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Literary Review
How California contains Iran
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PRATIK KANJILAL met Pico Iyer to talk about his latest book Abandon.
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R.V. MOORTHY
`WHEN we're confronted with the Other,' says Pico Iyer, `a part of us just wants to retreat into the known and close the door. That human impulse will never go away. On the other hand, the confrontation does at least open the possibility of understanding.'
Abandon, Iyer's second work of fiction, is an attempt to help forge that understanding between the West and Islam. It was written at a time when America's suspicion of the Muslim world was on the rise. In fact, the final version was put together on 9/11. The day the World Trade Centre towers came down, Iyer was busy proofing the manuscript, which had to be submitted immediately. More than a love story, the book was intended to be a parable of the centuries-long romance between the West and Islam. But then America queered the pitch, like it always does.
"I took this book to my rural retreat in Japan," says Iyer. "I was going to write about Iran, but California gatecrashed the party and took over." Rather involuntarily — and for the first time — Iyer found himself writing about America, the salad bowl in which he has lived most of his adult life.
Iyer is best known for literary explorations of the world's exotica — travel writing like Video Night in Kathmandu, for instance. In Abandon, he has changed his itinerary somewhat and elected to travel inwards. It is the first volume in what he hopes will be a series of fictional explorations of the ÈmigrÈ soul. Or, contrariwise, explorations of the place we call home. Yet, Iyer is still in search of the Other. It's just that now, he is looking for it in his own backyard, among the people who make up the rootless and freely transplantable culture of the future. The people walking the streets of Los Angeles or San Francisco, for instance.
The protagonist, John Macmillan, is a reclusive student of the 13th Century Sufi poet Rumi's works. He moves to California to get over an estrangement in England and falls, rather mystically, in love with what appears to be a typical Californian woman, complete with a nagging childhood neurosis. And then he discovers that she is actually Iranian. She is precisely the Other which America demonises with such indefatigable energy. At the same time, Macmillan sees that while America fights militant Islam worldwide, the bestselling poet in its independent bookshops is Rumi. "I keep thinking of the distinction we make between the New World and the Old World," muses Iyer, "forgetting that the New World is made up of all the Old Worlds. Distinctions are getting harder to make."
Iyer is also trying to correct an error of vision to which he contributed, perhaps unwittingly, in his days as a journalist. Twenty years ago, he used to write about world affairs at Time. He was one of the people who distil contemporary history and render it meaningful for the magazine's readers, one of the people who get all the big bylines. Today, Iyer has issues with the meaning that he made at the time, and is exploring a world far more complex than America would like to address, in which the Other is a constant, inescapable point of reference. "In 1983, the issues we covered week in and week out at Time were suicide attacks, the threat of radical Islam, the Beirut bombing," he says. "My feeling was that by fixating on these temporary geopolitical concerns, people were perhaps losing sight of a larger dialogue, even a romance, between Islam and the West."
The reportage of the recent U.S. attack on Iraq underscored the fact that the way we perceive contemporary politics is not very different from the way we take in an MTV video or an arcade game, "a fragmented explosion of moments that stand in the way of seeing what is going on." Abandon, which is written primarily for the American market, reminds the reader that there is more to the Islamic reality than the Pentagon's television warriors or Donald Rumsfeld's Beltway bandits can ever hope to fathom. "America is so ready to write off other parts of the world that are older and deeper," says Iyer. "There's a lot of ingenuity out there. I don't feel that way about Saddam Hussein, but Osama... he knows a lot more about America than America knows about him. Most cultures have a much more nuanced sense of America than the other way round."
Structurally, Abandon is an intriguing book. The beginning is vintage Iyer, exotic, observant, alert, following Macmillan as he searches for a lost Rumi text in Damascus. Ditto the ending, where Macmillan's quest for the truth, which loses its way in the expatriate Iranian community in Westwood, finally leads to a conundrum in the holy city of Qom, at Ayatollah Khomeini's shrine. Both follow the familiar, satisfying conventions of fiction, but the middle... Oh dear, yes, the middle. The middle is a vast desolation set in a remote wilderness of the spirit (or, more literally, of California) where nothing happens at all. At all, you understand? It can be fatiguing.
Iyer has used these long "moments of drift" as an extended metaphor for the vacuum of the spirit in California. "That's one reason why they're reaching out for Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism or Indian things — anything to import that sense of history and the ground beneath their feet," he says. "The beauty of California is that you can remake your life any day and be totally liberated from history, but that's also the burden of California."
These moments of drift are set in desolate places — a half-finished house in the mountains abandoned by the workers at night, for instance, or the Californian desert. Here, the culture-specific resonances of the idea of abandonment are explored. In America, people are abandoned by parents, lovers, children, and the result is neurosis. In West Asia (as in South Asia), "abandon" has positive nuances, suggesting liberation, even salvation. In the microcosmic world of Californian society, Macmillan finds both versions of reality living cheek by jowl. "Deserts all look the same," says Iyer, "but when you're driving across one you end up in Las Vegas or Palm Springs, gaudy apparitions. In Iran, the road leads to the shrine of Khomeini. Places seem superficially more similar in the global order but deep down, they are more different then ever before."
Right, time for the acid test, Occam's razor and other painful procedures. This book does not always live up to expectation. Its most serious flaw is that it has been written to deliver a strong political message: the need to resolve the West's neurosis about Islam. While this does not result in didacticism, it does reduce the main characters to rather ethereal principles and their relationships to the dry interaction of concerns or ideas. Two other criticisms may not be true for all readers. The depiction of mental illness will jade most Indian readers, but may be quite welcome to Americans, who might be reminded of a neighbour with a problem. As Iyer says, "California has many blessings, but psychological strength and sense of direction are not among them." Also, since most of the action is geographically limited and played out by a small cast of characters, readers will miss the acutely observed traveller's tales that Iyer is loved for. But, as the writer says, this was an experimental step in a new direction. In his forthcoming fiction titles, he will perhaps not be as tentative.
Iyer's next book is nonfiction. It recounts his travels in the poorest countries of the world, including Bolivia, Haiti, Yemen, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Tibet. But even this book has been written partly to correct the limited perspective of America, to gently remind its readers that there are competing realities out there. His next project, which is in the works right now, is again a novel about alternate realities. This time, the authorial voice will be that of a woman. "I haven't had a full-bodied male character in my books so far, and it would be interesting to look at such a man through the eyes of a woman," he says.
Iyer wants to keep experimenting, and the one area he is unlikely to touch again is America, the covert subject of his book about Iran. "America is just familiar enough to fail to hold my interest," he says. "England is so familiar that I can hardly bear the thought... I'll be busy finding ways to surprise myself." And to do that, he will go in search of what he believes human instinct recoils from: the Other in our midst.
Abandon: A Romance, Pico Iyer, Penguin India, 2003, (First published by Alfred A. Knopf), p.354, hardback, Rs. 450.
Pratik Kanjilal has translated Nirmal Verma's The Last Wilderness (Indigo, 2002) and is co-editor, The Little Magazine.
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