Burnt shadows

by Kamila Shamsie. Bloomsbury, 2009.

"Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey, but on the morning of 9 August itself both the man from Berlin, Konrad Weiss, and the schoolteacher, Hiroko Tanaka, step out of their houses and notice the perfect
blueness of the sky..."

The day is 9 August 1945, and the place Nagasaki. It is the morning on which the second Atomic Bomb was dropped, and the one that survives, in this story, is Hiroko Tanaka.

Right from the Prologue of Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie makes it clear that this book will have no happy endings. Yet it is a book full of love and life, humour and strength.

Hiroko is a likeable heroine and as we follow her though the event-filled fifty-seven years which this book covers she matures into a strong, independent, resilient and loving woman. Yet, even before the bomb dropped and burned the embroidered birds of her kimono into her back, her life was shadowed. The earliest shadow is reflected from her father, who was branded a traitor by the local community for an act of protest against the glorification of a young man's death in war. On the day of the bomb, Hiroko feels the suspicion of the people around her in an air-raid shelter, even of those she has know as friends for many years, and so she leaves. Konrad Weiss's death on that day, too, throws a deep shadow over her life. Not just because of her grief for the man she loved and was going to marry, but because it sets in motion a train of events which take her from Japan, to India, then to Pakistan and, eventually, to America. Each move brings her new joys and new sorrows.Kamila Shamsie is a superb story-teller. The people in her book are human and believable, and she draws the reader into their lives in such a way that you warm to them and care about them. In some ways the lives of these fictitious characters become more real than the horrors of the non-fictional history that they live through. It is hard to believe, for example, that sane human beings can perpetrate the acts which have led to the family divisions, bloodshed and trauma of Partition in India; the growing power and the influence on young Afghan boys of the mujahideen in Pakistan; the war in Afghanistan; the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York; the growing power of the CIA and private militia; Guantanamo Bay; and the resulting spread of xenophobia, religious fanaticism, and everyday suspicion of strangers who are not "like us". The lives of Hiroko and her family and close friends are influenced by all of these. And, as Hiroko's story moves into the present-day, Kamila Shamsie makes us aware of the way in which these things have changed all our lives, prompting, especially, the suspicion of strangers, the resulting spread of surveillance and the erosion of individual rights.

Yet in spite of its thought-provoking portrayal of recent history and the frightening, unresolved, seemingly unresolvable situation with which the book ends, there is nothing polemic about it. There are good times as well as bad. For long periods, as one section heading suggests, the shadows are veiled and the book celebrates comfortable, loving, family relationships. Hiroko faces the worst that can happen and, as she did at Nagasaki, she survives - because she has to, and because, as she says at the end of the book "the world goes on". And the shadows, for all of us, are always there.

Burnt Shadows, like the two fragments of poetry which Shamsie chose to set at the front of her book, is an elegy for all that the earth has lost and is still losing. But it is also a powerful and moving story.

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Copyright Ann Skea 2009

The house of wisdom

by Jonathan Lyons. Bloomsbury, 2009.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).

Baghdad: 'The Round City', 'The City of Peace'. This doesn't sound much like the city we hear of today. Nor do we think of Baghdad as one of the most important centres of learning in the world. So it is timely for Jonathan Lyons to remind us that all this was once true of Baghdad and to demonstrate how much the ancient Arabic-speaking world influenced the development of Western, non-Arabic-speaking, knowledge and culture.

In 762, the Abbasid Caliph, Abu Jafar al-Mansur, influenced by the geometrical teachings of the Ancient Greek, Euclid, set about designing the new capital city of his empire as a perfect circle. Learned astrologers (one a Zoroastrian, the other a Jewish convert to the Muslim religion) were consulted; a mathematically gifted overseer was appointed; various rites were performed, and The Round City grew up on the site of the old Persian city of Baghdad. Al-Mansur and his scholars then began to collect knowledge from wherever in the world they could find it. Persian, Greek and Indian knowledge was searched out, translated, studied copied and disseminated, and the city grew into a rich and important place which, according to one traveller, had "no equal on earth" for prosperity, luxury and learning. The great library of Baghdad, which housed the accumulated knowledge of the Empire also housed an academy of scholars and translators, and it was the resort of experts in astrology and scientific experiment. It became known as 'The House of Wisdom', and large sums of money were devoted to expanding its endeavors, accumulating valuable texts, and undertaking related cultural and intellectual projects.

