Book review: The Blind Man's Garden, by Nadeem Aslam

by Nadeem Aslam

Faber

What Troy was for the ancients, the World Trade Centre attacks and retaliations seem destined to be for our own time. It is hard to get any credible purchase on the subject, as many bad books and worse movies have shown. Nadeem Aslam's new novel, however, succeeds

Aslam, who was born in Pakistan and moved to Britain aged 14, knows his different worlds intimately and seems able to feel their very different kinds of want and anguish with sharp immediacy. There aren't many writers who can take you inside the heads of, say, a vulnerable young Pakistani widow one moment, and a US Special Forces operative the next, with little visible effort of impersonation.

The book is set in the first few months following the attacks. The action moves between the small town of Heer in Pakistan and the mountains of Afghanistan, where American soldiers have begun the fight against the Taliban and the hunt for al-Qaeda terrorists. At its core is an intricately knotted group of characters based around a school in Heer, whose devoutly Muslim founder, Rohan, still lives in its tended grounds, though the school itself has been taken over by hardline Islamists.