'There’s more past than present here'
Kamila Shamsie, A God in Every Stone
Bloomsbury, 320pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781408847206
reviewed by Michael Duffy
In Shame, Salman Rushdie refers to the modern state of Pakistan as a palimpsest – an historical document that is barely legible beneath hundreds of years of writing, erasing and rewriting by various colonising forces, visionary leaders and military dictators. Kamila Shamsie provides another look at that palimpsest in A God in Every Stone, a novel that straddles two historical moments as two archaeologists – a master and her apprentice – look for the hidden layers in colonial Peshawar and the Greek treasure that lies beneath its surface. Fresh from her inclusion in last year’s Granta collection of ‘Best Young British Novelists’, Shamsie has produced a novel with characteristic deftness in its presentation of character and location.
Shamsie is the most prolific of what Claire Chambers calls the ‘big five’ English-language Pakistani writers that have gained commercial and critical acclaim over the past decade. Like Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Daniyal Mueenuddin, who received high praise for his short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Shamsie is a migratory writer who is repeatedly drawn back to writing about Pakistan. Her historical fiction often places familial drama, and sometimes melodrama, within a context of great political upheaval. A God in Every Stone follows this formula with varied results; whilst highly entertaining, it possesses a great sensitivity in its portrayal of 20th-century colonial violence.
Shamsie’s previous novel, Burnt Shadows, was one of the most fully-realised and ambitious literary reactions to the World Trade Centre attacks. It also incorporated several other major tragedies of the 20th century: beginning with a vision of Nagasaki reacting to nuclear warfare in 1945, Shamsie moves on to Partition and tribal violence across South Asia. Continuing this historiographical trend, her latest work is presented in two parts: the first takes place during the First World War and the second in 1930, as tensions build in Peshawar between local non-violent freedom fighters – the Khudai Khidmatgar – and the British Raj. At first the novel appears to be a celebration of Pathan involvement in the British war effort, and is thus primed for publication on the centenary of the declaration of the First World War. But after one of the three protagonists, Qayyum, loses an eye at Ypres, he embarks on his trip back to British India, and Shamsie’s interest in the war comes to an end. In Shamsie’s fiction ‘Britain [is] just a pinprick – such a small, small island’ and the novel doesn’t suffer for this.
For Shamsie England has always been a peripheral space where characters recoup or retreat, whilst the action of her novels take place in South Asia, as with Karim in Kartography and Aliya in Salt and Saffron. When the inhabitants of these two spaces collide it is often in Pakistan - and occasionally the metaphorical bridge of Turkey, which lies across the cartographic boundaries of Europe and Asia. Working in these liminal spaces has been a powerful tool in the author’s earlier fiction; it allows a direct juxtaposition of middle-class urban loss with colonial and post-colonial violence. By the same token, A God in Every Stone begins in Turkey before the First World War, but the narrative gains pace in the then-Indian city of Peshawar. Shamsie’s Peshawar is invigorating, and at its heart is the bustling ‘Street of Storytellers’ where the Pathans’ history is regularly rewritten and reworked for an easily distracted passing audience. Part of this audience is Shamsie’s protagonist, a young English archaeologist called Vivian Spencer. Upon her arrival in Peshawar she meets our Pathan soldier Quayyum’s younger brother and embarks on a mission to teach the boy the importance of history. By the end of the novel Spencer’s desired archaeological site has become a mass grave for the victims of the Qissa Khwani Bazaar Massacre of 1930: a colonial atrocity not dissimilar in scale to that at Amritsar, in which peaceful protest was met with almost indiscriminate violence.
Vivian’s character is an uneasy presence throughout the novel; whilst she is progressive at home, she finds herself taking on conservative characteristics and devoting herself to a ‘civilising’ mission while in Peshawar. Never is her lack of understanding more evident and troubling than in her reactions to women in purda. The symbol of the veil preoccupies Shamsie throughout A God in Every Stone. Vivian dons a burqa on more than one occasion to hide her identity and move safely through Peshawar. Each time she is seemingly surprised by its restrictive nature, commenting on how she must shuffle when she wants to run, how she appears to be ‘half-woman, half tent,’ and how her vision is disrupted by the veil’s gauze. It is during her second stay in Peshawar that the veil becomes a real source of frustration. Upon arrival at her temporary home Vivian’s disdain is made clear when ‘with something of the same grandness with which she had cast her first vote she threw off the vile cloth, and didn’t look back.’
The unveiling of the Muslim woman has become an obsession in the ‘West’ in the 21st Century, especially as the contested issue of the lawfulness of the burqa in France, Quebec and the United Kingdom gains traction and legitimizes a wide-reaching stigmatization of Muslim women. Mohammed Hanif, in interview about his award-winning A Case of Exploding Mangoes, said that it ‘really seems as if the whole world wants to undress Muslim women. And I don’t understand why this seems to be such an obsession. The issue keeps coming up as a legitimate political argument.’ By introducing a character so representative of this contemporary obsession into an historical novel, Shamsie posits the colonial moment as a precursor to the clashes in its wake.
