The New York Times-20080127-Birth of a Nation- -Review-
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Birth of a Nation; [Review]
Full Text (1109 words)[Author Affiliation] Michael Gorra teaches English at Smith College. His books include After Empire and, as editor, The Portable Conrad.A GOLDEN AGE
By Tahmima Anam.
276 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.
About halfway through Tahmima Anam's first novel, the story slows for a weather report, an evocation of August in the author's native Bangladesh. The mornings seem unbearably liquid with humidity, and tempers worsen as the air stopped around people's throats, not a stir, everything still as buildings. Then come the daily exclamations of lightning, and always there is one small boy, or a very old man, or even a dog waiting with his tongue out for the first drop of rain to fall. The description allows for a few seconds of calm in an increasingly tense plot, but it's also a bravura set piece. It's almost as if Anam were giving herself a test -- if she were writing about Los Angeles, she'd do the Santa Ana winds -- a test she passes, not least because she never uses the word monsoon. And from that moment on, almost everything goes right with this historical novel about the birth of a new nation.
I say from that moment on because this book, the first in a projected trilogy, gets off to a muddy start. Born in 1975, educated in France, Thailand, England and America and now resident in London, Anam is too young to have witnessed her country's drive for independence; instead, she's telling the story of her parents' generation. When the British quit India in 1947, they cut the subcontinent in two and left a Pakistan that was itself divided. The country that now bears this name was the politically and militarily dominant west; the more densely populated east was a very different place. There, a shared Bengali culture linked Hindus and Muslims, with close ties between the Indian city of Calcutta and East Pakistan's capital of Dhaka. In 1971, an eastern party won a parliamentary majority, but leaders in the west kept it from taking office, and the army invaded what had been its own country. That army quickly earned a reputation for atrocity -- and found itself facing both a declaration of independence and an unexpectedly active resistance. After millions of refugees crossed its border, India joined the war on behalf of the new nation of Bangladesh and within weeks compelled a Pakistani surrender. But the dead were already past counting.
A Golden Age opens in 1959 with the words of a widow to her dead husband: I lost our children today. Rehana Haque, a young woman from an aristocratic but impoverished Calcutta family, has entered into an arranged marriage with a kindly businessman in Dhaka, only to see him die of a heart attack. With no money to fight her husband's rich brother, she temporarily loses custody of her two children, who are taken far away to Lahore, in the west. After a mysterious bit of luck with an investment in real estate, Rehana is able to bring them back, but the loss has marked her. Although she builds an ordered life, she has no dreams or hopes of her own. When the civil war begins, it takes weeks for her to realize the scale of the history taking place all around her.
Her children, now in their late teens, react more decisively. Rehana's daughter, Maya, moves to Calcutta to write about the freedom fighters for a newspaper, and Rehana's son, Sohail, gets himself to a training camp for guerillas, eventually returning to bury a cache of arms in his mother's garden. At the same time, Rehana's hated brother-in-law comes to Dhaka as a member of the occupation.
Historical novels must get the history right. They must be scrupulous about details in order to make us swallow the liberties they inevitably take in representing actual people, or in putting their own invented characters close to the center of the action. In some novels, these liberties may be writ large, made mythic or fantastical, as in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which attempts to get at a truth that lies beyond the documents. But Tahmima Anam works in a traditionally realistic style, and because of that she came near to losing me in her opening pages. When her children are sent to West Pakistan in 1959, Rehana is deemed an unfit mother, too young and feckless to teach them proper behavior. One item of evidence cited in court against her is the allegation that she has taken the children to see Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra -- which wasn't released until 1963.
This silly mistake put me in a deeply skeptical mood. It made me ask whether Cleopatra would have been shown in Pakistan at all, and if so, in how censored a form? Still doubting, I later asked myself whether 17-year-old Maya would really have told her mother that all the girls at her university were having sex. Would it have been true, even in her Marxist circles? Anam deftly captures the brutality of the Pakistani Army, but could its soldiers have also been so unobservant? Would none of them have detected the digging in Rehana's garden, especially after it became public knowledge that her son had joined the freedom fighters? Would such fighters have been able to stay in touch with one another by telegram, as Anam suggests? If a writer can't be trusted about small things, can we trust her about large ones?
At the outset, Anam's prose doesn't help; in fact, some of her descriptive passages are so overwrought as to be unclear. In one scene, Rehana sees a little girl next to a blood-filled gutter, her mouth a pale pink smudge, like the introduction of a bruise, but Anam so tangles Rehana's perceptions and her own omniscient narrative voice that it's impossible to tell if the child is alive or dead.
Yet the monsoon brings relief. Once the war takes hold, Anam finds her subject in Rehana's fierce love for her children, in the story of what she is willing to do to keep them alive. The novel's language grows more confident, and history itself becomes an animating force. Rehana travels to Calcutta and works at a refugee camp, then returns to Dhaka at the height of the crisis. The second half of the novel acquires a taut, electric air, and I turned its pages as greedily as if it were a thriller. The start of A Golden Age may not be promising, but by its end this first novel has itself become a promising start.
[Illustration]PHOTO: Exclamations of lightning: Bangladesh split from Pakistan in 1971, with help from India. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RAYMOND DEPARDON/MAGNUM PHOTOS)