Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
When Asian countries and, indeed, Asians themselves look beyond their borders they almost invariably turn, if not geographically West, then at least to what is normally known as the “West”. So while there may be no inherent reason that the cross-cultural elements in Asian novels, when they have them, should be Western, they almost invariably are.
Burnt Shadows, whose core relationship is between a Japanese woman and Muslim Indian, is a still rare attempt, whether deliberate or not, at a pan-Asian novel. Although the novel ends with the fraught relationship between South and Central Asian Muslims and the United States in the tail end of the War on Terror, this multi-generational saga, and the first two-thirds in particular, has at its centre the intriguing Hiroko Tanaka, a German-speaking survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945.
Hiroko travels unannounced to Delhi to find the sister of her deceased German fiance and her British husband in final days of the British presence in India, where she falls in love with, and ultimately marries, their servant Sajjad.
The story wends its way through post-partition Karachi, the NWFP, Afghanistan, New York and Canada, with the love story giving way to a more contemporary political commentary. Handling two cultures credibly in a single narrative, and without resorting to cliches, or at least not many of them, is difficult enough; Kamila Shamsie manages at least three, writing fluently throughout.
The effort is not without its (perhaps inherent) drawbacks, however. Burnt Shadows covers six decades and twelve time-zones in just 350-odd pages; the narrative sometimes seems stretched a bit thin. The intimate tone and detailed, almost painterly descriptions of the first sections are missed in the second half, where a decade might pass between chapters. An interlude in Istanbul, in which a refugee from the destruction of one pre-modern empire sojourns in the genteelly-decaying remains of another, is dismissed in just a few pages.
Seen from East Asia, the commentary on current (or at least Bush-era) relations between America and the Muslim world is perhaps less compelling than Shamsie’s narrative and descriptive gifts. So while novels all too often seem to be one hundred or so pages too long, the opposite is true here: one wishes this book had been rather longer.