Nadeem Aslam (2017) The Golden Legend London, Faber & Faber
Sunday, 22 Jan 2017, 08:08
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Sunday, 22 Jan 2017, 08:12
Nadeem Aslam (2017) The
Golden Legend London, Faber & Faber
Reading Nadeem Aslam is like returning to the great
Victorians – he is a writer who like them does not consider belief, thought and
thinking, writing and reading to be the prerogative of writers alone – his characters
do that. We share their reading sometimes and the irreducibility of the
marriage of their sources of thought, thinking and belief in understanding
their actions. That makes him a complex troubling writer because he does not
deny even the most ‘dangerous’ of beliefs its voice. Hence people find him
either too ‘preachy’ (mistaking the intellectual life of his characters for his
own) or too inclusive. In fact he makes readers experience the very conflict in
which his characters are absorbed.
Thus an intellectual and retired architect, the Christian Margaret who is also the Muslim Nargis, is often seen
with a book – to be repaired or absorbed or shared. We share with her (on p,
245) a reading that emphasises the complicity of power with the maintenance of
conflicts he pretends to despise, even in its self-regarding architecture. Her thought
moves to an everyday conversation and thence onto reflection (p.245f) on the
idea of history and talk about history as a present force in everyday
conversation. The processes are those of the perpetuation of conflict in interaction,
and the role in it of all discourses – written or oral and every day;
…she and Massud had fallen into a conversation with a
Tunisian air steward, who had said, ‘There are a lot of Italian visitors in my
country.’ And when Nargis had asked him to explain, he replied, @It is due to
the Punic Wars. They haven’t left yet.’ Nargis had to look up the detail of the
Punic wars. They had taken place between 264 BC and 164 BC.
To the minds of combatants causes are located in actions and
reactions to contingent events and thence to ideas that shape action. No cause
is seen as entirely reducible to its circumstances – even when that cause
persists as a moment of inter-group (as in the air-steward) of inherited
distrust and hate. It animate conflict between groupings and within groupings –
a point from which Aslan started his writing career. Aslam understands the
persistence of belief to sustain action – whether religious or political – his characters
live in the beliefs of global Communism as much as the recurring waves of
conflict within and between Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities. Places become
confluences where these beliefs conglomerate throwing up architectural and
other cultural traces or their simulacrums.
Moscow, otherwise known as Imran, remembers from his youth the
following chilling summary, although he does not reflect on it. He lets it stay
hard and gem-like as a vignette of Aslams’s own writing:
‘… things being as bad as they are,’ the baker said to the
two brothers earlier ‘this world won’t last for much longer.’
‘I’ve got news for you, uncle’, Laal had replied. ‘The world
will survive forever, with everything staying exactly as it is now.’ (p. 243)
On the day after Trump’s inauguration into bile, this makes
me feel that hope and fear for the world are much the same thing. Only
characters who become ghosts absorbed into the quotidian beyond its
boundary-setting (in this great books final chapters) ever escape – and, in
fact, do they? The question in this fiction remains open.
Deeply embedded pessimism is not the feel of this novel
however, although it finds its hope in the most visceral of responses to belief
and in the most desperate acts. A key one is where Lily journeys through a
black sewer in which his blood flows and human shit contaminates him to the
very core, Bishop Solomon, on a journey to one such act, contemplates what
survives acknowledgement that the reduction of self to matter – flesh, bone,
blood and ‘waste’ in a beautiful phrase that A.S, Byatt (as another novelist of
this ambition) would thrill to. The Bishop finds ‘a brilliant splinter in the
meat or bone’ (p. 318).
A man of deep reflection that splinter is of the meat and
bone but also imported to it from crystalline sources without. The passage ends
with the Bishop taking down and reading with us, his reader, a picture of
William Blake, reading Milton, the Bible and Shakespeare in the ‘horrid light’
(the Miltonic penumbra of ‘a mighty and
awful change (that) threatened the Earth. The American War began. All its dark
horrors…’ (p. 319)
I quote these parts because they represent for me the sheer grandeur
of the novelist standing against the modish novel of feeling. Few novelists
would dare to go the journey of reliving the Victorian novel – a hero of my
own, Tom McCarthy, actually only picks out the symptoms of why such novels
could be considered impossible for his sparse but beautiful art.
Read this novel then for its belief in ‘character’ (a belief
under great threat of course) and for its refusal to embrace easy options –
even in the shape of one’s plot – for feeling good about the world. And let’s
face it: Donald Trump’s fatuous sense that a nation can choose to feel good
within severely restricted boundaries is impossible to contemplate without the
victory of Seligman’s sham ‘positive psychology’ behind it.
