Book review: The novel self-destructs with ease

Literature is a potent persuasion. It can both disseminate radical ideas and normalise a way of life to an unfamiliar audience. Since the world of childhood classics expands slowly, school syllabi and libraries across the world tend to favour the works of established western writers, often over native writers, thus instilling in children a somewhat foreign ethical world and homogenising it. So it is not intriguing that British-born and Pakistani-raised Sarvat Hasin’s choice of subject for her debut novel should be a retelling of the coming-of-age classic Little Women.

However, This Wide Night is not so much a simple tribute to Louisa May Alcott’s bestselling 19th-century novel, as it is a deft little transplantation trick that takes the action to 20th-century Pakistan. If gender was destiny in Alcott’s novel about four sisters, then both gender and geography seem to impact the sisters in the re-telling. The central characters are refreshingly non-traditional models of womanhood, and both books are essentially about family dynamics and romance. Yet, Ms Hasin’s interior and intimate novel is firmly rooted in the historical and political reality of Karachi society of the 1970s through a few boldly defined incidents.

The censorious eyes that watch single women are as much upon the four Malik sisters, as upon the March sisters in 1868 America. “This was not a city for hiding sins or secrets,” as the narrator of This Wide Night recounts. The four sisters in this book, recognisably based on their fictional counterparts, are, the graceful Maria, the tempestuous and tomboyish Ayesha, homely Bina and the winsome Leila. Their mother Mehrunnisa is the portrait of a concerned mother and remains somewhat mysterious in the blithely given freedom she accords her daughters, “raising modern young women to live in a modern world”. The head of the household, a soldier father named Captain Malik influences them both by his absence, and later by his return after the war.

The sisters are on the cusp of adulthood when they befriend the lonely orphan boy Jimmy, who lives down the street, and later his teacher Amir. It is easy to see the contrast between the colourful, nurturing and ultimately lasting bonds of the female household versus the narrow and unemotional relationship Jimmy shares with his grandfather. Fascinated by the sisters who have always been wrapped up in each other, Jimmy is an eternal outsider, who may gain access to the threshold but never full acceptance and involvement in its secrets.

Told in three parts, the first and concluding sections are told through Jimmy’s first-person narrative. The middle section, which records his “lost years” of dissipation, is told in third person. The story opens at a wedding party, where Jimmy finds himself face-to-face with Ayesha, the second, and most intriguing, of the sisters. They are both holed up in the family home’s library and they bond at once in the ironic way loners do over their shared love of solitude. Jimmy recounts, “It was fun to tell these stories to a girl like that, a girl whose face lit up, a street parade.”  If Jimmy is the hero then Ayesha is his female counterpart and much of the book is dedicated to their complicated relationship, and to understanding her state of mind. Their conversations are brief but telling. “What does it feel like?” Jimmy asks, watching Ayesha type out a story. “It feels like opening up my oesophagus. And trying to reconstruct dinner,” she said.

Unlike Little Women, which was commissioned for young girls in response to the adventure series novels that written for young boys, This Wide Night, is meant for mature readers. The twists and turns in the plot remain entirely predictable, right up to the very end, and yet Ms Hasin’s interest lies in exploring the rich emotional spectrum of her individual characters, including examining their perversities. Jimmy is a hyper-observant narrator, who misses nothing, not the flick of a wrist, or a turn of phrase, which makes his fascination with the Maliks a mandatory interest for the reader as well. Moreover, what defines the household is a sort of insularity, an isolation that the girls maintain from the more regular preoccupations of their peers. The connectedness of the sisters only grows stronger, and their lives begin to overlap, even as the shadow of illness and death draws them closer. Jimmy senses the slide, but cannot prevent it, he is rebuffed at every attempt. “Something’s changing, isn’t it, Ash? You said it yourself last night, it’s all falling apart. Well, it isn’t gone yet — maybe we can fix it.” To which Ayesha replies, “Oh, J …promise you’ll leave it alone, us and everything else.”

Towards the end, Ms Hasin seems to blur genres, employing surrealism and magical realism, and writing a dizzying conclusion that seems part claustrophobic ghost story, part psychological thriller. The fantastical chain of events at the climax doesn’t sit well with the otherwise delicately layered portrayal of a close-knit, and relatable if somewhat eccentric family. “Nothing real was left,” Jimmy concludes about the way the Malik sisters choose to absent themselves from their society.

This Wide Night ends on a nihilistic note, the necessity for self-destruction as compelling and as inexplicable as in Jeffrey Eugenides’ iconic 1993 debut novel The Virgin Suicides. In this dark portrayal of the essential unknowability of women and female bonds Ms Hasin proves herself to be an author who can push her characters to extremes, even perversities, and re-appropriate an old formulas with a new sensibility.

Karishma Attari is a Mumbai-based writer and author of I See You and Don’t Look Down