Book review: No Good Men Among the Living, by Anand Gopal

by Anand Gopal
Metropolitan
4 stars
Laura King

Anand Gopal wisely chooses to tell the war's story from the personal perspective of three characters: a Taliban commander, a US-allied Afghan official, and an Afghan housewife who claws her way out of a suffocating village existence and eventually becomes a lawmaker.

In No Good Men, Gopal displays a keen understanding of the levers of power in Afghan society and their sometimes devastating effect on individuals trying to make their way in the world.

Gopal's literary method - switching from one character's life story to another, adding in a wartime chronology and blending in sometimes unwieldy chunks of explanatory prose - is anchored with small, beautifully rendered Afghan scenes: houses "built right into the mountainside - hundreds of them, lit up like candles, like some votive offering from the earth itself".

The portraits come alive to varying degrees. The Taliban commander, despite a wealth of detail about his activities, remains opaque. The Afghan warlord, enriched by the credulous-seeming Americans, is unrepentantly corrupt and keeps a young boy close at hand. (In Afghanistan, pedophilia is seen as a perquisite of authority.)

The most conflicted but triumphant story is that of the educated Heela, offering a nuanced view of a loving marriage that was nonetheless marred by domestic violence and the wrenching choices she must make at times to protect herself and her children.