Book review: A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie

I finally got around to reading Kamila Shamsie’s A God In Every Stone.

This is the kind of book you read slowly, savouring a certain turn of phrase, stopping to appreciate a certain twist to the story, and generally absorbing it all at a measured pace.

That feels right, too, because the story moves at a measured pace, with the faintest tinge of Michael Ondaatje‘s The English Patient in the war scenes.

We are introduced to Vivian Rose Spencer, fledgling archaeologist at a time (the story is set between 1914 and 1930) when women architects were not thick on the ground. She has feelings (a full-blown crush which just may develop into something deeper) for archaeologist Tahsin Bey, only the war creates a chasm that proves impossible to navigate; worse, Vivian unwittingly supplies the British War Office with some information that works to the Armenian’s disadvantage and downfall.

After a spell of intensive wartime nursing in London, Viv flees to a dig Tahsin Bey has talked to her about, in Caspatyrus/Paruparaesanna/Gandhara/Paraspur/Poshapura/Farshabur, now Peshawar.

Chains of mountains, bright green grass, rivers and fruit-laden trees. This is Pathan land with more than a few traces of Kim’s Peshawar, where men from Tashkent, Tibet, the Punjab, Afridi Pathans, Sikhs and Hindus all walk the streets. Viv starts to learn Pashto, meets and is captivated by a young boy Najeeb Gul, and starts to school him in the Classics of all things, give him a sense of history.

At the same time, Najeeb’s brother Qayyum Gul returns from Flanders, an eye lost in battle on the Ypres battlefield and in a heart full of disquiet about his once unquestionable loyalty to the British.

Peshawar, Viv thought, would keep the world and the war at bay. She was wrong.

The war is of course the villain in this tale. It’s not just the World War but another conflict fast gaining momentum, the war for Indian independence, too. Qayyum Gul joins the Frontier Gandhi Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s movement, now fighting in a non- violent manner the very British he had served with blood, sweat and one eyeball, out in Europe.

Najeeb Gul’s nascent education in history is cut short, Viv returns to England. But some things are mean to be; the young boy grows up to become an Assistant at the Peshawar Museum, and almost certain that the lost Circlet of Scylax Viv had been seeking hereabouts can be found by the Kanishka Stupa at the Shahji ki Dheri dig, reconnects with Vivian Spencer.

Other characters enter the story virtually at the end, even as events take on the shape of an inexorable whirlwind that has Peshawar’s Street of Storytellers as its epicentre.

The moral being that man can hope and dream but oftentimes conflict will take him where he has no intention, no desire to go.

At times, though, the reader gets the impression that Shamsie may have bitten off more than she can chew, that her canvas is an extra large one and of uneven heft, not quite doing justice to some characters and events, often straying into stereotypical territory. It’s a quiet book and the tone is one of restraint all through.

And in case you want the connection between title and tale, here is the relevant excerpt: Everywhere a traveller looked there was the Buddha, carved over and over into and around the countryside, in an age when the people of this region had the vision to find the god in every stone.