{"id":1685,"date":"2009-05-13T00:01:09","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T04:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=1685"},"modified":"2018-02-12T13:23:39","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T17:23:39","slug":"kamila-shamsies-burnt-shadows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2009\/05\/13\/kamila-shamsies-burnt-shadows\/","title":{"rendered":"Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Burnt Shadows<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Kamila Shamsie (2009)<\/span>
\nBond Street Books (2009)<\/span>
\n384 pp<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"burnt-shadows\"<\/a>
Free copy courtesy of Picador.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[\/fusion_dropcap] hesitated before beginning Kamila Shamsie’s\u00a0Burnt Shadows<\/em>\"\" because, while not overly long, at nearly 400 pages\u00a0neither is\u00a0it overly short. Also, so far this year I haven’t been in the mood for a “widescreen” novel (thanks John Self <\/a>and KevinfromCanada<\/a>\u00a0for making that a term of art).\u00a0That said, I did want to read the book in a timely manner and especially before several other books I’ve been pining for arrived in the mail.\u00a0So one sleepless night, I got out of bed and picked it up just to test the water.\u00a0What I encountered was an excellently rendered, personal\u00a0account of an engaged couple’s last day together in Nagasaki, just\u00a0before it was destroyed when the New Bomb dropped. This completely cleared my mind of all other concerns (which was nice when it came time to go to sleep again) and set me up to enjoy\u00a0this quick-moving, ambitious new novel.<\/p>\n

Recently shortlisted for the Orange Prize, this novel focuses on the surviving fianc\u00e9e, Hiroko Tanaka, and some of\u00a0the people she becomes linked to through the rest of\u00a0her life.\u00a0Ambitiously,\u00a0Shamsie\u00a0weaves\u00a0these lives around\u00a0some of the major events that ushered out the first half of the twentieth century leaving their shadow on the second half of the century and\u00a0still now in\u00a0the first part of the twenty-first.<\/p>\n

The prologue\u00a0begins\u00a0with\u00a0a man being thrust into a cell, stripped, and then\u00a0dressed in the\u00a0now-symbolic orange jumpsuit.\u00a0He asks the interesting key line that speaks to the novel’s political and personal threads: “How did it come to this . . . .”\u00a0The novel then goes back in time to Nagasaki, the day the bomb dropped.\u00a0Hiroko Tanaka is a twenty-one-year-old Japanese woman, engaged to marry Konrad Weiss.\u00a0I thoroughly enjoyed this short\u00a0section, entitled “The Yet Unknowing World,”\u00a0with the bomb sirens going off and the young couple concerned about the inconvenience.<\/p>\n

In the shelter at Urakami, Hiroko is packed in so tightly between her neighbours she cannot even raise a hand to wipe the sweat damping her hairline. It hasn’t been so crowded in here since the early days of the air-raid sirens.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This section is\u00a0full of life — though brief, Shamsie allows\u00a0the characters’ relationships to develop — even while it brings us to death. Hiroko survives the atomic blast, but the image of some cranes from a kimono she was wearing at the explosion were forever burned onto her back.\u00a0The scars\u00a0become\u00a0a personal symbol of the painful event and the “taint”\u00a0Hiroko carried away from it, but it is also a larger metaphor for the shadow of nuclear destruction that has hung over the world since.<\/p>\n

The novel then takes the reader through\u00a0the characters’\u00a0interlaced story as\u00a0the narrative\u00a0moves from\u00a0Nagasaki to India, 1947, in the last days of the Raj; then to Pakistan in the early 1980s as the mujahideen train to expel the Russians from Afghanistan (are you seeing a trend); and then to New York and Afghanistan just post\u2013September 11, 2001.\u00a0The artifice in taking\u00a0a few\u00a0central characters\u00a0through each of these\u00a0large historical moments\u00a0is <\/em>artifice, but it didn’t feel contrived because it is\u00a0not so much impossible as it is implausible.\u00a0Also, this is not like Forrest Gump<\/em>; these characters remain on the periphery\u00a0of the action. And even if it is implausible, watching these characters move from one hotspot\u00a0to the next\u00a0leads to many surprising and pleasing episodes — personal and political — that\u00a0come together nicely.<\/p>\n

However, with all of the political \/ historical ties, this novel has a much stronger narrative focus\u00a0than I usually like in a novel with such ominous overtones.\u00a0After the intimacy in Nagasaki, the next two segments in the novel, taking place in Delhi and Pakistan, didn’t hold me as much.\u00a0It felt at times that Shamsie was trying to set down some roots in the location and then prepare to move on to the next one.\u00a0It was all spelled out.\u00a0I like to meet a book halfway, but for the middle of the book it felt like the plot was overplayed, depriving the reader of really making these important connections for him or herself.\u00a0I hoped, based on the allegorical setup, for more nuance (or less — perhaps it was me!).\u00a0While Shamsie often begins a chapter by disorienting the reader, usually within a few pages we know all that has happened and there is no more ambiguity. This is more a matter of my taste and expectations, and not necessarily a fault; I found the book’s gripping plot compelling and I’m sure many others will too.<\/p>\n

Despite what I said about overplaying the plot, Shamsie’s writing is excellent and\u00a0not overplayed at all.\u00a0I haven’t included a lot of it here because I think context (like the story, the prose is all linked nicely) is important.\u00a0Taking it out of context just didn’t work.\u00a0Here’s a nice passage, however, from the section in Delhi; you don’t need to know the who what where why to appreciate the subversive coda which applies to the events and the intimate lives:<\/p>\n

There was nowhere in the world more beautiful than Mussoorie, Elizabeth Burton thought, standing at the top of her garden slope, watching either mist or cloud cling to the white peaks of the Himalayas in the distance while the scent of pine forests drifted down from the top of the hill on which the Burton cottage nestled.\u00a0What a pity beauty could be so meaningless.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shamsie’s characters are excellently realized, and their perspectives on the events taking place around them are insightful,\u00a0opening up a world of perspectives for a contemporary\u00a0audience.<\/p>\n

And while I complain about the focus on the narrative, the novel ends nicely, pulling together the personal and historical strings and offering an ending that reminded me\u00a0a great deal of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India<\/em>,\u00a0finishing Shamsie’s work of tying the past to the present.<\/p>\n

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