SURFACE
by Siddhartha Deb
Picador £12.99 pp362

The Sufi notion that “Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved” lies at the heart of Kamila Shamsie’s ambitious but overwrought new novel. Set in present-day Karachi, it is nar- rated by Aasmaani, a 31-year-old woman obsessed by her mother, Samina, who disappeared 14 years ago. Being the daughter of a political activist and feminist icon was never going to be easy in Pakistan, but Aasmaani was also partly abandoned when Samina embarked on a passionate and very public affair with a dissident writer known as “the Poet”. “For a good part of the first 12 years of my life the Poet was either in prison or self-imposed exile,” Aasmaani recalls, “and wherever he was she wasn’t far behind.” Nor is Samina far behind when the Poet is murdered: she never returns from a walk on the beach and everyone except Aasmaani believes she has committed suicide.

The difficulties of sharing a parent with the world, and the tensions experienced by women between the demands of children and the need to pursue their own lives, are reinforced by the parallel story of Samina’s friend Shehnaz, a well-known actress who abandons her career ostensibly to deal with her wayward son, Ed. Can Ed help Aasmaani escape the long shadow cast by the mother she so much resembles, in order to become a distinct individual? Matters are further complicated by the appearance of some encrypted letters which appear to come from the Poet, who may after all be imprisoned rather than dead.

The novel is reasonably involving but suffers from an unevenness of tone, and — for all their courage — Samina and the Poet remain rather unsympathetic, their passion self-regarding and literary rather than affectingly human. Aasmaani, too, can be trying, notably in passages when she argues with herself, to which this reader’s reaction was: Just get on with it.

Siddhartha Deb’s Surface is narrated by Amrit Singh, a disaffected journalist who comes across a photograph in the library of his Calcutta-based newspaper. Depicting a young woman surrounded by armed and masked men, the photo carries an ambiguous caption identifying the woman as a former porn actress who has been taken captive, paraded, and punished by an insurgent group as a warning to others. No story appears to have been filed, however, and Amrit thinks he has found the subject for an article to submit to a German magazine in the hope of starting a new career. He sets off in search of the woman to “the region”, a disputed territory kept deliberately vague by Deb but clearly in northeast India.

Amrit discovers that the woman had connections with the Prosperity Project, an “alternative community” that provides agriculture and handicrafts training, an Aids clinic and a drug rehabilitation centre. The Project is a beacon of hope for people suffering the results of violent skirmishes between government forces and rival insurgents, and its mysterious and charismatic director, Malik, seems to have some sort of power-broking role in the region. Although we are in India rather than Africa, Malik is clearly meant to remind us of Conrad’s Kurtz, who in Heart of Darkness is first mentioned to Marlow as “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress — a special being”. There are also nods to Graham Greene (including the cheeky suggestion that the great author had once been arrested and imprisoned by one of the characters Amrit encounters during his journey), but Deb has created his own impressively autonomous world, quite distinct from those of his models.

As the title suggests, nothing is as it seems in this book, and Deb springs some fine narrative surprises on both Amrit and the reader. He also brings the shadowy, almost dream-like “region” to vivid life with specific and well-chosen physical details in this confidently imagined, cleverly constructed and finely written novel.

Available at the Books First price of £12.79 and £10.39 (Deb) plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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