"Burnt Shadows" by Kamila Shamsie - ISBN 978 1 4088 0087 4 - Bloomsbury Publishing London p/b - 2009 - 363 pp
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Shamsie has received many plaudits for `Burnt Shadows` here in Britain, where she is now based. It has undoubtedly brought her fame and fortune and also put her firmly on the international literary circuit, with frequent media appearances as a critic and commentator. I have only recently finished reading the book and for that reason alone would have liked to have been part of the audience at her appearance on the BBC World Service`s Book Club programme on Thursday September, 30, 2010. What a pity however that I won`t be able to because we will be away in Spain just then. It is scheduled to be broadcast on November 6, and again I won`t be able to hear it on air either because we will be away in India at the time!
The point that I would have made, and am sure others probably will, is about the extraordinary provenance of the plot - the Japanese connection. The novel`s opening sequence is gripping indeed: both the period and physical setting of Nagasaki is beautifully captured. The picture of a city on the brink of disaster, and then devastated by the atomic bomb, is conveyed in sensitive and evocative detail. It is against this background that we meet Hiroko, the shy young woman who will survive the holocaust, but it is her subsequent trajectory that is so intriguing. That within just over a year after that she should find herself transplanted onto Indian soil requires an amazing feat of imagination.
This then is what I would like to ask Shamsie: you have constructed a complicated scenario based on a seemingly implausible and tenuous chain of serendipity that does surely stretch the reader`s credulity! Was the character of Hiroko - her situation - a creation of your imagination or was it based on historical research?
Japan after the atomic bombs was a defeated nation. It was also under the control of an occupying power. There had been wide-spread damage and destruction. How was it then possible for Hiroko to leave the country and travel to India, even if she did have "some money and no attachments" (p 48) and a bagful of "glowing references from the Americans" for her linguistic skills as a translator during that post-war period of austerity and deprivation? But what was it that brought her to Delhi - via a long sea voyage to Bombay and an onward train journey - at a critical moment in the transformation of the sub-continent in early 1947? Chance? A sub-conscious yearning to visit the place and meet the people that her German lover / fiance Konrad (who was to perish in the Nagasaki bomb blast) had talked about? To preserve something out of his intangible past as an enduring mission for her own life? Whatever it may have been, we are propelled along the saga as it unfolds, more out of curiosity than concern for her and in the process we discover much more that had laid hidden, as it emerged in the course of a relentless sequence of events and interactions of people with places and politics.
But the most obvious conundrum of how is it that she is welcomed into the bosom of the Burton household and becomes a familiar, even cheerful, presence within the settled British establishment at the heart of imperial India, remains a mystery. There was turmoil all around as partition and independence beckoned. She was not just any foreigner, and an Asian at that, but Japanese. Her only connection was with Konrad`s half-sister Elizabeth (nee Ilse) Burton, who was herself half-German, as had Konrad been. The British in India would have been, undoubtedly were, only too aware that Japan had been a ruthless enemy during the war that had just ended. Nowhere does Shamsie acknowledge the significance of these facts or the impact and reverberations of the Japanese conquest of British territories all over South East Asia and the ensuing suffering and devastation. Nor do we get anything more than a superficial glimpse of the intricate social nuances that would have dominated the lives of the British in Delhi at that time. Surely the many `burnt shadows` of the title would have included those cast by the Japanese advance, right up to the Indian border, and the capture and mistreatment of British and Allied PoWs and countless civilians in its wake! To be fair, we are witness to some of her inner conflicts, as she came to terms with her own scars, both physical and psychological, of the war and its aftermath.
But even so, against the background of that turbulent and epoch-making end of the British Indian Empire, Hiroko manages to have a sexual encounter and fall in love with Sajjad Ashraf, the faithful Muslim servant-companion of James Burton, Elizabeth`s husband, and to elope with him. She becomes a Muslim convert and they marry. By the end of that year, 1947, they have settled in Karachi, willy nilly, and create a new life and identity for themselves in the new state of Pakistan. They have a son, Raza, who grows up within the relatively well-off Pakistani middle-class milieu that Sajjad and Hiroko Ashraf have become part of. The Burton family leave India, go back to England, but their marriage falls apart and they separate. They have a daughter, Kim, who goes with Elizabeth to live in New York, to be near her cousin.
These and many other crucial details are buried deep in the narrative, to elude but the most attentive reader who however has to keep on referring back to the text so as not to lose the thread. One layer of improbability is heaped upon another as the full cast of characters is revealed and as they navigate across time and space. Early on, for example, Hiroko explains to Elizabeth, when she queried the propriety of having travelled to Delhi in the company of her male Canadian escort, that he was of "a Wildean persuasion`! Other literary references, to E M Forster, do not seem this incongruous. Complex relationships are forged and nurtured over generations, with fortuitous coincidences and cross-connections, to give us an epic tale of family and friends as they grapple with the geo-political realities of our age. The racial dynamics between the English or European, Japanese and Indians at the centre of the story are alluded to but not with sufficient critical depth. Some points of conflict are papered over while others are explored in a one-dimentional projection.
And so we travel through the decades, traversing the contemporary history of our time - how the Pakistanis became drawn into the Afghan conflict, first with the Soviet invasion and the Mujahedin resistance to it, then when the Americans left a power vaccum after the Soviets were driven out and the Taliban took over and finally in the wake of 9/11 - how it all piled up into a gigantic mess, with spooks and spivs, `blowback` and betrayal. We are driven to a predictable denouement involving figures from the past - the dramatis personae - who have straddled continents and cultures to find themselves in an emotional bind that alas can only lead to their undoing. Here, in one face-to-face encounter, we are treated to one of the several complicated relationships that form the essence of the tale:
"Abdullah, I am a Raza`s mother".
His instant reaction was to push his chair back from the table with a loud scraping sound his expression one of disbelief. She put his hand on his arm, and he paused, seeing Raza in her features.
"Raza`s not Hazara. I`m Japanese. And his father was a Pakisani. Originally from Delhi. He and I moved to Karachi in `47."
Her accent - Karachi mingled with something else - countered the improbabilty of what she was saying.
Raza it is then upon whom falls the mantle of the anti-hero, and his asymmetric journey also provides this telling line in the Prologue: "How did it come to this, he wonders", as does the reader!
On the whole, a readable work of highly imaginative fiction. Shamsie has skilfully packed a lot into it in terms of her own background and our current preoccupations in world politics.
RAMNIK SHAH
Copyright
Surrey England
