Having read and loved all Kamila Shamsie’s novels, I was thrilled to get my hands on her latest, Best of Friends. Even better, the blurb suggested it was going to be a read similar to Kartography, one of Shamsie’s earlier novels and one of those dearest to me. Kartography was about close and intense friendships between/among children, which ripened as they turned into teens and then into adults, and the relationship between their parents too, against a backdrop of Karachi which combined love and loyalty and violence and recklessness in a heady brew.
Best of Friends also begins with the deep, abiding friendship of two 14 year olds, Maryam and Zahra, which has been a constant in their lives since they were little. The first part of the story is set in 1988 Karachi, when Benazir Bhutto was elected Prime Minister and when the country seemed poised to enter into a whole new era. The second part of the novel is set in London 2019, 30 years later, where both girls are now super successful ladies in their own right, Zahra heading UK’s Centre for Civil Liberties and something of a celebrity, and Maryam who is a
leading figure in the UK tech scene […] a founding partner at Venture Future, a leading early-stage technology and internet VC firm in London
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a long way away from the 14 year olds who were summoned to their headmistresses office, along with their parents, for accepting a lift and going on a car ride one night after a party with 2 young men not known to their families. Their world has changed, but the novel questions whether the world has changed all that much.
This second part in London is subdivided into spring, summer, winter, and then London 2020. Spring sets up the scene for how the girls have fared and transformed, but how their friendship has remained powerful and steadfast; summer sees changes: the Khan family have packed up and returned to Pakistan after 30 years in UK, and old enemies re-enter Zahra and Maryam’s lives. Winter sees the resolution to these shake ups in their UK lives. Throughout most of the novel, I found myself feeling that although I was enjoying the read – it would be impossible to even imagine not enjoying a Kamila Shamsie read! – I was not as wowed by it as by her previous novels, it was delightful but not as impactful somehow. The first part set in Pakistan seemed so much stronger and more vivid than the London parts, which were interesting but not riveting. And then, I was thrilled to find the true Shamsie power emerging in the last stages of the book, the subtleties, the powerplays, the understated intensity of emotions, all that magnificent undertow which has characterised so many Shamsie novels. Yes, it was all there; I just wished more of it was there throughout. But that re-emergence of the darkness and despair which Shamsie knows how to write and wield with such telling effect really gave the end am impetus and tension which some other parts of the novel did not have. Perhaps others would argue it was necessary to build up to that, the rest was the process of the build up and could not have been foregone….perhaps. Far be it from me to refrain from any exonerating explanation possible, when it comes to such a favourite author of mine.
But there were always shining pieces of prose throughout the novel. The gender observations, for example, were beautifully made, marking temporal and geographical contexts and changes. In 1988 Karachi, the 14 year old Maryam finds her body is changing, and with that, people’s (particularly men’s) treatment of her.
She was beginning to understand why men and women walked so differently, stood so differently. Men strode, owning the world. Women walked with smaller steps, watched and watchful.
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In 2019 London, Zahra now in her 40s, thinks
It was a triumph, if you were a woman, to move between visibility and invisibility that suited you, rather than being scrutinised and ignored in equal, infuriating measure.
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Although Maryam and Zahra have bedded down into lives in the UK, highly successful expatriate lives, they remain always deeply infused with all things Pakistani; their circle of friends, their reference points, their yardsticks, their preferences and values. Through them, Shamsie manages to convey eloquently the feeling of outsidership that many migrants feel, a cliched sentiment, but in a very fresh way:
But still there had persisted this knowledge of the thinness of her relationship to this country. ‘Home’ had once been a city of millions, then it had shrunk to the size of a house in Primrose Hill.
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Shamsie flags up how we feel at home in a place where we can read other people effortlessly and with depth of understanding, and that’s why home had been a city of millions for Maryam, where she could accurately place anyone and everyone. On returning to Karachi after each summer in London,
She was filled with the satisfaction of being with a group of people and knowing the words and tone that would produce exactly the effect you wanted. This is what was meant by ‘belonging’ and ‘home’ […]
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In London by comparison, she was embarrassed that she had not realised that what she deemed helpfulness of shop assistance in London repeatedly asking,
Can I help you with anything?’, “is the English way of saying, ‘Buy something or leave.’ […] Back in Karachi, she’d prided herself on her skill at reading subtexts.
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The sense of being an outsider, as Shamsie depicts so elegantly, is compounded by lack of knowledge which has currency, and at the same time, conversely, having knowledges which have no currency, in a given place.
In all, Best of Friends is a wonderful novel, but ardent admirer of Shamsie’s work though I was and remain, I wonder if the prism of best friends is the best choice for the other political issues she was framing in this novel. Not that it doesn’t work….just, some other prism may work much better. Still, I am already eagerly anticipating and impatiently awaiting Shamsie’s next novel!
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