Since the war in Bangladesh, a rough thread of brutality invades the psyches even of dreamers and idealists
It is 1984, and Maya returns to her family home in Dhaka. She has been away for more than a decade in the north of Bangladesh, where, having given up her aspirations to be a surgeon, she has been working as a "simple country doctor". She tells her rediscovered friend Joy over greasy American burgers: "I heard a woman screaming. She was squatting at the back of a tailoring shop, in labour. I helped her, and I felt ? well, as I hadn't felt in a long time. Like I was finally good for something."
Much has changed: her once-vibrant mother is ghostly, ailing; her brother Sohail, an erstwhile hero, has immersed himself in the ideals of a puratanical and proselytising branch of reformist Islam. His beloved wife Sylvi has just died, leaving behind a little son, Zaid, who, almost illiterate and entirely wild, has to bring himself up as his father refuses to allow him a modern education or even a normal life.
The family crises mirror the state of the nation. A dictator is in power; war crimes are still unaccounted for, and criminals are on the loose. The stories of women raped and abused during the war for an independent Bangladesh have been erased or marginalised in the search for a clean, linear history. Frantic forms of religiosity proliferate.
Maya escapes from shadowy rituals of mourning to more affirmative celebrations of past ideals and victories. Joy, recently returned from a long stint driving taxis in the US, reintroduces her to a life of which she might have been a part. At a political meeting, she hears the author of a modern Bengali classic about the loss of her son in the war speak of a country "that allows the men who betrayed it, the men who committed murder, to run free, to live as the neighbours of the women they have widowed, the young girls they have raped".
Maya has started writing columns herself, on an old typewriter, addressing such issues. She involves herself in the rescue of Zaid from a father who seems monstrous, but is actually too involved in his own mourning and reparation to concern himself with his child. She tends her cancer-ridden mother.
Mourning and reparation, exile and return, losses both personal and political link the novel's past and present. Two patterns emerge in the earlier section, set in the 70s: the nostalgic colours of memory, when a nation dreamed of freedom and equality for all, interwoven with a dark, rough thread in which the brutality of war invades the psyches even of the dreamers and the idealists.
But Anam invests real narrative power in the sections set in the mid-80s, in which the past resonates as an often minatory echo. Sohail's conversion, and Maya's escape, acquire more complex dimensions as consequences converge and secrets are revealed. Maya, resolutely secular, begins to understand Sohail's religious zeal and to reflect on the practicality of religion and a possible return to prayer: if she chose it now, it would be a hollow bargain, shallow and insubstantial.
Powerful and ambitious, The Good Muslim more than fufills the promises of Tahmima Anam's celebrated debut, A Golden Age. Here, too, Anam examines the consequences of war, the hazards of an uneasy peace, the gains and losses of nation-building, the rewriting of history. Leisurely, dense and varied in its stylistic register, this is a darker and more reflective novel, told largely from the persective of Maya, whose idealism is tempered by experiences beyond her control and the recognition of her own fallibility. Her desire to be "good for something" will lead to another family, while her articles bring her into conflict with the paranoid ruling powers, in a poignant climactic sequence of great suspense.
The novel also exults in the traditional pleasures of adventure and romance. Maya discovers hidden needs in her growing closeness to Joy; their relationship offers both a modicum of conventional domestic harmony and family approval, though we can imagine that neither Maya nor Joy will accept the merely conventional, and that their struggles will continue in another book, the third of Anam's projected trilogy.
Aamer Hussein's The Cloud Messenger is published by Telegram.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/29/good-muslim-tahmima-anam-review
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