Don’t listen to me. The book is full of life and beauty.
Read it and live it. You will, I am sure.
Nadeem Aslam (2017) The Golden Legend London, Faber & Faber
Nadeem Aslam (2017) The Golden Legend London, Faber & Faber
Reading Nadeem Aslam is like returning to the great Victorians – he is a writer who like them does not consider belief, thought and thinking, writing and reading to be the prerogative of writers alone – his characters do that. We share their reading sometimes and the irreducibility of the marriage of their sources of thought, thinking and belief in understanding their actions. That makes him a complex troubling writer because he does not deny even the most ‘dangerous’ of beliefs its voice. Hence people find him either too ‘preachy’ (mistaking the intellectual life of his characters for his own) or too inclusive. In fact he makes readers experience the very conflict in which his characters are absorbed.
Thus an intellectual and retired architect, the Christian Margaret who is also the Muslim Nargis, is often seen with a book – to be repaired or absorbed or shared. We share with her (on p, 245) a reading that emphasises the complicity of power with the maintenance of conflicts he pretends to despise, even in its self-regarding architecture. Her thought moves to an everyday conversation and thence onto reflection (p.245f) on the idea of history and talk about history as a present force in everyday conversation. The processes are those of the perpetuation of conflict in interaction, and the role in it of all discourses – written or oral and every day;
…she and Massud had fallen into a conversation with a Tunisian air steward, who had said, ‘There are a lot of Italian visitors in my country.’ And when Nargis had asked him to explain, he replied, @It is due to the Punic Wars. They haven’t left yet.’ Nargis had to look up the detail of the Punic wars. They had taken place between 264 BC and 164 BC.
To the minds of combatants causes are located in actions and reactions to contingent events and thence to ideas that shape action. No cause is seen as entirely reducible to its circumstances – even when that cause persists as a moment of inter-group (as in the air-steward) of inherited distrust and hate. It animate conflict between groupings and within groupings – a point from which Aslan started his writing career. Aslam understands the persistence of belief to sustain action – whether religious or political – his characters live in the beliefs of global Communism as much as the recurring waves of conflict within and between Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities. Places become confluences where these beliefs conglomerate throwing up architectural and other cultural traces or their simulacrums.
Moscow, otherwise known as Imran, remembers from his youth the following chilling summary, although he does not reflect on it. He lets it stay hard and gem-like as a vignette of Aslams’s own writing:
‘… things being as bad as they are,’ the baker said to the two brothers earlier ‘this world won’t last for much longer.’
‘I’ve got news for you, uncle’, Laal had replied. ‘The world will survive forever, with everything staying exactly as it is now.’ (p. 243)
On the day after Trump’s inauguration into bile, this makes me feel that hope and fear for the world are much the same thing. Only characters who become ghosts absorbed into the quotidian beyond its boundary-setting (in this great books final chapters) ever escape – and, in fact, do they? The question in this fiction remains open.
Deeply embedded pessimism is not the feel of this novel however, although it finds its hope in the most visceral of responses to belief and in the most desperate acts. A key one is where Lily journeys through a black sewer in which his blood flows and human shit contaminates him to the very core, Bishop Solomon, on a journey to one such act, contemplates what survives acknowledgement that the reduction of self to matter – flesh, bone, blood and ‘waste’ in a beautiful phrase that A.S, Byatt (as another novelist of this ambition) would thrill to. The Bishop finds ‘a brilliant splinter in the meat or bone’ (p. 318).
A man of deep reflection that splinter is of the meat and bone but also imported to it from crystalline sources without. The passage ends with the Bishop taking down and reading with us, his reader, a picture of William Blake, reading Milton, the Bible and Shakespeare in the ‘horrid light’ (the Miltonic penumbra of ‘a mighty and awful change (that) threatened the Earth. The American War began. All its dark horrors…’ (p. 319)
I quote these parts because they represent for me the sheer grandeur of the novelist standing against the modish novel of feeling. Few novelists would dare to go the journey of reliving the Victorian novel – a hero of my own, Tom McCarthy, actually only picks out the symptoms of why such novels could be considered impossible for his sparse but beautiful art.
Read this novel then for its belief in ‘character’ (a belief under great threat of course) and for its refusal to embrace easy options – even in the shape of one’s plot – for feeling good about the world. And let’s face it: Donald Trump’s fatuous sense that a nation can choose to feel good within severely restricted boundaries is impossible to contemplate without the victory of Seligman’s sham ‘positive psychology’ behind it.
Don’t listen to me. The book is full of life and beauty. Read it and live it. You will, I am sure.
All the best
Steve