Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) came out to wide critical acclaim in Britain and the USA, the third novel of an author already well-known for his prize-winning Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and the less successful Season of Rainbirds (1993). The generally laudatory reception accorded to this novel is not hard to understand. On the face of it, since it brings together characters representing different parties to the conflict in Afghanistan, to a crumbling and beautiful old house in the town of Usha, the narrative aim might be encapsulated in the worthy observation made by the saintly Marcus, an ageing Englishman who has dedicated his life to the country: ‘here everyone is human and must try to understand each other’s mystery. Each other’s pain’ (2008, p. 198). In Marcus’s old house, a destroyed perfumery, where he is the custodian of a giant ancient Buddha statue which has withstood an attack by the Taliban, an all but allegorical cast of characters come together: ‘Look at the three of us here! Like a William Blake prophecy! America, Europe and Asia!’ (p. 183). Along with Marcus—who has converted to Islam but who has had his hands cut off by his late wife Qatrina (declared an adulteress) under orders from the Taliban—there are the Russian, Lara, looking for her brother Benedikt, a soldier who defected from the Soviet Army while it was in Afghanistan; David, an American who has lost his brother in Vietnam and whose fiercely anti-communist CIA connections are kept from the reader until a quantum of reader sympathy towards him has been accrued; Casa, an orphaned boy soldier with the Taliban, and, in a cameo, Dunia, a young Afghan schoolteacher who notionally represents the ordinary person’s version of Islam in Afghanistan and the aspirations of Afghan women to education and selfhood. The dead Qatrina herself haunts the edges of the narrative, staunchly, if privately, atheist and a feisty critic not only of the Taliban but Islam itself. The stage in the theatre of war that is Afghanistan is set for the emergence of insight and understanding in the face of unspeakable violence and the brutal exigencies of realpolitik.

While mildly deprecating Vigil’s ‘operatic effusions’, a fairly representative review by Lorraine Adams in The New York Times avers that in Vigil, the novelist demonstrated that he was ‘unafraid of political complexity’ while ‘unflinching in his examination of depravity’. Adams’s approving list of the novel’s iteration of ‘the documented savagery of Afghanistan’, however, invokes a cornucopia of cliches:

land mines (especially those that look like toys, designed to lure children); inventively vicious rapes (of girls, of a main character, of a historical figure); rough public justice, including a stoning and the amputation; warlords and their intractable feuds; misguided Americans and their obstinate meddling; abominable methods of torture, inflicted by both warlords and Americans. (2008, para. 7)

This is not, unfortunately, an unjust adumbration. The undoubtedly opulent rhetorical style of this novel, something of a literary trademark for Aslam, the son of a poet, ends up not so much articulating complexity as standing in for it, displacing its possibility. The novel is dotted with long passages where linguistic flourishes and internal monologues in italicized print (mostly in Casa’s head) conceal generalizations of somewhat startling crudity and questionable historical insight in relation to Afghanistan, Afghans and Islam: ‘a woman seen is a Western idea’ (Aslam 2008, p. 185); ‘If you do not fight He will punish you severely and put others in your place, said the Koran’(p. 187); ‘A tribe’s greatness is known by how mighty its enemy is, the clerics at the madrassas would say’ (p. 210). There is an unmistakeable elision of lines between what could be construed as the brainwashed thoughts of a single character and what could represent Afghanistan or Islam more widely. Indeed, even when a character like Marcus is made to suggest in passing that ‘the West was involved in the ruining of this place’, we are invited to read the comment as evidence of his characteristic liberal generosity rather than truthful historical insight (p. 74). Qatrina, we are immediately informed, would not have agreed and hers, of course, is implicitly the more grounded view of native informant: ‘The cause of the destruction of Afghanistan, she said to me toward the end of her life, is the character and society of the Afghans, of Islam’ (p. 77). In many ways, with its relentless emphasis on the crude savageries of the Taliban as both Islamist and Islamic, this is the novel’s view too: ‘One can only wonder, Qatrina would say, at what these lands could have been had they not been set back by the arrival of Islam’ (p. 220). The only comparable savagery in the novel is that of communism which, like Islamism, articulates a thoroughgoing critique of the (capitalist) West. To this effect, the characters too are etched with quite different sets of brushes and colours. Casa (‘Home/House’) and Dunia (‘World’), the two living Afghan characters, are the supporting cast with the text insistently and alternately foregrounding the three white non-Afghan protagonists, Lara, Marcus and David, a narrative choice with determinate ideological consequences. Even as the omniscient narrator switches perspectives frequently, the narrative consciousness suffusing the telling of the tale overlaps significantly with that of the three white non-Afghans.

The real ideological sleight of hand, however, has to do with how the narrative understands and explicates the notion of ideology itself. Aslam puts in place an operational distinction between characters whose motive force is ideological and conceptual in the first instance—that is, every thought and feeling is crudely referred back to an authoritative set of external precepts—and those who are to be read through their affective and psychic existence, an organic concatenation of feeling, thought, ideas, reflection and engagement. Within this frame, Islamism and communism are understood to be ideological: coherent, if delusional, bodies of thought whose adherents, occasional doubts notwithstanding, are incapable of either critical reflection or breaking free. Their every action and thought is determined by this ideological or textual force-field although they can elicit our sympathy as victims of brainwashing who have been made to believe in the most ludicrous scenarios, ‘seed sprouted from the blood-soaked soil of Muslim countries’ (Aslam 2008, p. 13). Casa, the main living Afghan character, belongs to the tribe of the ineluctably tunnel-visioned, referring every idea and action back to the Koran or to the teachings of madrassa preachers, brainwashed and pathologically unable to imagine alternatives. In contrast, David, Lara and Marcus enjoy rich and ‘complex’ affective lives; they may be complicit in the occasional ideological manoeuvre but they are ‘in touch’ with their feelings, endowed with empathic self-reflection, able to rue mistakes and criticize themselves. They are, in short, capable of transformation. David may be a former CIA agent with a murky past of his own, but it is as a mourning lover of Zameen, Marcus’s and Qatrina’s daughter, that we come to know and empathize with him; Lara is Benedikt’s grieving sister who has long repudiated any Soviet connection; the long-suffering Marcus transcends all ideology, ‘one of those few humans who lent dignity to everything their gaze landed on. Like a saint entering your life through a dream’ (p. 33). His life is imbricated with the liberal largesse of the British empire as one who thinks ‘too lovingly of the other races and civilisations of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result’ (p. 74). He—and thereby we—know that the ‘entire world…had made mistakes in this country’ but it is unclear ‘who to blame for those consequences’ even as it is conceded that left to itself, the country might have done well (p. 34).