Kamila Shamsie’s new novel, Burnt Shadows, is an ambitious work. It covers a large span of time: beginning on 9 August 1945, in Nagasaki, Japan a while before the second atom bomb was dropped by the Americans to end World War II, and ending in the US a little after 9/11.
It is a story about people who try mighty hard to put down roots and have their efforts nullified by the caprices of prevailing history and politics. Konrad, the love of Hiroko Tanaka’s life is literally reduced to a shadow on stone after the A-Bomb blast. His step-sister Elizabeth (Ilse) in New Delhi, married to the Briton James Burton, becomes Hiroko’s confidante, as she is wooed by and then married to Sajjad Ali Ashraf, her husband’s assistant. The Partition occurs, Hiroko and Sajjad find themselves against their will in Karachi, Pakistan. Their son Raza, a promising student, finds himself co-opted by Harry, Elizabeth and James’s son, an American citizen and a CIA operative, in Afghanistan, helping the Taliban against Soviet army. Such a story is bound to end in tragedy.
Shamsie’s narrative canvas is vast and she peoples it with vivid characters and credible situations. Its principal character, Hiroko, is capable of contradicting the time-worn cliche of the East and West never being able to meet. Even she, in the end, is forced to tell Kim, the granddaughter of Elizabeth, after Raza is taken away by the FBI, “... Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb.”
The novel throws up many interesting ideas, but the one that stays with the reader is the capacity money has to corrupt absolutely not only individuals but also nations. The role of commerce as a soul-killer is suggested from the beginning. The Americans dropped the two atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Japan had refused to surrender after the war had been all but lost. It was a cheaper option from the American point of view — in terms of money and lives expended, in that order — than fighting for victory using conventional weapons.
The atom bomb changed the very attitude towards life and death and brought about a collective apathy, especially among denizens of the so-called First World towards human suffering on the one hand, and a craving for materialism and its handmaiden hedonism on the other, as if there was no tomorrow. It was/is true, the emergence of the next day was/is at the mercy of the US, the nation with largest number of nuclear warheads and a deadened conscience to match. The “Father of Capitalism” is only interested in seeing the stock market buoyant!
These ideas are not hammered home in the novel; rather they exist as distant echoes, even as epiphanies. Kamila Shamsie is a passionate, intelligent and subtle writer. Her characters elucidate her ideas, but never do they give the impression of being her mouthpiece.
Her love is for all growing things, for growing relationships. Her anger, simmering just below the surface, is directed against those forces that systematically thwart the course of a happy, healthy and fair life that every individual fervently desires. Especially people like Hiroko, Sajjad and their son, Raza, who have been severely tested by life.
She has a consummate grasp of her craft and the ability to compress time, not just to convey information about a person but also the psychological and emotional transformations that have taken place in his/her journey through life. Like some really fine musicians do, Shamsie can create mood and depict its changes through delicate shifts of harmony and within the melody proper.
— PC