The Wasted Vigil

Nadeem Aslam

Knopf, 320 pp

Faber and Faber,(UK)

2008

During a question and answer sequence with Nadeem Aslam provided by his American publisher, the Pakistani novelist recently stated, "When in the 1980s, the USA and Saudi Arabia began funding and arming the Afghan mujahidin, my family and friends in Pakistan were among the people who warned about the dangers of giving billions of dollars' worth of weapons to Islamic fundamentalists.

"The predicted horror was unleashed onto the people of Afghanistan soon enough, but it took decades for it to reach the wider world -- on Sept. 11, 2001, the consequences became apparent to everyone."

Although the American government would prefer for the world to forget, the Taliban were largely "created" because of American money (just as Saddam Hussein enjoyed the economic support of the United States government that later permitted him to create an equally diabolical regime).

This economic support is central to the story in Nadeem Aslam's utterly riveting and mesmerizing novel, The Wasted Vigil, especially Cold War pyrotechnics often not diffused until years later like innocent children stepping on land mines from the latest proxy war.

Aslam's narrator states the issue quite directly, "The Cold War was cold only for the rich and the privileged places on the planet."

Other areas -- Africa, Asia and the Middle East -- felt no chill, but rather the ravages of outside intervention as first one and then another government occupied and then abandoned them.

Out of the Soviet and American interventions of Afghanistan Aslam has fashioned a disturbing parable, populated with characters who are often polar opposites yet, simultaneously, often good souls who are simply trying to understand why their lives or those of their loved ones have gone so terribly awry.

For example, there is Lara, a Russian woman searching for her brother who is a soldier who disappeared during the Soviet intervention.

Then there's Marcus, a much older Englishman whose Afghan wife Qatrina "was put to death by the Taliban. A public spectacle after Friday prayers, the stoning of a sixty-one-year-old adulteress. A rain of bricks and rocks, her punishment for living in sin, the thirty-nine-year marriage to Marcus void in the eyes of the Taliban because the ceremony had been conducted by a female."

Both husband and wife were doctors, ministering to the destitute and the afflicted, but they were threats to the Taliban who feared their practice of modern medicine.

Finally, there is Casa, trained by the Taliban at an impressionable age to murder women and children, to impose the dictates of Sharia even on the young women whom he is obsessed with.

Not surprisingly, the sections of the novel where we are privy to Casa's point of view are the most disturbing and fascinating-no surprise because of Aslam's extraordinary gifts of characterization, plotting, and (above all) language.

Add to these three characters still another half dozen: Americans (mostly CIA operatives), who are fundamentalists in their own fashion; children; lovers; the hunter and the hunted.

The implication is obvious: Left alone, without so many international forces intervening (especially the Americans and the Soviets) Afghanistan would have been an entirely different place. Even the permutation of a central image of the novel (a larger-than-life stone Buddha destroyed by fundamentalists on Marcus' property) is little different than the Cold War games that similarly defaced the nation.

The narrative describes harrowing scenes of violence and despicable acts generated by all sides involved in Afghanistan's recent wars. And always beauty, as Aslam strips down life to its basic elements, whether that be in the author's eloquent prose or the surprising incidents in his story.

After Qatrina is killed by the Taliban, Marcus survives their plan to execute him next because, in their rage to destroy all things foreign, they shoot their guns at the stone Buddha they discover on his property. Aslam notes, "After the gun fired into the horizontal face it was noticed that a small point of light had materialized in each bullet hole, a softly hesitating sparkle.

"Over the next few instants, as more and more of the men took notice and stared uncomprehendingly, each of these spots grew in brilliance and acquired a liquid glint. Welling up in the stone wounds, the gold eventually poured out and began to slide down the features very slowly, striping the face, collecting in unevenly spaced pools on the floor."

There are other stunning images -- an entire library of books nailed by Qatrina to the ceiling of their house after she goes mad, the faces of dying Americans in their "disbelief that this faraway and insignificant place has given rise to a people capable of affecting the destiny of someone from a nation as great as his," Marcus's blood splattered on a wall that he confuses as an airborne "red butterfly".

Language, terror, and beauty are Nadeem Aslam's extraordinary gifts to the world.

Amid this relentless tale of horror and dismemberment, the endless vigils of individuals and invaders, of political machinations for naught, Aslam's unforgettable novel is an endless saga of human misery -- a brilliant story ripped from the pages of current events.

Few contemporary writers have mixed such horror and humanity in so powerful a narrative. If only we could convince some of our world leaders to read The Wasted Vigil.

The writer is a professor of literature at American University in Washington, D.C.

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