Review

Maps for Lost Lovers

By Nadeem Aslam

Published by Faber

Nadeem Aslam’s first book, Season of the Rainbirds (Abacus, 1994), was praised by Salman Rushdie as ‘one of the most impressive novels of recent years’.

Reading Maps for Lost Lovers it is not hard to see why Rushdie likes Aslam’s writing, with its lush and magical use of language.

In an unnamed northern English town, lovers Jugnu and Chanda go missing. They are assumed dead and Chanda’s brothers are arrested for the murder. Their disappearance has a devastating effect upon the families involved and the Islamic community at large, testing bonds of loyalty and religious strictures to the limit.

The book focuses on Jugnu’s brother Shamas and his sister-in-law Kaukab. Shamas is a respected member of the Pakistani community, helping those unable to speak English or understand the English way of life.

His socialist leanings have also led him away from the true path of Islamic teaching. Kaukab, on the other hand, tries her hardest to respect every law of her religion, and despairs at the wickedness and depravity of all that she sees about her.

Kaukab is particularly troubled by her Westernised children, all of whom she has driven away with her strict adherence to the belief that the laws of Islam should never be challenged. The children in their turn, with liberal views silently endorsed by their father, are dismissive of their mother’s upbringing and scathing of her attitudes.

These relationships are dissected with great care, in the context of the Islamic community in which they are embedded. Aslam shows the painful cracks appearing between a generation of pious immigrants and some of their children, who have chosen to assimilate themselves in the British way of life at the expense of their religion.

Aslam spent ten years writing this novel, and it shows. Just as his character Jugnu collects moths and butterflies, so Aslam has searched the world of language for beautiful and rare metaphors and similes. These are scattered throughout the story, forming an arresting patchwork upon which his story is stitched. And although the surface of the book is profoundly sad, a quiet undercurrent of rage courses beneath, despairing at the violence wrought by the seeming impossibility of two opposing cultures co-existing.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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