ISHMAEL, THE NARRATOR of Kader Abdolah’s moving novel, is an Iranian refugee who escaped from his country in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah and brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, and has settled in the Netherlands.

He has brought nothing from Iran except a small notebook, written by his father, Agha Akbar, an illiterate deaf-mute. Although composed in an incomprehensible script, similar to the cuneiform writing found on ancient tablets, the notebook is the guarantee of Ishmael’s identity — a constant reminder of who he is and where he comes from. Writing this novel is an act of filial piety — “I am writing this book out of guilt . . . (father) was the reason why I fled the country” — and a meditation on exile, language and love.

Ishmael is born near Senejan, a town famous for its carpets, the finest of which are woven by poverty-stricken women in the surrounding villages scattered on the foothills of Mount Saffron. The snow-clad abode of wolves, wild goats and eagles, the mountain is notable for a well on a ridge in which the Mahdi, the Hidden 12th Imam of Shia Muslims, is supposed to have disappeared, and from which he will one day appear to save the world.

Near by is a cave where a 2,000-year-old cuneiform tablet attracts archaeologists, and which gives Agha Akbar the idea of scribbling the same signs in his notebook.

Agha Akbar is the son of an aristocrat from a “temporary marriage” with a maid. Left with no inheritance, he is adopted by an uncle, who trains him as a carpet-mender. He invents his own sign language, travels through the villages to repair people’s rugs and to conduct countless love affairs.

With his wife, Tina, he has three daughters and a son. At Ishmael’s birth, someone reads the Annunciation story from the Koran, then a poem by Hafiz in his ear: “So the first words I heard were about love, sadness, longing.” To educate his children, Agha Akbar takes his family to town and works in a textile factory.

Time passes. The Shah’s reforms and oil revenues bring prosperity and modernity to Iran, and the family becomes better off. A bright boy, Ishmael is awarded a scholarship to the University of Teheran, gets involved with left-wing politics and joins “the Party”.

In the years before the revolution many anti-Shah, leftist underground organisations supported Khomeini in the belief that, after the revolution, he would retire and they would take over. But they underestimated him — he ruthlessly crushed every faction except his own, inadvertently saving the country from Soviet domination or Pol Pot- style genocide.

Although not named, Ishmael's party is clearly the Communist Party, whose leaders were paraded on television to make their abject mea culpa as spies of “a foreign power”.

Ishmael has to go into hiding. He escapes over Mount Saffron to Russia, where Gorbachev’s glasnost is causing havoc, trying to shake up the sclerotic Soviet system. Communist refugees had been taken care of, but now Ishmael is put in a tiny flat with eight other refugees, and no prospects. “So much for my dreams,” he muses, as he realises that they were built on one of history’s biggest lies. He makes his way to the Netherlands and freedom, but his youngest sister, an intelligent, ardent young student, is not so lucky.

Kader Abdolah spices his narrative with poetry, myths and tales of Sufi wisdom from Persian classics, while skilfully conveying the condition of exile: gratitude for hospitality tinged with pain, regret and nostalgia for the lost homeland, remorse for the wrongs done to others, and the struggle with a new language.

In the end some wisdom is attained. This original novel shares the experience with the reader and Susan Massoty’s fluent translation conveys the simplicity and exotic diction of the original Dutch.

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