As a writer from Pakistan, whose novels are available in several countries, I am sometimes asked if readers "back home" respond to my writing in any way that is significantly different to the responses of readers elsewhere. There are various answers to this question, but the one which struck me most when my most recent novel Burnt Shadows was published - available first in Pakistan, then the U.K., then India, now Canada and the U.S. - is that it's only in my country of citizenship that I almost never encounter the phrase "political novel" or questions about why I chose to tackle that genre.
The reason for the absence of the question is entwined with my reason for writing novels in which politics is a strong factor - if you've lived in Pakistan you don't have the luxury of believing that politics is separate from everyday lives. When I was growing up in Karachi, in the 80s, we had bomb drills and riot drills rather than fire drills at school. There were days when plans to go to the beach had to be cancelled because of riots and curfew.
Today, suicide bombings, American drone attacks, Taliban advances are all part of daily conversation. When I was publicizing Burnt Shadows in Pakistan, I was on a live morning breakfast show that led off with a news segment about the Taliban bombing a girls' school in the north of the country. One of the other guests on the show turned to me and said, "They're bombing girls' schools and you're launching a novel. That's Pakistan for you." That summed it up. Even when you're in a situation of comfort and privilege, there is always this awareness of the other world, always this tenuousness to the feeling of security.
It's possible, of course, to come from Pakistan and write fiction that doesn't explicitly refer to the political world - just as it's possible to come from the U.K. or U.S. or Canada and write fiction that does explicitly refer to the political world. But in Pakistan the absence of politics in fiction is greater cause for comment than its presence. The "political novel" is a rather redundant term there; "Pakistani novel" tends to imply some degree of politics, be it the politics of gender or class or ethnicity or nation.
But while all this explains why the political novel has always been a form I've gravitated towards, that doesn't mean it's without its challenges. For one, years can pass between starting a novel and seeing it in print, so if you're trying to write about the political present, the project is doomed. You'll always have one eye on the news and another on the text, watching the two drift further and further apart from each other. The novel is far less effective at saying, "Here we are, right now" than it is at saying, "Look at how we arrived at this place."
The novel has to have space within it to allow for the fact that it will reach readers who are living in a different moment to that in which the novel was created, and that to which it refers. For me, a prime example of this came just weeks before my novel was published. Burnt Shadows starts and ends with a man waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. At the time of writing, I thought that implied a situation with no exit. But just prior to the novel's publication, President Obama started his term in office and put in motion the process that will lead to the closure of Guantanamo Bay's detention facilities. Suddenly the book had changed - though not in a way that displeased me. Rather than saying, look what a terrible state we're in, it was beginning to suggest that perhaps we've started the movement away from some of the horrors of the last several years.
The other challenge posed by the political novel, when it enters a world in which "political novel" is a niche rather than mainstream genre, is that it implies polemic to many readers. For those for whom politics is not stitched into the fabric of daily lives, the political suggests a separation from the personal. And the novel, of course, must always focus on the personal. Character is at the heart of a novel. We follow individuals across the landscapes of their lives, entering an intimate relationship with them. "Political novel" suggests their lives will be flattened under great swathes of authorial explanations about history and government and war. Who wants to read that? Not I!
So when readers come to me, worried about this strange beast "the political novel" that I'm trying to unleash upon their world, I can only explain that I never think of my books as political novels when I write them. I think of them, instead, as stories about people's lives. Who is this person? Where is she? What happens to her? Who are the other people in her world? Surely novelists all ask these questions. It's just that, when I ask them, the answers are not: She is a woman in New York whose fiancé dies and who falls in love with another man. Instead it's: She's a woman in Japan who survives the atom bomb that kills her German fiancé, and though he dies their two families' lives remain entwined in a complex dance over the next 60 years from Delhi to Karachi to Afghanistan to New York to Canada.
And yes, after her fiancé's death she does fall in love with another man. If some people chooses to call that a "political novel" rather than a "family novel," it seems only to suggest that they do not feel history breathing down their necks at all times. That may be all the more reason to read a novel that will bare your neck and allow you to feel history's breath.
Kamila Shamsie's novel Burnt Shadows is in stores now.