Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam

This novel, 11 years in the making, radiates melancholy. Every phrase, every gesture of its characters is so saturated with mournful meaning that to read it is to drown in prose. Nadeem Aslam wrote it in longhand in a darkened room, not emerging into daylight for six weeks at a time. After two years' hard labour, he abandoned the narrative altogether to devote four years to writing 100-page biographies of all the main characters. Now, 11 years later, it's easy to imagine that when he declared his second novel finished, he must have wept at the loss.

Shamas, director of the Community Relations Council in an unnamed English town, lives in a claustrophobically oppressive Pakistani community. He describes himself as a non-believer, but he is married to Kaukab, a woman so devoutly Muslim that she has alienated both him and their three children with her strictures and her dire warnings about their sinful lives. Shamas is a man who cares about what a thing is. His wife cares about what a thing looks like. The novel opens with Shamas mourning his younger brother Jugnu, murdered with his lover Chanda, for setting up home together. This is a community in which a man can divorce his wife simply by uttering the word talaaq three times. Chanda has been divorced by two husbands, but her third has abandoned her without taking the trouble to divorce her first. She is unable to remarry without his permission and, in any case, in a community like this she is now unmarriable.

Aslam, like his character Shamas, describes himself as "culturally a Muslim, but a non-believer". Maps for Lost Lovers is a work of great courage both technically and spiritually. He dares to explore the taboo subjects of honour killings, to question the sexual practices of some Muslim clerics, to expose the beatings handed out to women who offend Islamic law, to castigate the random cruelties of white racists and to rail against the hypocrisy of Muslim men who spend nights with their lovers but who torture their female relatives for their imagined sins by day. Not once does Aslam allow himself the comforting cloak of self-censorship, although at times it would surely have been the safer thing to do.

Stylistically the novel is equally daring, relying on the dictum "why use one metaphor when 95,000 will do?" In Aslam's lexicon, a woman doesn't simply wear earrings, "The beads hanging from her earlobes are tiny and clear, as though she has managed to crack open a glass paperweight like a walnut and somehow managed to pick out whole the air bubbles suspended within it." At times I wearied of the sheer weight of language draped so heavily around my neck, but I admired Aslam's desperation to make every word count.

This is a deeply pastoral novel, tied to the seasons and resonating with birdsong. Jugnu, the murdered lover, is a lepidopterist, and even though he is dead by the time the novel begins, moths float and soar through the story in his place. Maps for Lost Lovers is a filigree of quests for loves that never were, of passions cut short and of romances that are about to be. Like Aslam, I was heartbroken when the dense, dark tapestry was finished, and perhaps like him too, completely and utterly exhausted.