The Wasted Vigil

In a disused perfume factory beneath Tora Bora, three survivors of Afghanistan's recent past meet: an elderly English doctor widowed by the Taliban, a former CIA agent who helped train the Mujahideen, and a Russian woman seeking a brother lost during the Soviet retreat. Inevitably, their lives intersect with those of a younger generation: a jihadi, a female schoolteacher and a US special forces operative. This is a deeply disturbing novel on many levels. There's been an ethical drive to economy of style in the face of atrocity since Hemingway on Spain and Levi on Auschwitz, as though seductive words were invariably a moral anaesthetic. But Aslam's approach is different: his lush prose flirts dangerously with orientalist sensuality, whether describing peacocks, gardens or characters getting their eyes blowtorched out of their skulls. Among other things, this is a book about responsibility - and in implicating his readers, the author points to our culpability in a continuing human catastrophe.