A God in Every Stone is a thoroughly enjoyable novel in which characters and locations are presented with a practiced depth and exotic appeal. Granta were right to recognise Shamsie as one of the biggest talents in contemporary writing, and her most impressive moment in this book is during a central section that bridges the two timeframes. In a three-way exchange of letters between Vivian, Qayyum and his younger brother, the complexities of Western-Eastern relationships in the colonial moment and beyond come to light. They are all unsure of the future of British India, but in their different ways all seem doubtful about an even greater cultural dialectic: the very compatibility of Islam with the West.
Shamsie is the most prolific of what Claire Chambers calls the ‘big five’ English-language Pakistani writers that have gained commercial and critical acclaim over the past decade. Like Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Daniyal Mueenuddin, who received high praise for his short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Shamsie is a migratory writer who is repeatedly drawn back to writing about Pakistan. Her historical fiction often places familial drama, and sometimes melodrama, within a context of great political upheaval. A God in Every Stone follows this formula with varied results; whilst highly entertaining, it possesses a great sensitivity in its portrayal of 20th-century colonial violence.
Shamsie’s previous novel, Burnt Shadows, was one of the most fully-realised and ambitious literary reactions to the World Trade Centre attacks. It also incorporated several other major tragedies of the 20th century: beginning with a vision of Nagasaki reacting to nuclear warfare in 1945, Shamsie moves on to Partition and tribal violence across South Asia. Continuing this historiographical trend, her latest work is presented in two parts: the first takes place during the First World War and the second in 1930, as tensions build in Peshawar between local non-violent freedom fighters – the Khudai Khidmatgar – and the British Raj. At first the novel appears to be a celebration of Pathan involvement in the British war effort, and is thus primed for publication on the centenary of the declaration of the First World War. But after one of the three protagonists, Qayyum, loses an eye at Ypres, he embarks on his trip back to British India, and Shamsie’s interest in the war comes to an end. In Shamsie’s fiction ‘Britain [is] just a pinprick – such a small, small island’ and the novel doesn’t suffer for this.
For Shamsie England has always been a peripheral space where characters recoup or retreat, whilst the action of her novels take place in South Asia, as with Karim in Kartography and Aliya in Salt and Saffron. When the inhabitants of these two spaces collide it is often in Pakistan - and occasionally the metaphorical bridge of Turkey, which lies across the cartographic boundaries of Europe and Asia. Working in these liminal spaces has been a powerful tool in the author’s earlier fiction; it allows a direct juxtaposition of middle-class urban loss with colonial and post-colonial violence. By the same token, A God in Every Stone begins in Turkey before the First World War, but the narrative gains pace in the then-Indian city of Peshawar. Shamsie’s Peshawar is invigorating, and at its heart is the bustling ‘Street of Storytellers’ where the Pathans’ history is regularly rewritten and reworked for an easily distracted passing audience. Part of this audience is Shamsie’s protagonist, a young English archaeologist called Vivian Spencer. Upon her arrival in Peshawar she meets our Pathan soldier Quayyum’s younger brother and embarks on a mission to teach the boy the importance of history. By the end of the novel Spencer’s desired archaeological site has become a mass grave for the victims of the Qissa Khwani Bazaar Massacre of 1930: a colonial atrocity not dissimilar in scale to that at Amritsar, in which peaceful protest was met with almost indiscriminate violence.
Vivian’s character is an uneasy presence throughout the novel; whilst she is progressive at home, she finds herself taking on conservative characteristics and devoting herself to a ‘civilising’ mission while in Peshawar. Never is her lack of understanding more evident and troubling than in her reactions to women in purda. The symbol of the veil preoccupies Shamsie throughout A God in Every Stone. Vivian dons a burqa on more than one occasion to hide her identity and move safely through Peshawar. Each time she is seemingly surprised by its restrictive nature, commenting on how she must shuffle when she wants to run, how she appears to be ‘half-woman, half tent,’ and how her vision is disrupted by the veil’s gauze. It is during her second stay in Peshawar that the veil becomes a real source of frustration. Upon arrival at her temporary home Vivian’s disdain is made clear when ‘with something of the same grandness with which she had cast her first vote she threw off the vile cloth, and didn’t look back.’
The unveiling of the Muslim woman has become an obsession in the ‘West’ in the 21st Century, especially as the contested issue of the lawfulness of the burqa in France, Quebec and the United Kingdom gains traction and legitimizes a wide-reaching stigmatization of Muslim women. Mohammed Hanif, in interview about his award-winning A Case of Exploding Mangoes, said that it ‘really seems as if the whole world wants to undress Muslim women. And I don’t understand why this seems to be such an obsession. The issue keeps coming up as a legitimate political argument.’ By introducing a character so representative of this contemporary obsession into an historical novel, Shamsie posits the colonial moment as a precursor to the clashes in its wake.
A God in Every Stone is a thoroughly enjoyable novel in which characters and locations are presented with a practiced depth and exotic appeal. Granta were right to recognise Shamsie as one of the biggest talents in contemporary writing, and her most impressive moment in this book is during a central section that bridges the two timeframes. In a three-way exchange of letters between Vivian, Qayyum and his younger brother, the complexities of Western-Eastern relationships in the colonial moment and beyond come to light. They are all unsure of the future of British India, but in their different ways all seem doubtful about an even greater cultural dialectic: the very compatibility of Islam with the West.