Masud's
murk
Geordie
Williamson
Adib
Khan
Spiral Road
Fourth Estate, $27.95 pb, 362pp, 9780732284175
Britain's
Prospect magazine recently canvassed a number of leading
thinkers on the question of what, in coming decades, would replace
the great twentieth-century schism between left and right. In
an overwhelmingly pessimistic field, the contribution of Pakistani
scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy stood out in its cold-blooded concision.
‘Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian,’
he predicted. ‘In the interim, energy hunger will drive the
US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last
drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam
and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant
neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe.’
Spiral Road, Adib Khan’s fifth work of fiction, is
a worthy attempt at humanising this Manichean abstraction: a novel
tracing the experience of a man standing in the middle of one
such bridge as it begins to crumble. That it fails is less an
indictment of Khan’s gifts as a writer – although there
are weaknesses here – than an acknowledgment of the difficulty
of describing the pure cerebral white-out of the fundamentalist
worldview. The novel is an open, messy, quarrelsome form; but
the terrorist mind is a closed perfection. Our narrator, Masud
Alam, is a man haunted by his own insubstantial self. As a young
student in what is now Bangladesh, he was a leftist, a university
agitator and, eventually, a freedom fighter. His experience during
the struggle for independence shook him out of certainty, however:
no political or religious programme was worth the death of innocents.
He fled to Australia, abandoning his beliefs and his large, rather
grand family, and hunkered down.
Years later, we meet him leading a placid half-life in suburban
Melbourne, eking out his days as a librarian and basking in a
fragile contentment largely based on self-imposed amnesia. But
the man who considers himself an Australian citizen, a rationalist,
a non-believer and an educated member of the Universal Civilisation
of the West cannot ignore the daily reminders of his difference.
The 9/11 attacks only etch these in sharper relief. The news that
his father, Abba, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, is
the twitch on the thread that draws Masud home, to a country and
a family at once familiar and alien. Indeed, Abba’s condition
stands in for the one afflicting modern-day Bangladesh –
the old colonial coherence breaking down – as well as Masud’s
own threatened sense of identity. The Alam family’s wealth
and social standing have diminished with the intervening years,
and yet certain expectations and patterns of behaviour are still
enforced. Masud’s wastrel uncle is cut off from his family
for contemplating a socially unsuitable fourth marriage. His mother,
querulous at the decline of a more certain world, clings to traditional
domesticity. A divorced sister lives a shrunken life of public
disgrace.
But as he makes an uneasy re-entry into family life, Masud comes
to realise that others have changed in more disturbing ways. His
brother Zia, a successful, American-educated professional –
the family anchor – has become more radical in his politics:
he is providing clandestine shipments of medical supplies to the
Pakistan–Afghanistan border. And yet he has only dipped a
toe compared with his son, Omar, who also went to the United States,
suffered interrogation at the hands of American security services,
and returned to Bangladesh, determined to create a domestic terror
cell.
Omar provides the red meat of the narrative. Knowing of his uncle’s
past, he seeks to draw Masud into the jihadist orbit. Masud is
repelled, but also admires his nephew’s clarity of purpose.
The drama of the novel lies here, in the question of which path
Masud will take. When it arrives, the resolution feels cheap –
aesthetically gimcrack in a way that retrospectively illuminates
the novel’s flaws. Masud’s voice is kindly, intelligent
in a melancholy way, and sometimes elegant; but more often it
is stunned by its own confusions. And yet confusion is just another
item in the novelist’s rhetorical toolbox. Even the depiction
of Masud’s mental disorder must be carefully shaped. Instead,
when he flails around for some moral purchase, we sense the author
is, too. It is unfortunate that Spiral Road should address
subjects already broached with such grim authority by V.S. Naipaul.
His last novel, Magic Seeds (2004), also describes the
experience of an individual’s reluctant involvement with
a terrorist group. Naipaul captures perfectly the sense of panic
felt by a man who, torn between East and West, makes a decision
based on a flabby and suspect idealism, and ends up indentured
to murderers. In its pages, we are offered a portrait of confusion
controlled by a merciless intelligence and literary craft. A better
version of Khan’s book would explore in greater detail Masud’s
own time in such a group. It would also use character and plot
to drive the novel forward, instead of shunting it along by resort
to bare explication. In Naipaul, the confusion is part of a larger
insight into mass political movements. In Spiral Road,
we only stumble, blindly, within Masud’s personal murk.
Geordie Williamson is a Sydney-based reviewer
AUSTRALIAN
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