‘Age’ of disappointment
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam is one of those books you want to like because it tackles something enormous and little exposed, the Bangladesh genocide and war of independence. Age is being marketed as lit fic, but it’s really a young adult book written at around a 10th-grade level. The author’s skill is not commensurate with the novel’s theme. Subtle thoughts are never left unmolested; they’re implied, then said outright, then hammered in once again. The authorial gaze is averted around dark, gruesome or naughty bits, the snip of self-censorship. This G-rated book implies sex and torture but confuses prudishness for tact. The handful of passages where the author attempts poetic flourish rarely rise to believability. Instead you get the sense she’s attempting notes far beyond her range.
Worse, A Golden Age is keyhole lit, centered on a conservative, narrow-minded character. And it’s auntie lit. Like the Charlie Wilson’s War movie, it’s all about someone very peripheral to the battle, the mother of a guerrilla. Would you rather read of war from a general’s perspective, or that of an auntie who spends her time making pickles and worrying ineffectually? Yes, this is intended as an intimate, human perspective on the war; yes, it all depends on the quality of the writing. But all else being equal, give me the POV of the person in the thick of the action any day rather than one hearing reports third-hand from off-field.
The politics in the book are skewed. You hear why the war started, Sheikh Mujibur’s win in the Pakistan elections, but you never hear of how it ends. A chapter ends and then mysteriously, in December 1971, it’s all over. Is this omission in service of story? Or does it cater to modern, Islamic Bangladesh’s embarrassment at requiring India’s assistance in its war of independence?
There’s a grand story to be told here, but nowhere in the book is the scale of Gen. Yahya’s genocide, the Blood telegram, Nixon, the threat to station American aircraft carriers off the coast. All you’ve got is a lonely mother watching her children go off to war, falling in like with a soldier she quarters. Though domestic tales can be wonderfully subtle human stories, this one isn’t. And even in the most skilled of hands, The English Patient is a tough act to follow.
You will extract much from this book — this era of Bangla history is so little written about in fiction, you can’t help but learn. For example, the Pakistani military had the chauvinist idea that Bengalis are intrinsically not a martial race. (One which my Bong playwright buddy happily endorses.) But getting there will not tax your literary imagination. If I recall correctly from the reading, the book started out as an anthropology thesis on oral histories about the war. The novel did not flourish in the transition.
on Monday, May 19th, 2008, 5:36 pm in History, Literature, Politics › 
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Actually Manish, the Pakistanis inherited the idea of Bengalis as a ‘non-martial’ people from the Brits. Bengali wanna-be soldiers were routinely rejected by the Indian Army under the Raj for being too lightweight for battle. Damn Brits!
Just won an award.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2281015,00.html
Good! I was worried I might have to add it to my ever-lengthening list of books to read.
I had a leisurely skim of this book and came away with the same impression of earnest, amateurish writing. Perhaps too many books are cut slack on actual literary merit these days if they can claim to Treat Important Political Issues. I felt that a bit about Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss - the part set in India was pretty good even if the author got a bit carried away with her own descriptive flourishes, but the parts set overseas were real political set-pieces, with very trite, obvious “messages”. A good read, but not Booker material, IMHO.
Just to be historically complete - the East India Company army pre-1857 did recruit sepoys from Bengalis, Biharis and east-UP. They had to, as Punjab wasn’t ‘conquered’ till the previous decade - the 1840s. Even more, the soldiers were largely ‘upper-caste’ - especially Brahmins.
It was only when these groups mutinied, that the British came up with the martial/non-martial theory, post-1857. The Punjabis and Pathans in the Pakistan Army may have inherited the idea from the British, but would have had no trouble reinventing the theory vis-a-vis themselves and Bengalis, if they had to, given the pre-British history of interactions between the groups.
On topic - I haven’t read the book, but in general I consider it a good thing that more South Asians get published - it’s only then that the truly good show up on the radar. Not all published authors are, or need be, Booker material.
“Not all published authors are, or need be, Booker material.”
Err, except for the ones that get Bookers, like Kiran Desai.
Some people’s obsession with the Booker Prize stunts their appreciation of literature. However good or bad this novel may be, the fact that it didn’t win or get nominated for the Booker Prize has nothing to do with it.
I think the auntie matters as much as the General, personally. I guess it just wasn’t well written, is what you are trying to say, so thanks. Will avoid. Nice cover, though.
(In my old college days, 20 years past, I would have cried, ’sexist!’ I don’t do that anymore)
Dudes, I was talking about Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, which DID win a Booker, and which I was disappointed by, and wondering if it too had got extra bhau for touching on hot political topics. Nobody said all desis have to get Bookers (or get into Harvard Med School before they are considered viable foetuses;) I commented on a particular novel which did win a Booker, and kind of had me wondering why.
