The Wish Maker

By Ali Sethi

Reviewed by Fatema Ahmed - 23 July 2009

Continental drift

The Wish Maker arrives with pre-publication blurbs by two Pakistani writers, who praise its take on contemporary Pakistan, and by an American novelist born in the former Soviet Union, who praises it as an "example of the new global novel". Elsewhere, the author's epigraph, taken from Middlemarch, nods to an older model: "The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes."

In its first chapter, Ali Sethi's debut novel justifies the praise, confidently introducing us to its social and political world. The narrator, Zaki Shirazi, is studying in America and has returned to Lahore to attend the wedding of his slightly older cousin Samar. The two cousins grew up together in their grandmother's house and Zaki's mother is organising the wedding. She has been widowed since soon after her son's birth, and edits a feminist magazine of which her mother-in-law disapproves.

Sethi is good at describing place; he rarely sounds like a travel writer fleshing out everything he sees in implausibly exquisite detail. This is Zaki's first visit home since going away and the mild disorientation that he experiences makes him an interesting guide. On the drive from the airport he is struck by the anonymous - advertising hoardings and the main road - rather than anything that could be described as "vibrant". Once he gets home, we meet his bedridden grandmother, his prosperous aunts ("the sisters were inside the boom") and his activist mother. The contradiction between public conversation and private, liberal behaviour is taken for granted: the family servant who has recently been on pilgrimage to Mecca watches religious television programmes while Zaki is sent out to buy alcohol for the wedding.

The novel's central problem is that, after setting up this world, the narrative retreats into the past, returning to the present of the opening chapter only four pages from the very end. For nearly 400 pages in between we learn the backstories of everyone to whom we have just been introduced. The most difficult aspect of choosing to structure the book this way is that Sethi deprives us of Zaki the adult narrator, as the sections dealing with his grandmother's childhood and the story of his parents' meeting and brief marriage are seen through their eyes. It comes close to being a brief history of Pakistan; there is no sense that these are stories Zaki has absorbed and is passing on.

The Wish Maker is mainly concerned with the adolescence of Zaki and the more outgoing Samar against the background of 1990s politics, but here Zaki is not so much a narrator as a narrative device. Though many first-person novels rely on a narrator whose passivity allows them to observe more colourful characters, Zaki never reflects on his relationship with Samar or with his mother. After pursuing a boy she likes, Samar is sent away to her father's village. Zaki accuses his mother of being "a half-baked liberal" for going along with this, but neither subject is mentioned again.

Zaki is an unconvincing narrator of his own life because there doesn't seem to be any need for him to be telling this story, even to himself. He is only in his early twenties, too close to events to reflect on them. When he tries, his thoughts are too close to waffle: "The difficulties of adolescence are the first of their kind. There is nothing like them in the chanciness of childhood, just as there is nothing, no resonance or meaning, in the sayings of those who have crossed the waters and speak now exhortingly as from the shore."

The perspective that living abroad has given him would be an excellent reason for reflection, but this aspect of the story is frustratingly underdeveloped. Zaki's orientation at his liberal arts college in Massachusetts is one of the most enjoyable passages of the novel and allows Sethi gently to mock the eclecticism of his main character and his sense of entitlement. Zaki thrives in his new environment, writing papers on "the discursive space allotted to Other cultures in the American media", and becoming a student journalist and an activist in ways that would make his mother proud. All this, however, is told in fast summary towards the end - a late and uncomfortable reminder that this is The Wish Maker's most successful strand.

The author, who was born in Lahore, went to university in America and has now returned to Lahore, has mentioned in interviews that the most common American misconception of Pakistan is that it is a Middle Eastern country. Long stretches of this novel, with its detailed descriptions of Pakistani politics and Hindi films, read like an attempt to correct that view. The Wish Maker's didactic aims smother the far more interesting coming-of-age novel inside it that is struggling to get out, but perhaps Sethi will write this in the future.