In a Kashmiri apple orchard, a young fugitive from the Indian army’s cruel oppressions spots a snake that has ‘mistaken its tail for a separate creature’ and started to devour itself. Imran, a.k.a. ‘Moscow’, will later break away from the equally barbaric Islamist insurgents who prey on his rage and grief, flee to Pakistan, and there meet the other protagonists of this fifth novel by Nadeem Aslam. Although The Golden Legend has plenty of passages of exposition and argument, Aslam shines above all as the fabricator of radiant images that tell a story in themselves. That self-consuming serpent — an ouroboros in Greek myth — here embodies not only the cycle of birth and death but the self-destructive urges of a brazen era that eats itself up with bigotry and bitterness.
In the city of Zamana — a thinly disguised Lahore, renamed to signify (in Urdu) ‘the age’ or ‘the times’ — the married architects Nargis and Massud have built not only a house crammed with books and beauty but a ‘small nation of love’.
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