An Unexpected Light

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 3, 2001 | by Rex Roberts

Curious about life in Afghanistan, or among the spoiled rich Pakistan or inside terrorist cells in New York City? Here are thee books plucked from today's headlines.

Picador USA, an eclectic house that publishes authors from around the world, has several books on its list that have become more timely since their original releases. An Unexpected Light ($30, 496 pp) by Jason Elliot, in its second printing in the United States, recounts the author's sojourns into Afghanistan, first during the Soviet occupation when he was 19, then a decade later during the country's infighting among government forces, warlords, mujahideen and the Taliban. Moth Smoke ($13 paperback, 247 pp) by Mohsin Hamid, a young novelist born in Pakistan and now living in New York City, explores decadence among the upper classes of his native land. The Poet Game ($12 paperback, 228 pp) by Salar Abdoh, born in Iran but also residing in New York City, pits Arab terrorists against Tehran agents in a plot to bomb Manhattan on New Year's Eve.

An Unexpected Light has its charms -- Elliot is a lyrical writer who knows how to embellish a tale -- but the book is derivative. The author is in thrall to the masters of the genre, intrepid peripatetics such as Bruce Chatwin, and we are invited to experience not just his wanderings but also his thoughts on travel writing, Western wealth and Eastern asceticism, the nature of man and so much more -- most of which is pedestrian. "To what logic did ants turn to comprehend the fall of the gardener's spade?" asks Elliot, musing on the destruction wrought by the Russians during their 10-year siege of Afghanistan.

In 1979, Elliot smuggled himself from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Kabul at the beginning of the Soviet occupation. He spent several weeks traveling the country, managing at one point to latch onto some mujahideen living in caves a day's march outside Kabul. Incredibly, the fighters allowed him to accompany them on two operations. One turned out to be a raid on an apple orchard, but another was a harassing attack on a Soviet garrison in the suburbs. Both missions have ample comic elements -- Elliot is appealingly self-deprecating when telling war stories -- mixed with real danger.

But the better part of the book, a mixture of history, analysis and anecdote, relates his return trip to Afghanistan, when he spent six months touring the remote parts of the country just before the triumph of the Taliban. Elliot wonderfully conveys the hardship of travel in this ancient, battered land, creeping along rutted paths that snake up the sides of mountains barely wide enough for a bony horse, sleeping in crowded shelters made of piled stones, taking meals in huts where fellow diners dip their hands into common bowls.

"Each man broke his portion of bread into pieces, taking turns to push the morsel beneath the surface of the thickening soup, so that even before we had begun to eat at least twenty different hands had been submerged into what was to be our dinner," he writes of a typical mealtime in a mud-walled serai. "I hadn't much of an appetite. Half a dozen of the men had raging, liquid coughs, and every few minutes spat whatever they dredged from their watery lungs behind the mattresses on which we sat."

An Unexpected Light reads best when Elliot simply describes his encounters with Afghanis or waxes poetic about the beauty of the country, such as this scene from his foray into the Panjshir valley: "We had entered a region rich in minerals and the mountain walls were coloured now, with reds like the blood of bitter oranges or gifted with the desert shades of the Grand Canyon: grey, ginger, mahogany. One vast triangular mound was the cuprous shade of unpolished malachite. I saw another white-breasted eagle fly overhead, and smaller, energetic birds with purple throats and white caps by the river."

Unfortunately, Elliot feels compelled to sermonize on the material greed and spiritual alienation of the West, among other worn-out topics to which he adds little. He displays an endearing childlike enthusiasm for Afghanistan's glorious past, its multifarious mix of ethnic groups, religions and arts and, of course, the parade of conquerors such as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Yet his well-intentioned summaries detailing thousands of years of war and peace are hard to digest, and his publisher compounds the problem by failing to include maps, time lines and an index.

Then, too, Elliot has spent comparatively little time in Afghanistan to have written so big a book. At various times, he admits as much. "I felt a familiar heartache at having intruded frivolously into the troubled life of Herat," he writes upon leaving one of the cities he briefly visits, "and at having abandoned it with a facility of which its inhabitants could only dream."

For all this, and despite Elliot's tiresome biases (Christian fundamentalists are bores, Muslim faithful fascinating), An Unexpected Light manages to evoke the generosity, determination and good humor of Afghanis. If you can ignore the author's preachments, it's a good palliative to the press' portrait of the country as pile of rubble peopled by unattractive fanatics in beards and pattus.