves me wanting can I provide an example of something with greater generosity, one in which all the threads are connected to each other and the rest of the world?

I would offer Isabel Allende's House of Spirits as an example. The antagonist is the patriarch Esteban Trueba. He is given a full story and is thoroughly motivated as a fully rounded human being. Allende never pulls her punches as she describes how Trueba destroys the lives of the peasants he treats as no more than slaves and servants. And yet, we come to know Trueba well, we are allowed to empathize with his arrogance, with the manner of his self-deception, with the power he feels as he squeezes out the lives of other human beings, and with the potential justification for his beliefs. Indeed, so great is Allende's desire to give equal time to the man she is trying to un-knot that in various parts of the book, Trueba erupts into Allende's novel to tell the story in his own voice. Allende submits to the Trueba within her and allows him his own tone, words, and voice. I think of this as full generosity to the antagonist and the standard that has to be met for a great novel. It is not the only standard, but without this quality, fiction, in my view, does not live up to its greater purpose.

Here are some other novels that I think live up to this standard:

Bridge on the Drina
Sorrow of War
Milagro Beanfield War
Cities of Salt
The Pickup
Season of Migration to the North