Powerful, whimsical and hard-hitting, an interesting second novel from a young writer

DISPLACEMENT AND identity. I and you. Them and us. Violence and inner peace. The prison one flees and the land of second chances. Ties to one’s soil or land, the repulsion of the new terrain. Sense of family, suspicion of nationality, push of leaving and the pull of curiosity—The Walking is a balance of opposing elements, deriving its voice from a number of players across tenses, timelines and voices. Khadvi’s first novel The Age of Orphans started a trilogy. The Age of Orphans followed a Kurdish boy in Iran in the 1920s. That boy is left orphaned by the Shah’s army. He is then abducted and taught to hate his own people. The Walking, the second book in the trilogy starts in 1979 with Ayatollah Khomeini taking over the reigns of Iran with the boy—now an older man—standing at its margins. Like before, the theme of displacement and geopolitical turmoil continues as two Kurdish-Iranian teenagers are forced to flee, now from Khomeini’s Iran. The two brothers are as different as you can imagine; the younger—Saladin—is a cinema buff and dreams of Amreeka, while the older, Ali, pines for home. The central story of the boys’ journeys is related in the third person— which lends the book its unique flavour. To read what is cardinal in the third voice is disconcerting and arresting at the same time. Sometimes, the boys’ stories seem just as incidental as the other stories of immigrants that run parallel to Saladin’s or Ali’s, or those that are snatched from the past. And there are smaller side-stories galore—of families and loved ones left behind, of people who manage to escape, of emigrants finally learning to live in the land of second chances which is America. Ultimately, the effort is to fit in and to blend in as mush as possible. In doses, The Walking is also a tale of horror—of war—in a land where the head and its power changes hands, but the realm of absurd violence continues with a thematic emphasis; it is also a story of an Iran where multiple communities are paying the price of being born in specific cultural identity—be it as a Jew or a Baha’i or a Kurd. Khadvi does not really dwell on atrocities of war, stoning and other sorts of medieval punishments, but brushes over them in a poignant fashion, which manages to leave a dent on the reader’s mind. The book is a comprehensive history of the war-torn nation—there is the mention of those who died in the cinema fire in Tehran (now known to have been started by fundamentalists and not, as decreed by the mullahs, by the Shah’s supporters); the American hostage crisis; the Iran-Iraq war; the tens of thousands who were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. In bits and pieces the book does seem tad slow and a bit too descriptive, however the lack of pace is more than made up by the prose. The book is essentially about migration— a theme that must be close to the heart of the Kurdish-American author, whose family was forced to flee in similar circumstances. The physical movement of a being from one place to another and severing of mental, emotional and geo-political ties are explored throughout the book. Fortunately Khadvi does not mince her words and the writing is taut, bereft of sentimentality but laden with emotions. In attempting to cover both the fictional story and the facts, details of the former slip and become implausible. Credulity is stretched when crop-gatherers deviate into some sort of an archaeological excavation and lead both the boys to a dig where Saladin finds a valuable gold object. And the brothers are allowed to keep it. Despite its flaws, there are several bits to love and rant about—its characters, the way it was written, its geo-political context and the lucid connections that Khadvi draws between political history and personal journeys. Though this is to be the second book in a trilogy, however, readers can pick this one up as a standalone. All in all, The Walking is definitely one of the best reads of this month.