Book review: The Golden Legend
Things under which a mountain will crumble, you can place on paper and it will hold: beauty at its most intense; love at its fiercest; the greatest grief; the greatest rage”.
Paper is literally at the centre of the novel, which opens in the home of Nargis and Massud, architects who live and work in a defunct paper factory now converted into their home/work space.
Surrounding this edifice is the city of Zamana, an Urdu word meaning period, era or age, pulsating with the noises of modern and ancient Pakistan.
One sound is that of the loudspeakers, in the multiplicity of mosques, which, instead of emitting the muezzin, are being violated by a mysterious broadcaster who, night-by-night reveals the scurrilous secrets of citizens. Vigilantes punish the accused, of course, especially women.
The former factory, however, is set in an oasis of bright fertility: an orchard, largely developed for cheap housing, but leaving a demesne of trees; almond, rosewood, mango, silk-cotton and coral.
From the beginning the novel seems surreal, juxtaposing calm with sudden violence, silence with cacophony, cleanliness with filth.
Nargis and Massud’s vast library contains two elaborate and ornate miniature mosques, used in the winter months as small studies; easily heated in the freezing space. In the summer they are winched up, towards the high ceiling, hanging, floorless, above the dwellers.
Elsewhere in the house, huge, spread, swan wings are pinned to the pink wall alongside the wings of a golden eagle, a parakeet and other birds.
The house is full of ‘intense’ beauty and provides a crucible from which the architects can create more beauty in an ideological attempt to fight, as Aslam himself does with his art, the evil of the outside world.
It is not magic-realism: it is Aslam’s portrait of a world in which all that exists is extreme.
Social and religious hierarchies are fiercely maintained, with the Christians, including two other central characters, Helen and Lily, as the butt of prejudice; their blood thought to be black, not red.
Nargis thinks “everything this land and others like it were going through was about power and influence. All of it. And these struggles of Pakistanis were not just about Pakistan, they were about the survival of the entire human race. They were about the whole planet”.
Life is precarious amid frequent acts of sectarian violence. Vicious assaults against vulnerable flesh come from the most unexpected sources and are perpetrated against gentle and educated characters as often as not.
There is no sense that those who might be considered liberal, rational and moral are thought of as such by their neighbours.
Strangely, the most shocking knife slashes are directed at a book from the Islamic section of one of the city’s oldest libraries.
This book is ‘That They Might Know Each Other, words inspired by a verse in the Koran. A meditation of how pilgrimage, wars, trades and curiosity had led to contact between cultures’.
This book, written by Massud’s father, contains reproductions of iconic art. The first page to be vandalised is an image of the Prophet Mohammed receiving a revelation from the angel Gabriel.
“He perforated the face with the steel tip, and then the blade continued upwards through the angel’s head-dress, the various ribbons and gems. Continuing, it cut into the sky full of gold stars.”
The congress between Christianity and Islam is severed in an act of “conscienceless temper”.
In The Golden Legend, Aslam opposes the vituperative Pakistani laws of blasphemy with his call for the freedom of language, written and spoken, especially when uttering words of love.
He, like Nargis, is trying to accept and restore damage. He says when he starts writing a novel, “I think beyond the despair, what is the moment of hope?”
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