THE WASTED VIGIL By Nadeem Aslam, Faber, £17.99

In all of recorded history, Nadeem Aslam writes in The Wasted Vigil, there have been only 29 years without a war. He does not interpret the enormity of this piece of information, so we cannot assume that mankind enjoyed a state of pristine peacefulness during this brief interlude. On the contrary, we are left with only one certainty: there is always too much destruction around us, which makes the first principles of ‘peace’ appear tenuous. There may have been a temporary lull in this history of violence, when the dead were mourned, the injured cared for, and those left all alone pitied, but there seldom was a moment of absolute tranquillity. Aslam’s richly evocative novel, five years in the making, is rooted in this sense of a world validated entirely by violence, where people remain alive only at the mercy of ceaseless cruelty.

Set in the village of Usha (meaning teardrop in Pashto) near Jalalabad in Afghanistan, The Wasted Vigil begins in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when the United States of America has already made some headway with its war on terror. The Taliban regime is theoretically over, although a clandestine network of its sympathizers is growing from strength to strength. With increasing suicide attacks, aggressively feuding warlords, the deplorable treatment of women and the relentless indoctrination of young minds at the madrasahs, the foreigners are struggling against too many odds to civilize the disciples of Osama bin Laden. In this volatile nation, torn apart between militant nationalism and righteous neo-imperialism, a Russian, an American, an Englishman and an Afghani boy are thrown together in Usha, as if in “a William Blake prophecy! America, Europe and Asia”.

This coming together of the players of the Great Game appears a little too neat. Aslam tries his best to tempt the readers to suspend disbelief and accept these connections as mere coincidence. But the design is irredeemably pat, and the flavour of this tale too fable-like. Marcus Caldwell, the Briton, is a doctor settled in Usha, and a convert to Islam after his marriage to Qatrina, an Afghani woman, also a physician. He has lost his daughter, Zameen, to the Soviet invasion, and then his wife to the atrocities of the Taliban. The perfume factory he had started at his home in Usha became defunct after the Taliban took offence. The only vestiges that remain of it are several pages of chemical formulae, the lingering aroma of perished blossoms and a grand reclining head of the Buddha, presumably a relic of the Bamiyan valley, staring, as it were, out of the earth. As Taliban soldiers fire bullets at it, this immense face, filled with watchful benediction, starts bleeding molten gold, scaring the intruders away.

In this enchanted terrain come a Russian woman, Lara (in search of her brother, who had defected during the Soviet era), a jihadi called Casa (absurdly named after Giocante Casabianca, the boy who had “stood on the burning deck” in the famous poem), and an ex-CIA agent, David Town, who had loved Zameen, now trying to locate her illegitimate son, Bihzad. The house they inhabit is a bizarre treasure trove of books, all nailed to the ceiling for fear of discovery by the Taliban. The delicate frescoes adorning the walls have been muddied into obscurity. Tape-recorders, TVs and cassettes have been buried, the strains of music only floating in the minds of the listeners like “sound fossils”. There are a few exceptions. In the Street of Storytellers in Peshawar, vendors peddle cassettes on which various battles between the Soviets and the Afghans were recorded, to be enjoyed later in solitude. Like his second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which Aslam took a decade to write, The Wasted Vigil is thickly atmospheric as well, immersed in its own exquisite turns of phrase. One feels surfeited with the preciously woven sentences, as one does with overripe fruit, a bit sickened by its cloying sweetness. Even the simple act of eating a pomegranate becomes darkly poetic: “The outer layer of scarlet seeds had been warmed by the flames. The temperature of menstrual blood, of semen just emerged from a man’s body.” An exotic fruit, after all, must not go to waste. A critic had described Maps for Lost Lovers as “England Orientalized”; here it is the Orient’s turn to be re-Orientalized.

Aslam identifies himself as a non-believer, a fact that is reinforced by his gentle commiseration with the underdogs of history. He is not squeamish writing about the terrors of the Taliban rule, and he is equally critical of the CIA’s methods. But James Palantine, the American officer full of trite theories about the barbarity of the East, remains a cardboard effigy, a figure of fantasy descended from the Bush-Cheney school of thought. In contrast, the enigmatic Casa, riddled by conflicting emotions and ultimately turning out to be much more than a fortuitous presence, makes for a more credible human portrait. Marcus, as the contrite Westerner full of righteous guilt, is a bit wet, although Qatrina, bristling with liberal outrage, is a more delicately realized character. There are plenty of purple patches: as Lara listens to the call of the muezzin tearing through the silence of the dawn, she “feels as though she is buried alone under the ruins of the universe, under the weight of the extinguished and smashed suns and moons”. When David and Zameen meet for the first time, their eyes are locked in an intense gaze, a moment of serendipity that is as much the stuff of Bollywood as of the Persian love-lyric. This frieze glows against its backdrop: “Pure distilled life, a beautiful child behind her was stretching his body in a high-armed yawn, his shirt rising up to reveal his navel”.

While Aslam’s novel would beautifully lend itself to a film, it leaves the readers somewhat confused about what it really tries to say. Is it a political drama, or a love story? It does not help at all that the answer could be both yes and no. It is a political tale because it gives a bird’s-eye-view of history — from Aeschylus’ account of the plight of Xerxes in the Persians to the 1993 bombings at the World Trade Center, up to the ongoing war on terror. (For a Pakistani, based in London, Aslam leaves the role of the ISI in Afghanistan diffuse.) Even so, The Wasted Vigil is not half as exciting as Mohammad Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

For Aslam the true antidote to jihad is love, not reason, which is why he is forced to create a largely functional character like Dunia, a counterpoint to Casa’s apparent heartlessness. But again, the charge of this love-plot, though replete with lush descriptions, has nothing of the appeal of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. “I am stripping down the details,” Aslam had said in 2005 on the writing of The Wasted Vigil, “and am concentrating on the human figures. Something like a Caravaggio, like Goya.” This is a rather audacious analogy for even the best writers in the language, and applied to Aslam, eminently readable as he may be, sounds embarrassingly hyperbolic.