Zia Haider Rahman

First published by American company Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014, In The Light of What We Know was written in upstate New York at Yaddo, an artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York that offers residencies to enables artists to produce new, or finish current projects.

The novel tells the story of two South Asian men, united by a history, friendship and a passion for mathematics, but divided forever by social class and life experiences. The narrator of the novel is the child of an affluent and well-regarded Pakistani family. His father is a physics don and the family begin the novel based in Princeton. When his father moves to Oxford, the narrator also relocates to a luxury home in the wealthy London suburb of Kensington. His friend Zafar has a very different life story: the product of his mother’s rape by a Pakistani soldier during the war for independence, he is raised in an immigrant family who live in poverty across London. Both – one through privilege and one through merit – earn a place to study Mathematics at Oxford University, where they meet and become friends, before drifting apart following graduation. The narrator opts for a career as an investment banker in London, while Zafar is determined to further his study, moves to the United States and achieves a law degree. In September 2008, Zafar reappears on the narrator’s doorstep in London. The reunion intersects with moments of crisis for both characters: personally the narrator’s marriage is near-collapse, while professionally he is scape-goated for his role in the financial crisis; Zafar meanwhile has suffered a form of personal breakdown. The narrative unfolds as both recount memories, the path that has led them to this shared moment of crisis, as well as the wider crises experienced globally in the first decades of the new millennium. At the heart of the story they tell is the history of their friendship that culminates in the betrayal of one man by the other.

In The Light of What We Know has been favourably compared to literary classics including Heart of Darkness, Brideshead Revisited and The Great Gatsby. Like Conrad’s tale, the novel is told from the centre of London as a series of stories by a single person who has travelled the world but is not at rest, and draws us to the issues that have come to define the dark heart of civilisation in the new millennium through a range of disjointed and personal tales of political and economic conflicts at home and overseas. The cross-class friendship between the narrator and Zafar also reveals tensions in understanding, differing experiences of home, exile and belonging that speak on wider levels to the contemporary condition. Although both men are South Asian Muslims and meet studying mathematics, what emerges as the novel develops is the shaping influence of social class on their very different identities and experiences. Class is finally presented as the final border, one as significant as geography, career or nationality. Haider Rahman writes with a painfully acute eye for British class consciousness. Sharing concerns about social class and an enigmatic and mysterious protagonist, the novel draws on these literary predecessors to offer a new engagement with themes central to the world after 2001. As a post-9/11 novel, In The Light Of What We Know is concerned with the consequences of a series of ‘ripples crises’ that spread across the world in subsequent years. Zafar notes the changes he experiences personally and politically, commenting that the attacks have made him visible, the subject of public gaze, and the subject of special attention at airports.

Concerned with ‘the breaking of nations’, Haider Rahman’s encyclopaedic analysis of the first years of the twenty first century. The novel offers unique unravelling of geo-political and interpersonal tensions, to suggest that history and the novel require reading both forwards and backwards in order to appreciate the subtle complexities and connections between experiences. Taking in crises of the developing and developed worlds – the financial crisis of the West as set against the tensions of the Afghanistan war in the East – Haider Rahman weaves politics and fiction to profile characters whose lives are as complicated as the social, economic and political issues they confront. Set against the context of a series of personal, national and global crises, the novel draws on the author’s insider view on investment banking and human rights. Haider Rahman jokingly argued that he is only ‘67.5% similar to Zafar, before conceding that ‘of course there are similarities […] but everyone writes what they know.’ Zafar appears to the narrator in 2008, at the beginning of the global financial crisis. The novel mobilises the crash to offer a personal dimension to financial lives, offering bankers a back-story and the experience of scape-goating that occurred in the months following the crash. Moving from Oxford and London, Islamabad and Kabul and then New York, this truly global novel considers in invisible connections that bind the contemporary world, especially money and power.

The dialects that are collectively employed to interrogate the nature of philosophical enquiry and the ability of language to capture contemporary reality. In his Observer review, Philip French argues that the novel is a contemporary version of ‘what Henry James called a “large, loose, baggy monster” – but for our century’, while Rebecca Mead remarked that it reads like ‘a 21st century novel written with the ambition of scope of a 19th century novel, and bearing the seriousness of purpose of a 20th century one’. Saturated with epigraphs at the opening of each section, the novel mobilises these features to show how the narrator organises his own thinking as well we drawing out the thinking of the author of the notebooks from which they are drawn. Drawing on a range of Asian and English authors, these epigraphs function as signposts as well as the site for significant revelations later in the novel. Refusing to submit to binary oppositions that continue to define the contemporary period - whether Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, East and West, home and exile, or personal and political – the novel is, in the worlds of James Woods’ glowing review in The New Yorker, ‘what Salman Rushdie once called an “everything novel.” It is wide-armed, hospitable, disputatious, worldly, cerebral. Ideas and provocations abound on every page.’

Haider Rahman injects every sentence with so much information that the overall experience of reading the novel can be as much exhausting as exhilarating. In this novel of digressions, readers must be willing to wander down long side roads along the main narrative path. Narrative diversions are taken up, then dropped, and then resumed later by different characters, making the text challenging to map. However, as the novel reminds us, ‘Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings. That’s what maps mysteriously do: They obliterate information to provide some information at all.’ Challenging the possibility of mapping the contemporary, the novel offers both the act of writing and the role of fiction as appropriate metaphors for lived experiences of the new millennium. This is a novel concerned with the need to remember and re-tell the gaps in history, to gather stories and evidence as means of understanding the world today. Inspired by Kierkegaard's dictum – ‘life can only be understood backwards; the trouble is, it has to be lived forwards’ – an obsession with the ‘Incompleteness Theorem’ pervades the novel. Concerned with the nature of truth – essentially, that there are things that are true that cannot be proven to be true – the theorem becomes a useful framework through which to understand the contrasting and conflicting accounts of the two friends, as well as wider historical, social, political and economic developments that define the early twenty-first century.

Perhaps most significantly, given its consideration of the many upheavals that have characterised the teenage years of the twenty-first century, In The Light of What We Know is not a pessimistic representation, but one characterised by hope and optimism for the future. Although the framework of the narrative is domestic and familiar, built around a returning friend and rekindled friendship fortunes of two former classmates who are reunited unexpectedly in London, the scope of the approach is ambitious. Marrying contemporary concerns to offer a global overview of the engagements and tensions that have come to characterise the contemporary period, Haider Rahman underscores the potential of the novel in the contemporary period as a form not only characterised by vitality and agency, but one which is capable of representing the conflicts and concerns of the new millennium.