Elegant literary romance and contemporary jihadism are unlikely bedfellows. Yet British-Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam has now written a third novel combining the two. While The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and The Wasted Vigil (2008) were partially set in Afghanistan, The Golden Legend is set in the fictional city of Zamana, somewhere on the Grand Trunk Road in northern Pakistan. Though vibrantly, bloodily contemporary, Aslam’s Zamana is also a heady, symbolic place, rich with cultural memory of a more loving and tolerant time.     

Two families are at the centre of the story, a middle-class Pakistani architect couple, Massud and Nargis, and their poor Christian neighbours, Lily (a man), Grace and their daughter Helen. Nargis was born Christian Margaret, her uncle the bishop of Lyallpur, and she changed both name and religious identity to fit in better when getting to know her husband. Their district, Badami Bagh, used to be an almond orchard, and as the city grew in the 1950s became a Christian ghetto lived in by that poor community of cleaners or servants. First of the weighty pieces of symbolism comes in the form of the ghost of a mutineer, hanged from one of the almond trees by the British. Memory of traumatic injustice hangs heavily over Zamana.   

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A painstaking literary craftsman, Aslam is well known for drafting in longhand, then editing ruthlessly. The description, and construction of the characters and narrative, are subtle and elegant. The story is told with beautifully measured precision, its moments of languorous evocation punctured by shocking violence. The contrast between the leisured opulence of his prose and the shuddering brutality of so many lives in contemporary Pakistan is effective, here, because it’s so jarring.

Aslam is carefully even-handed with his perpetrators. There seems little to choose, morally, between British colonial atrocities, the vicious Indian occupation of Kashmir, seemingly random and high-handed acts of violent American intervention, the bone-headed malevolence of the jihadis, or the bottomless cynicism of the Pakistani military and secret service, corrupted by American interests. The presentation of causes is both relativistic and depressing. It’s an intractable mess. As a political document, however, it eventually feels rather simplistic, despite the elegance of the narration. Though it’s expressed with delicate erudition, the contrast between diversity and bigotry is nonetheless hammered home, and as a manifesto, can’t help seeming somewhat limited.