Cry freedom

Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that readers may question that definition. Set in Dacca (now Dhaka), it is about the emergence of Bangladesh as a state independent of Pakistan after the savage civil war of 1971. Philip Hensher has drawn on memory and history — family history and ‘real’ history. Historical characters, notably Sheik Mujib, the courageous and civilised Bangladeshi leader, mingle with semi- and wholly fictional ones. The joins are seamless. Finishing the book, I was startled to realise that Hensher, an Englishman, had written a novel without a single English character in it, and that I, at least, had been wholly convinced.

The narrator is Hensher’s husband, Zaved Mahmood, now a human rights lawyer for the UN, once a chubby, charming Bengali child, the youngest in the family and the object of adoration for his multitudinous aunts.