Fiction can embody international political connections as flesh-and-blood family histories.

Evidence

Burnt Shadows is shot through with the poignancy accompanying the loss of the life-giving homes—geographical, cultural, and personal—that characters leave behind them. In one way, loss is an inevitable consequence of the passage of time. Different figures have different attitudes to the past: some seek to flee it and its limitations, whereas others hold it fast or feel nostalgic yearning for it. Yet traces of the past always persist in the present, whether through the cherished memories of lost loved ones such as Konrad Weiss, incinerated at Nagasaki, or in the incalculable way the consequences of national strategic interests play out over time. Like Hiroko, one can seek connections between past and present (and between people and times) despite all obstacles, or one can settle into the deceptively comforting yet deadly complacencies of patriotism, as to differing degrees do Harry Burton and his daughter, Kim. International connections take on flesh-and-blood form in the second generation. Raza is half-Japanese and half-Pakistani (his father, Sajjad, having had to shed the status of an Indian Muslim to take up residence in Karachi on the other side of the new border). Harry Burton is the product of a German mother and an English father but eventually becomes an American and, as a spy and subsequently a private-security operative, a gatekeeper of U.S. interests and a functionary of neocolonialism. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 423

Categorization

Category: Craft and Method

• XREF: Relevant to reading Hamid’s and Naqvi’s protagonists as embodiments of transnational Muslim identity—Morey’s method of reading character lineage as political allegory transfers directly.