Books

Prisoners Of The Sun

Three generations are braided through Hiroshima, the Partition and 9/11. Yet they are untouched by it all.

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Prisoners Of The Sun
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Burnt Shadows

The novel follows the lives of two families across three generations. At the heart of the novel is a Japanese woman, Hiroko. Young and in love with a German man, Konrad Weiss, her leap into love, marriage and sexual awakening is cut brutally short by the devastating bomb, which kills her father and fiance.

She flees Japan to India, to live with Konrad’s half-sister, Ilse who, under the name of Elizabeth Burton is (unhappily) married to a stiff-upper-lipped Brit, James Burton. She falls in love with Ilse’s son Henry’s tutor, Sajjad. Partition happens, making it impossible for Sajjad and Hiroko to return to Delhi.

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The third section concerns Hiroko and Sajjad’s life in Pakistan in the early ’80s. Their son, Raza, is a gifted student, but his bright career prospects seem to be jinxed by panic attacks brought on by exams. Into their life returns Henry, now a grown American man called Harry, a CIA employee. The last section, set in New York, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Canada in 2001-02, follows the intertwined destinies of Raza (who is an interpreter for Harry in a CIA-like organisation), and Harry’s feisty daughter, Kim.

The book opens with a description of a prisoner, stripped naked, waiting to be interrogated: "When he is dressed again, he suspects, he will be wearing an orange jumpsuit." The reader knows this must be Raza—what other fate could there be for a young male Muslim in a 21st century novel? The only question is whether he will turn out to be a ‘real’ terrorist or an innocent ensnared in the net.

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Perhaps it is unsurprising that Shamsie, hailed as a bright new voice of Pakistani fiction, felt the imperative to write her ‘9/11-book’. As the planes crashed into the twin towers, one could almost hear writers cracking their knuckles and thinking, "My God! What a great image." It is the defining image of our time, as the mushroom-cloud was for an earlier generation. In Burnt Shadows, we get both.

I found the novel disturbing precisely because it is too comforting. Kamila Shamsie’s characters are simply too nice. They suffer terrible loss, encounter all manner of brutality and violence, but the reader is left strangely untroubled and the characters themselves scarcely suffer a scratch to the paintwork.

Hiroko is physically scarred—three cranes on her white silk kimono are burnt into her skin by the atomic blast. She finds them ugly, but to others they are alluring, even erotic. The moral dubiousness of this ‘terrible beauty’ is never explored, so that one wonders if the writer herself felt its discomfort.

As for Raza and Harry, they float through their paramilitary lives oddly unblemished, while nasties, like Steve, the CIA-man, are reduced to cartoons. At one point, Raza asks Harry where he would draw the line in extracting information from terror suspects. " ‘What wouldn’t I do if it was effective?’ Harry said thoughtfully. ‘Almost nothing. Children are out of bounds, rape is out of bounds, but otherwise what works, works.’ "

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In this month’s New York Review of Books, Mark Danner quotes from the Red Cross Report on the treatment of detainees in CIA custody, published in February 2007. It is chilling. Harry Burton is one who endorses these, in George Bush’s words, "alternative techniques". Raza is sufficiently enticed by the glamour of the gun that he seriously considers becoming an Afghani jehadi. Yet both emerge from the novel smelling of nothing but roses. Is it that women writers cannot ‘do’ the dark stuff? Will they always choose redemption over damnation, empathy over alienation, sentiment over cold fact? If so, perhaps we had better leave terrorist novels and war fiction, bombs and violence to the writers with the balls to peer into humanity’s dark side and report back from the abyss.

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