Review: a mesmerising journey into the life of a brilliant polymath
In Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel, , a young Oxford-educated Bangladeshi-born British human rights lawyer named only as Zafar befriends a colonel in the Pakistani army against the backdrop of the past decade's war in Afghanistan.
by Zia Haider Rahman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"What is strange to me is that although I know a fair deal about you, I'm still puzzled as to who you really are," the colonel tells the novel's protagonist, prompting him to ask: "Do you think I'm involved in some kind of subterfuge? A masquerade?" The officer dismisses the suggestion. "No, my boy, you are so unsure of your bearings that you wonder if you're pretending to be the person you actually are," he says. "I see it in your face - the searching assessment, which you hide well but unsuccessfully."
A mathematics whiz who ditched a Wall Street investment banking career to become a lawyer, Zafar takes the stinging remark in his stride, not least because he appears to agree with it. "Our actions are always questions," he says towards the novel's end, pithily revealing its pathos: "If it's true that our will is free, how is it that we do things we regret?"
is a mesmerising journey into the life of a brilliant polymath modelled on Rahman himself. Born in rural Bangladesh and educated at Oxford, Cambridge, Munich and Yale, Rahman, too, has a background in advanced mathematics, investment banking and international human rights law. "Most of the novelists I've loved reading - [Joseph] Conrad and [W.G.] Sebald, for instance - have written books with strong biographical connections between the author and some or other character," he says when asked if his novel is autobiographical.
Combining politics, religion, war, science, history, geography, class, ethnicity, language, neocolonialism and career, is a 497-page tour de force notable for its intellectualism and nobility. Narrated by an unnamed, upper-class Pakistani-American character who also studied maths at Oxford along with Zafar, the story explores the age-old themes of friendship and betrayal.
