Fiction: A pair of tragic lovers battle the disapproval of their families and local society only to abruptly disappear.
The initial search quickly settles into resigned acceptance shared throughout the small Pakistani community, unhappily located somewhere in present-day England. The lovers then enter a type of myth. They become the stuff of endless speculation.
That love is a tricky, often hurtful business is clearly a major theme in Nadeem Aslam's richly textured second novel. It is a story that opens with the characteristic warmth and domestic tension of most Asian narratives, but instead of individual stories - of which there are many - there is also a weighted message.
Shamas, whose younger brother is one of the missing lovers, is a father, sufficiently old and wise to have become bewildered by life. He "stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself." As he watches the snow fall and the neighbourhood children play, he notices a figure making its way to the mosque for the day's first prayer. The image makes him recall an observation made by a visiting Pakistani friend, who had decided that England's wealth had to be due to the Queen disguising herself each night to walk the streets and identify the needs of her subjects.
Aslam lovingly develops this opening scene. Shamas continues watching the approaching figure. His curiosity must now yield to politeness, and so he retreats into his colourful kitchen, which replicates the colours of the house in which he had been born in Pakistan. The first conversation builds on this idea of doomed love. The figure in the snow turns out to be a neighbour, a woman who needs assistance in lifting her old father who has fallen to the floor and is trapped by his weight.
But there is an ugly history. Some thirty years earlier, the woman, a Sikh, had been in love with the Muslim brother of Shamas's wife. The match was opposed with all the hatred that religion tends to engender and, of course, the man's family intervened. "A marriage was hastily arranged for him within the next few days." Although there are many flashbacks and asides along the way, Maps for Lost Lovers is written in an urgent, intensely felt continuous present tense. Aslam creates the sense of a community living in a state of suspended shock. Two lovers have disappeared: a young girl, and an older man twice her age yet still regarded as the belated younger brother of his family. Where are they? Are they still alive?
At times Aslam's prose soars, dazzling images abound and the lyricism of the writing initially overwhelms. However as the plot develops, it proves this is no idle romantic yarn but a serious account of multiple betrayals. Aslam, whose first book, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), charmed and delighted, has here chosen to tell a frightening story through the medium of language that is beautiful and elegant. His characters are all victims and yet this novel, some 11 years in the writing, never becomes a turgid litany of disasters. Nor is it a self-regarding performance. Aslam has surpassed Rushdie's fireworks with dignified restraint; he exposes without resorting to ridicule or caricature.
Love is a major driving dynamic, family is another. But Aslam's sense of family is bound to a culture in which ritual, religion, arranged marriages and family honour, rather than individual feeling, dictate. At the heart of the story is the plight of the lovers Jugnu, the younger brother of Shamas, and the girl, Chanda, the daughter of a couple who tend the local shop. It is far bigger than that: also central is Shamas, an old man who has lived to see the various faces of love and is still open to passion. His story has its own difficulties but Aslam, a romantic with a brutal message, succeeds in making it more credible than one might think.
This is a narrative in which realities fence with elements of magic. Jugnu's hands glow, his lover's eyes change colour with the seasons. Even the birds defer to the magical. "It was March and the sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm." Aslam maintains a lightness and grace in the telling and then introduces a shocking piece of information. "Jugnu had said he would marry Chanda but since she had not been divorced by her previous husband, Islam forbade another marriage for several years." As this is England and not Pakistan, the couple brought together by a delivery of food for butterflies begin living together.
As the novel unwinds, Aslam pays immense and kindly attention to his characters while maintaining a distance. There are no heroes, no one is perfect, but several are hardened. One of the strengths of the narrative is the character of Kaukab, the unhappy wife of Shamas. Having lived for her children, each of whom has disappointed her, caught as they are between cultures, she admits her misery. England has never been home for her. Through her life, Aslam says many things about the life of an outsider, as well as the shared comfort and hostilities of mothers and daughters.
It is interesting to discover that for all its beauty and apparent gentleness, this is a tough, unsettling and ultimately brave book. There are no easy laughs, although there is humour and the serious intent never falters into moralising. White readers will feel shamed by the racism Aslam describes, Muslims will feel uneasy. Throughout the narrative he makes references to the passing snide comments made by white people in the course of everyday encounters.
No, the Muslim community will not be pleased at the candour with which Aslam explores the barbarity which religion demands. A girl is killed and butchered by her brothers in the name of family honour, women are ritually humiliated. If a woman's husband chooses to divorce her and then later seeks her back, it is left to the woman to find another man to marry her so that she may divorce and be ready to be taken back by her original husband.
That a novel may balance the beauty of the natural world and the ugliness of human nature with such delicacy is extraordinary. Maps for Lost Lovers is not an easy book. In ways it is a condemnation of the brutality of a culture in which women are degraded. Through the opulence of his writing and the darkness of his message Aslam quite brilliantly and shockingly seduces his reader. It is no coincidence that among the many gorgeous images populating the book is a number of wayward peacocks that run riot. Death exerts huge power. Another image, that of butterflies pinned to boards for exhibition purposes, also speaks volumes as nature mirrors human society.
Through the simplicity of an old man's last desperate grasp at love, with its attendant joys and guilt, develops a tale that is both Shakespearean and horrifically topical. Very few novels published this year were as obviously Booker-bound as this one. In common with the also Booker long-listed David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - an enjoyable if contrived sequence of interlinking narratives - Maps for Lost Lovers makes big Booker claims. It is a weightier work in terms of harsh truths and also offers exactly that cross-cultural mix so favoured by Booker panels.
In spite of, or possibly because of, the fate of the lovers being obvious, this gentle novel of graphic violence and hurt proves compelling. Even when Aslam, who delights in language and uses it with an archaic elegance, is at his most lyric, he never allows his story to stray away from its essential tragedy. The dialogue consistently sounds like everyday speech, the poetry is reserved for the descriptive passages, of which there are many.
Aslam's narrative, with its motif of maps as an aid for finding directions, is also a book of sad truths. A woman in a shop remarks, "We are stranded in a foreign country where no one likes us. I heard someone say only yesterday that our poor Shamas-brother-ji was beaten up by,who else but, white racist thugs." Beautiful and only too real, this story born of romance and pain matches its artistry with courage. It is an important novel and also a very fine one, one of the few published this year that approaches the profundity of Tahar Ben Jelloun's IMPAC-winning This Blinding Absence of Light.
Maps for Lost Lovers By Nadeem Aslam, Faber, 369pp, £16.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
