BURNT SHADOWS

It's a historical novel with the very highest intentions, asking the question: How has the modern world gotten itself to the edge of nuclear annihilation? Shamsie's answer may or may not sound accurate, depending upon your own view. The world has been cursed, she suggests, since America dropped not one but two atomic bombs, first on Hiroshima, then -- gratuitously? -- on Nagasaki, in the summer of 1945. That unspeakably awful twin event has always been complicated by questions of race. America would never have done such a thing, some people have said, to the Germans; Caucasian lives would never have been submitted to such an experiment. Hiroko Tanaka is a young woman living in Nagasaki during that portentous summer. She is in love with Konrad Weiss, an idealistic German artist and scholar whose work attempts to discover how Eastern and Western civilizations might learn to live in harmony. Fate doesn't treat this young man very well; within the first few pages of the novel nothing is left of him but a scorched shadow etched on a large rock. At the time of the attack, Hiroko was wearing a kimono with black cranes on its back; she will carry the burned imprint of those birds for the rest of her life. Within a couple of years, Hiroko, who can no longer endure Japan or her position in it, journeys to New Delhi to visit Konrad's half sister, Ilse, who is married to James Burton, a slimy British attorney who has been living as one of the ruling elite as the Raj crumbles around him. His solace and comfort come from emotionally swindling an impossibly handsome and good-hearted young Muslim man, Sajjad Ashraf, who has been euchred into thinking he's somehow studying for the law when he's actually employed to play chess with Burton. (The author might not like to hear this, but Burton is a photocopy of Mr. Wilcox in "Howard's End," unscrupulous, bestially cunning. He lets the devil take the hindmost -- in this case, every person of a different color or belief than his own.) It doesn't give away the plot to say that -- against all odds and probabilities -- the bereft Hiroko and the pure-hearted Sajjad fall in love. The British, meanwhile, having extracted everything they could from India, make a hasty retreat. Partition ensues; Hiroko and Sajjad end up in Karachi. Their dreams have taken a beating, but they have each other. But this tale of oppression and emotional swindling, of running roughshod over people of other colors, is just beginning. The Burtons have a son, Henry, who moves to America and changes his name to Harry (read: Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop those bombs). The British empire turns American. Harry Burton becomes a member of the CIA and then a private mercenary. He manages to capture the trust and affection of young Raza, the mixed-race son of Hiroko and Sajjad. Raza possesses an uncanny gift for languages -- he and his mother speak Japanese, English, German and Urdu on a regular basis -- and although he has some trouble making a place for himself in Pakistan, he has only to cross the Afghan border to be thought of as a native tribesman, because of his almond eyes, his high cheekbones and his amazing command of the language. Soon Harry Burton and Raza are romping about in the mountains of Afghanistan, first stamping out the Soviets, then advancing American interests. After a tragedy, the beleaguered Hiroko moves to New York City to live with Ilse, who has divorced her awful husband. Hiroko is now in her 70s, Ilse in her 90s. The Burton dynasty has produced another reptilian creature: a daughter named Kim (just so we'll remember Kipling and his dreams of empire). This woman thoughtlessly commits a final, ghastly sin against Hiroko's family, based on race, self-interest and primitive stupidity. I could say that the first third of this novel is far more believable than the last two, or that the author stumbles when she attempts to create conversation between elderly women or Afghan tribesmen or American mercenaries. But the real problem is that "Burnt Shadows" is a novel of argument. Her argument is that the British and American empires, through their conscienceless colonialism (and particularly America's use of the bomb), are responsible for the very troubled world we live in today. After Kim Burton delivers the final coup de grace to Hiroko and her loved ones, Hiroko can only say, "You are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb." There's something quite wacky about that sentence. First, Kim Burton, outside of offering Hiroko a cup of hot chocolate, has been neither kind nor generous. Second, there aren't any "governments" that have dropped a second atomic bomb. There's only the United States. You can pick holes in this three-generational tale of white oppression, but you can't argue with deeply held beliefs. This is what a Pakistani novelist, Kamila Shamsie, believes. It's instructive to read this, on many levels.