Al-Mansur was not the first to so value knowledge and learning. The Umayyad dynasty, whose armies al-Mansur's brother had defeated in 750, were equally interested in 'scientific' enquiry. Astrology, logic, law, philosophy and medicine, all were studied, and when the most important surviving Umayyad Prince, Abd al-Rhaman, fled to Southern Spain, he took this love of scholarship with him. So Muslim Spain, too, became a important centre of learning.

Meanwhile, the Western non-Arabic-speaking world had lost the language skills which would have allowed them to learn from the Ancient Greeks. Latin had become the language of scholars in the few centres of learning. And Christianity suppressed Greek philosophy and independent thinking to such an extent, that only Aristotle's influence survived in the formal teaching and practice of logic and rhetoric. The Crusades soon made the free exchange of knowledge between Muslims and Christians almost impossible. However, contact with the Arab world, however bloody, did expose some Western men to Arab culture and a few, like Adelard of Bath, set out to learn more. Adelard is one of the heroes of Lyons's book. Born in about 1080, he had influential church patrons, a thirst for knowledge, a flair for languages and, apparently, a penchant for flowing green capes, green being a new dye colour discovered by the Alchemists. In about 1100, Adelard left his native England for a cathedral school in France. From there, he headed East, possibly by way of Spain and Sicily, spending at least seven years studying in and around crusader lands before returning home. He learned Arabic well enough to communicate with other scholars, and he read and translated (from the Arabic) the works of Classical Greek philosophers and mathematicians. When he finally returned to England, he brought back with him knowledge of geography, astronomy and astrology, as well as his own translations of a work on the use of the astrolabe and, most importantly, Euclid's Elements. Euclid's work was of seminal importance in the West. It covered geometry, number theory and such sophisticated mathematical concepts as irrational numbers, plus the logical method of stating a problem, hypothesizing a solution, demonstrating proof, and presenting a final conclusion. This 'scientific' method was, and still is, applied to every aspect of the search for knowledge. Adelard's work, Lyons notes, became the benchmark for Twelfth-century learning.Other scholars similarly sought out Arab knowledge and brought it back to the West. In 1230, the Scotsman, Michael Scot, brought back the medical work of Avicenna, and the philosophical work of Averroes. In twelfth-century Italy, Leonardo of Pisa, better know as Fibonacci, produced his Book of Calculations, which provided a detailed account of the use of the Arabic numbering system (which had, in turn, been learned from India) and so the nine figures 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and the sign 0 (which we still call by the Arab name 'zero') came to the western world. In the thirteenth century, English scientist and philosopher, Roger Bacon, brought from the East the knowledge of alchemy, which was the precursor of chemistry. Lyons's charting of these changes gives us an important insight into the major sources of our knowledge today, and the strong influence of Arab learning is still clear in every aspect of our lives. Music, manners, gardening, geography, religious debate, magic, all were strongly influenced by Arab learning. They gave us not only our number system but also many of the words which are in everyday use: 'alcohol', 'tariff', 'monsoon', 'algebra', and many more. The House of Wisdom is a timely reminder of the debt we owe to these early lovers of learning: the Arabs who searched for it, treasured it and transmitted it so freely, and the adventurous Western scholars who were fascinated by it, saw its value, and brought it back with them from their travels. Lyons writes well and his knowledge of the Muslim world is extensive. My only quibble, is that he tends to jump around in time in his book and, since history and dates were never my strong point, I often lost track of which century I was in.

However, this was a small price to pay for the knowledge I gained.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2009

Manly Library Author Talk: Love in the Age of Drought by Fiona Higgins

Fiona Higgins will speak at Manly Library on Wednesday 6th May on her first book Love in the Age of Drought her true story of rural romance.
Author Fiona Higgins met her husband-to-be at a conference in Melbourne, she wasn’t looking for a relationship, let alone the upheaval of falling for an eco-aware cotton farmer from South East Queensland.
But then life never goes quite according to plan...

Check out her interview with Grazia magazine.

6.30pm Wednesday 6th May

RSVP 9976 1722

Light refreshments provided