I will be the first to say that Fidali’s Way is out of my comfort zone. It is not about relationships, women, motherhood or infidelity. It is not about cycling. Nor is it written by a woman, nor is it about popular culture, nor is it set in Manhattan.
But part of my reason for doing this project is to make myself feel a little uncomfortable. Fidali’s Way was a top-seller at our school’s annual book fair, due entirely to the fact that a selector on the Adult Fiction committee enthusiastically praised it, practically thrusting it into the shoppers’ hands, with the stern warning, “You will love this book.” (This selector, by the way, is one of those people of whom I am in awe, reading a book a day and then some. She and I rarely like the same books, I hasten to add.) Set in Pakistan, and the Himalayas, it is about Nick Sunder, a disaffected American lawyer who has been backpacking the dangerous region for some time, attempting to escape his internal demons. After his girlfriend is found murdered in the Tribal Regions, Nick is fingered for the crime and thus begins the saga. Losing his money, passport, backpack as he attempts to escape the Wild Wild West of Pakistan and Afghanistan, he meets two strangers, Ghulam and Fidali, natives to the area, who mysteriously help the unenlightened American as he negotiates his way, identity-less, toward Indian-controlled Kashmir.
There is nothing easy about this journey, obviously, and Mastras does a more than admirable job of describing the punishing landscape of the Tribal Areas and the Hindu Kush (home to Bin Laden, the Taliban, and many other sociopaths) and unbelievable beauty of the Himalayan region. More than once I felt physically sickened reading of the taxation on the bodies of Sunder and his companions Ghulam and Fidali, but I was also enormously struck by Mastras’s confident prose, especially in his description of the pristine vale of Kashmir, and in his commentary on the political situation there. Sentences like, “In the end, however, so long as influential nations of the world failed to find the will to intervene with sufficient persuasion, the savagery for the people of Kashmir would endure” would normally fail in that Creative Writing 101 adage of show-don’t-tell, but it feels entirely appropriate here.
There is so much to admire about this novel: the gripping nature of the tale (bordering on the “thriller” genre), the examination of the many facets of Islam and fundamentalism, and the larger philosophical questions which are posed by the Kashmiri smuggler Ghulam, standing in for Mastras himself, I suspect. What is less compelling or believable are the romantic relationships, which feel forced and showy. The so-called “beautiful girlfriend” who was murdered is a pretty despicable person, and it’s hard to feel that Nick could feel that much attachment to a woman who seemed to spend most of her time alive insulting him. The other main female character, Aysha, is also a little bit of a cardboard cut-out: a woman doctor whose beauty seems to stun the men with whom she encounters into silence or submission or both.
Normally, this would irritate me, but I was so enthralled by the storyline, and the characters of Ghulam and Fidali, that I was willing to overlook all of that. The novel comes to a somewhat depressing conclusion, but a realistic and timely one. By the novel’s conclusion, I felt lucky to read of this magical and doomed area of the world, mostly so I wouldn’t have to go there. Of course, by the time you read this, there will be about 30,000+ soldiers who will experience it (or places nearby) firsthand in the not too distant future.
Bravo George Mastras: a thrilling debut, and I look forward to your sophomore creation.
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