#The blind prophet review code#
With his outcast affect, cool resourcefulness and impeccable private code of honour, Mikal resembles certain reluctantly heroic Clint Eastwood characters. A rumour had circulated that the Americans had used solid gold bullets." Later, when he captures an American soldier and wants to ask him some questions, the interpreter he finds turns out to be too frightened of the Taliban to speak to an American: "She says they'll cut off her tongue …" But then "while he slept, a large group of them came at him with scalpels and blades. Mikal in captivity begs the warlord's men to extract the bullets in his flesh, to no avail. The story itself moves in terse jabs of present-tense narrative short scenes are built around two or three bright shards of action or dialogue that light up whole universes of thought and outlook. Flora and fauna are wonderfully observed – moths "like shavings from a pencil sharpener" a tree trunk "twisted as though struggling with some unseen force" – forming a decorative braid around the frequently brutal human interactions they coincide with. Emotion is done imagistically, via quick, finely sketched details of light and landscape that set small precise moods. Complexity tends to be more outward than inward, resulting from the wide variety of human types portrayed (and the very ingenious plotting that brings them into collision with each other), rather than from individual psychological richness.
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This isn't the kind of novel in which characters change or evolve much: they are what they are. His existence is a kind of atonement, though whether he himself ever makes the connection enforced by the larger intelligence of the novel – between his own inflexible faith and the sickening act of violence that finally erupts out of the teenage jihadists at the school – remains doubtful. He is also going blind – a steady (and symbolically punitive) exile from the realm of earthly beauty incarnated in the trees and shrubs he himself once planted. Still in mourning for his wife, he is as religious as ever, though appalled by the fundamentalists who have taken over his school. In him the conflicting passions of pious spirituality and ordinary human love are tragically combined. For the same reason, he had also burned her life's work of drawings and paintings. He hoped to force her to re-embrace the religion she had rejected, and thereby save her soul from eternal torment. He is an interestingly problematic figure whose religious convictions, though sympathetically portrayed, at one time caused him to withhold medication from his dying wife. A love story, then, but with the tumult of war in the foreground.Ĭounterpointing this plot is a quieter, more reflective story centred on Rohan himself. The question – and the emotional motor driving much of the book – is whether Mikal will make it back to his beloved Naheed before she is married off yet again. In the ensuing battle Jeo is killed, while Mikal is captured by a warlord who sells him as a "terrorist" to the Americans they proceed to interrogate him, Bagram-style. However, they have been betrayed even before they set off, and soon find themselves forced to defend a Taliban stronghold against American-backed rebels. The two young men – equally opposed to the Taliban and the US – are not intending to fight, but want to help the wounded. Rohan's recently married son, Jeo, a trainee doctor, sets off for Afghanistan with his adopted brother Mikal, a poetically minded mechanic who knows everything about cars and stars and is secretly, agonisingly, in love with Jeo's wife, Naheed, who also happens to be in love with him.
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At its core is an intricately knotted group of characters based around a school in Heer, whose devoutly Muslim founder, Rohan, still lives in its lovingly tended grounds, though the school itself has been taken over by hardline Islamists. Its action moves back and forth between the small town of Heer in Pakistan and the mountains of Afghanistan, where American soldiers have begun the fight against the Taliban and the hunt for al‑Qaeda terrorists. The book is set in the first few months following the attacks. There aren't many writers who can take you inside the heads of, say, a vulnerable young Pakistani widow one moment, and a US Special Forces operative the next, with as little visible effort of impersonation as he does in The Blind Man's Garden.
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He knows his different worlds intimately and seems able to feel their very different kinds of want and anguish on his own nerves, with sharp immediacy. Aslam, who was born in Pakistan and moved to Britain aged 14, is an exceptionally gifted writer whose previous books (which include Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil) have already demonstrated an ability to turn his double perspective to powerful effect.