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Literary Review
FICTION
Games, big and small
SHEILA KUMAR
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A romance set against the backdrop of the British debacle in Afghanistan.
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Companions of Paradise, Thalassa Ali, Headline Review, p.334, £6
"DEAR Allah," she prayed through chattering teeth, "take this good man's soul to thy Paradise. And please... let him be with English people, if possible." This is Thalassa Ali's heroine Mariana Givens praying over a fallen British officer. And the reason she appeals to Allah is because Mariana is secretly married to an Indian Muslim.
Not quite your historical bodice-ripper (the romance is restrained to the point of dullness), not quite a full-on account of the failed British policy in the remote reaches of Afghanistan, because the point of view is decidedly a female and damped-down one. Companions of Paradise, the third and final book in the Paradise Trilogy that traces Givens' passage to India and beyond India, is nevertheless an interesting read, if not a top-draw historical one.
Weak character
The main flaw is Mariana Givens, the heroine of A Singular Hostage, A Beggar at the Gate and now, Companions of Paradise. She remains just as she started out, a one-dimensional character, sparking nothing more than tepid interest in readers. Impetuous, optimistic, given to flights of romantic fancy, Givens drifts through the book more a passive victim than a real heroine. Her one good point is her open mind; she is willing to learn Urdu and Farsi poetry, to see that man is one beyond his many Gods, to attempt to de-mystify the mystical elements of Islam, to see that her countrymen and women are all making the mess worse in the hostile desert.
And that is the book's strength, ultimately. Ali traces the advent of the officers of the Raj, complacent, arrogant, adroit bunglers contradictory as that may sound, as they come into Kabul and settle down to what they see as a peaceful tenure, on top of the game, as it were. In a couple of years, their Great Game, as we all know, blows up in their faces. Under brutal siege from local tribesmen, the British, extremely reluctant to fight, are forced to make an ignominious retreat, losing more than three-quarters of their men, English and the ever-loyal Indian troops, in the process.
Balanced perspective
Ali is no apologist for the Raj; indeed, she is clear-eyed about the Afghanis, too. A proud, fierce people taken over by an inept Empire, continually slighted in ham-handed fashion, they wait patiently for their revenge and when it comes, the revenge is, of course, a savage one. To give her credit, Ali writes of the fall of the great fort at Bala Hisar with such a sure hand, the reader cannot in all fairness classify her as yet another writer of the chick-lit that deals with the exotic East for the delectation of the curious West. However, Givens' meeting, saving the child of, falling in love with and marrying Hassan Ali Khan, the scion of the sage of Lahore, suffers from actual fleshing out, in comparison to the blow-by-blow description of the British army's disastrous moves in tackling insurgency on this desert chess board.
An admix of historical fact and fiction, Companions of Paradise is a curiously readable book. Only, the reader is advised to first read A Singular Hostage and A Beggar at the Gate. And despite the fact that he has raised the bar for all historical accounts, no comparisons are to be made with the works of a certain William D.
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