I agree, the New York passages in The Inheritance of Loss were weaker than the rest of the book. Brick Lane’s awards had me scratching my head too.
It did just win the Commonwealth Award for best first book, South Asia region, which is egregious prize inflation.
Alert the Pentagon. They’ve been sending out the wrong briefings all this time :)
I liked Brick Lane, actually. It didn’t feel forced. And generally speaking I do prefer the auntie’s perspective to that of the general in literature. If you want the general’s perspective you can just read a military history, no? (and besides, behind every successful general is a worrying, pickle-making aunty).
Did you like 10-page letters in pidgin English?
It can be done well, but it isn’t here. It has a larger problem, which is that if you omit an omniscient narrator you’ll only get little shards of the full story, which drives me nuts. Especially when it deals with real-world events– what a squandered opportunity.
The same issue arises with writing in the first person– you have to contort to get the narrator in odd spycam situations, like Animal’s People, or you punt large chunks of the story, or you jettison believability. Similarly, you can restrict the writing to a less-educated character’s voice, write in a rich voice where the dialogue isn’t believable, write simply but skillfully so everything which needs to be conveyed is implied, or leave the talky bits simple and authentic and resort once again to a fluent, literate third-person narrator.
Well yeah, I though the pidgin English letters were a nice touch, actually. I’d go off on you for privileging the authoritative, omniscient powerful (coded male) narrative voice, but I sort of agree with the problem of first person writing, felt that way about how Ganesh Gaitonde was made to pontificate philosophically in bhai-speak in Sacred Games too, much as I loved the book. But regarding shards vs omniscient narrator perspective, both have their place in historical narratives. Perhaps the problem with A Golden Age was that it tried to narrate history in a fictional, first-person form, rather than letting the story focus on the characters and fictional situations with the political -historical context just context, and not the main story? I haven’t read the book, just skimmed, so can’t really say.
A couple of pages in that voice is a nice touch. Tens of pages are a stunt, trauma, literary malpractice.
Aurora Zogoiby and Vina Apsara would be dismayed.
It focuses on a character all right, which is my complaint– she picks a central character who isn’t privy to the larger story. She doesn’t reference a whole lot of larger events where you can nod knowingly and say, Ah yes, that was the Such-and-Such Offensive. And Westerners aren’t necessarily going to know much about this war either.
No, that was just the regional awards, out of which the final two award winners were chosen. Lawrence Hill won the overall award, Tahmima Anam won the award for best first novel.
The parallel prize for a first novel was presented to Tahmima Anam for A Golden Age - previously shortlisted for the Guardian first book award - for her story of the Bangladesh war, A Golden Age.</b>
Best first novel published in the British Commonwealth in the last year? Hmmmm…..
Either way, she gets to have tea with the Queen as part of the prize.
I agree.
I can’t think of a single great war novel that is written from the perspective of a general, they’re all from the perspective of an average grunt or an average civilian. There are a few war movies which are from the perspective of the generals, but they’re generally far less interesting in part because the generals are pretty far removed from the action, and often ignorant of what’s really going on.
I agree with MD, I don’t really buy this as a criticism, quite the opposite. I’d be disinclined to read a novel written from a General’s perspective unless it was really good, it’s far harder to do.
This one’s a war novel written from a mom’s perspective, which is sort of like filming the Daniel Pearl tragedy through the eyes of a homebound wife who doesn’t know Pakistan and doesn’t speak Urdu. Oh, wait.
Lost in Banglation.
Per se, I don’t think speaking from a mother’s perspective gives little insight into what’s going on - it could potentially be an interesting study of how the war is affecting the average citizen, and with the mother of a soldier, the effect might be even more than that of the average Bangladeshi. However, this obviously requires some sort of strong and insightful portrayal of such elements, which, it seems, was non-existent in this book.
I thought that one of the differences between Gaitonde’s perspective and the language in the letters is that it was translated into English similarly to the way he spoke in Hindi/Marathi - with similar grammar, idioms, slang etc. In Brick Lane, neither one of the sisters spoke English (or, if they did, very little early on in the book), so presumably, they wrote to each other in Bangla. Yes, they grew up in a rural area, but even if there were colloquialisms or slang thrown in, I don’t imagine that their grammatical speech in Bangla was as bad as the grammar used in the English translation. Yet, with the pidgin English, it gave the impression that they spoke Bangla that was terribly gramatically incorrect. I felt it was rather insulting, and after about the third such letter, I just stopped reading.
AK, I felt that the Gaitonde monologues attempted to stay true to Marathi/Hindi (particularly delicious was the way in which he pretended all his goonda-gardi was God’s will), but at some point the author’s voice did take over, because how could it not, if a character is being made to make sweeping observations about things…yet it did not “take over” the novel because of the device of using different first-person voices in dif chapters.