In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman

The World is Not Enough
Parts of the review first appeared in The New Indian Express

Straight to the point: Zia Haider Rehman’s voluminous first novel, In The Light of What We Know, is a masterpiece. This is not to say that the book is without its flaws, but if an emotionally overwhelming novel that gives readers the feeling of having approached a truth crucial to their own lives qualifies as a masterpiece, Rahman's book is just that.

It begins thus: In London, an investment banker of privileged Pakistani origins is caught between a flailing marriage and the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. As one of the early innovators of credit default swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) -- much-maligned financial instruments that were blamed for the recession -- his firm is prepared to make him as a scapegoat after the onset of bad times. One day (the opening of the novel), he opens his door to a long-lost friend, who looks disheveled and out-of-center. Zafar, the friend, doesn't share the same privileged background as the banker. He was born in rural Bangladesh, like the novelist Rahman, and had migrated to England as a child. He had studied with the narrator in Oxford; the two had also worked together in Wall Street for some time.

Soon after settling into the banker's apartment, Zafars starts to narrate his life's story. Zafar's narration provides our narrator a welcome distraction from his own troubles. We thus have two narrations happening in the novel, one directed at us by the banker, the other to the banker. Though our narrator is not as relegated to Zafar as Carraway was to Gatsby (Rahman hints strongly at the comparison inside the novel), Zafar is still the give-or-take hero we have. And we do root for him, at first as someone who rose from a severely underprivileged childhood to earn a standing in the world through his own genius and hard work. Yet, as Zafar's story unfolds, we see that the gulfs of class and race could not be overcome, and manifest as they were in Zafar's relationship with a thoroughly privileged and thoroughly British woman named Emily, we see him being pushed, slowly, toward a state of rage, from where his only outlet could be an act of violence.

In all the reminiscences into the narrator's and Zafar's lives, Rehman also grants the novel its exhilarating scope, not only in the places where the action takes us, not only in the decades and events it traverses—from the sub-prime crisis of 2008 to war-time Afghanistan in 2002 to the Indo-Pak War of 1971 —but also in its desire to inform the reader with varieties of knowledge in an essayistic fashion—the class structure in Britain, T S Eliot’s poetry, the immigrant-savvy spirit of America, Godel’s Incompletness Theorem, Orientalism, carpentry, the narrative choices of Scott Fitzgerald, Green and Maugham, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, CDOs, the dual nature of sub-atomic particles in quantum physics, so on. Throughout all this, the novel remains skeptical of the act of knowing and its relationship with micro and macro power structures.

The two friends are connected to Pakistan and Bangladesh; India is often talked of as an important regional power, thereby having an impact on the whole subcontinent’s consciousness; and the most important events in the novel take place in Afghanistan. This trans-subcontinental tendency was last approximated in a novel this good in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. However, Rushdie’s view could still be called Indo-centric. Moreover, if Rushdie was said to derive his charm from magical realism, the only moniker possible for Rehman’s realism is erudite realism. But unlike Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, where essayistic knowledge of miniature paintings and the threats faced by the art form—threats faced because of growing Western hegemony—served a more direct purpose in the plot itself, in Rehman’s novel, knowledge and its acquisition aren’t pegged to any particular area. Zafar’s indiscriminate erudition is itself a counter against discrimination. It is also contributive to the idea of shunning an untested life, which Zafar has decided to do.

It must, however, be noted that Rahman's little essays are all deftly dramatized, and do not appear to exist for their own sake. Rahman's true achievement with the novel form is to make these discussions appear to be contributing -- in fact, they are essential -- to the plot that he works with. And Rahman is going for breadth, not depth. No topic is dug deeper than it needs to. If you happen to have knowledge of any one of these, you might even find Rahman's explanations / usage bordering on cliche. He uses what could be called local cliches - where you can make out if one passage is a cliche only if you have some specific knowledge of that specific field. The range of subjects ensures that most local cliches retain their original flavor - that of carrying extraordinary insights.

It is commonly agreed that the most important historical events of this fledgling century are 9/11 and the financial crisis. The complications that need to be traversed to gain any meaningful understanding of these events in the novel form necessitate that the dramatization be both believable and meaningful. Rehman’s novel does that, and it operates with a world-historical-consciousness that clarifies just who faces the brunt of History, of all that is wrong in the world. The idea of ‘The Age of Knowledge’ doesn’t work for those who cannot acquire it. But the privileged who equate its acquisition with wisdom are also committing a desperate error.