The author of this book (as the back-jacket informs us) is a former Rhodes Scholar, a lawyer, a policy instructor, a legal scholar, a university teacher, a reform consultant, a successful doctoral candidate and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Such an impressive résumé signals a brilliant and articulate mind. And these gifts are indeed in evidence in Osama Siddique’s first ‘novel’. Yet the inverted commas are necessary, because this is something of a cautionary tale.
Snuffing Out the Moon is a large, imaginative work of prose, but it is not recognisable as a novel. Perhaps there is no accurate word to describe it, but the analogy that came to mind as I was reading, was of the type of joke we call ‘a dad joke.’ A dad joke is so very knowing about what is funny that it does not even begin to be funny.
Likewise, this book evinces an acute knowledge of everything that goes into fiction—characters, plots, settings, themes—but it does not even begin to be a novel. I do not mean it is a bad piece of work. It is more akin to a blueprint for a work, done up ever so lavishly, which remains a completely separate entity from the work itself.
Turbulent times
As you can imagine, a lot of lavishing must be on display for this impersonation to even have occurred. There are six separate storylines here, ranging from 2084 BCE to 2084 CE, that play out over a common geography—the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. However, nothing knits these stories together into the one purported novel. Every storyline is continually interrupted by another, with a structure that goes forward in time, and then backward, and then forward again, serving no narrative purpose, except to assure us (with literary knowingness) that we are reading a single work.
Yet the malaise is not just a matter of structure. The dialogue in this book is affected from start to finish, through all history as it were. Not only in a king’s court in medieval times, but also in a jungle hide—more in a futuristic age, we find the very same over-produced cadences, as in this snippet: “Exiles as they were, like us, like yourself, they faced a future of acute uncertainty and privation. Buddhamitra—for that was the esteemed monk’s name—lived through some highly turbulent times and I find his observations quite poignant, for we also face something that is not dissimilar.” The more this style repeats, the more we realise that it is really just the author’s own scholarly voice, serving as a place-holder for dialogue that never actually appeared.
This lack of finish, or rather this omission to begin, which is reflected in the structure and the dialogue, prevents the book’s characters from taking life. Potentially, they are powerful characters in compelling situations—a young man rejecting the ways of the great city of Mohenjodaro, but in love with a young woman besotted with that world; two pranksters trying to con the emperor Jahangir; a monk meditating on the nature of evil even as war approaches; an old woman up against a labyrinthine and conniving legal system, and various others. But since they are not given the space to breathe, they cannot abide with us long after we have finished reading, as vivid characters do.
Authority and dissent
Ultimately, Snuffing Out the Moon suffers from an anxiety to do too much, a fairly typical issue with first novels. One has the feeling that the author, eager to ‘prove himself’, did not want to leave out any promising storyline that had occurred to him.
Typically, the demands of the novel form exercise a natural restraint on this itch. In Siddique’s case, the ingenuity and imaginative power that he clearly possesses have worked against him, enabling him to ignore those demands and yet enjoy the illusion of succeeding. Because he has these powers, one might reasonably expect a great novel from him in the future.
Meanwhile, this book, full of themes of authority, faith and dissent, yields this ironic moral: that an author, unless he surrenders in humility before the authority of fiction, cannot lay his hands on it, not even to do damage to it.
A novelist, the author’s most recent book is The Persecution of Madhav Tripathi .
