Kamila Shamsie's new novel asks: Should friendship transcend politics?
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Loading... - Chander Kumar
- 26 Oct 2022
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“Best of Friends” a new novel by Kamila Shamsie, opens on the first day of school, Karachi, Pakistan, 1988. Zahra, 14, watches her closest friend, Maryam, arrive in her family’s Mercedes after another summer abroad in London. Having spent months apart, they are startled by incontrovertible evidence that their adolescent bodies are changing, but their friendship of 10 years remains unaltered. “If you moved to Alaska tomorrow, we’d still be best friends for the rest of our lives,” Zahra tells Maryam — “the only person in the world toward whom Zahra displayed extravagant feelings.”
Shamsie’s 2017 novel, “Home Fire,” was praised for its retelling of Sophocles’ “Antigone” transferred to modern Britain and Pakistan. In “Best of Friends,” Shamsie once again contrasts the two countries, with a first half devoted to the girls’ lives in Pakistan and a second to their adult friendship in the U.K. In each country, Maryam and Zahra’s positions are intertwined with politics and money — not only raising the stakes of their relationship but also revealing troubling parallels between the former colony and its increasingly isolationist former colonizer.
The Pakistan-set half of Shamsie’s narrative is by far the more effective. In poetic prose, Shamsie details the small ways friends imprint themselves on each other: the secrets shared, the mutual pop-star crushes, the books passed between them, how a best friend can become a fixture in a family home. In Pakistan, the girls are hemmed in by a surveillance society in which confidences cannot be shared over tapped phones.
They are also divided by its enormous income disparities. Maryam, the presumed heir to her grandfather’s line of luxury leather accessories, bears outsize expectations but also enjoys the trappings of wealth, including a fortress house protected by the trappings of military power. These too, Shamsie highlights with a subtle touch: “Maryam’s father had carried a peach out of the house and he cut that in half, the scent of it perfuming the air. The guard walked back toward the driveway, wiping his hand against the butt of his Kalashnikov and smearing the cold water on his neck.”
Zahra’s life is less extravagant, though her father’s new role as the anchor of a TV talk show about cricket has made him into a celebrity. As he is forced to toe the line for the military leadership, Zahra comes to feel trapped in Pakistan, “with its repellent dictator and its censored television and the everyday violence that had shrunk all their lives into private spaces.” Read More…
