Does a novel need a factchecker? Not for the kinds of truths that Amin, the scruffy protagonist of Hossein Asgari’s second novel, Desolation, holds dear. He accosts a young Iranian-Australian writer in an Adelaide cafe and announces that he has a story for him: “It’s a true story, not one of those made-up, pointless whatever it is that you people write.” The writer is sceptical – “I have no interest in a true story, if such a thing exists” – but he listens.
The writer is never named and Amin is not the stranger’s real name but, over a series of meetings in parks and cafes, Amin tells the writer his story. The bulk of the novel follows Amin’s life in post-revolutionary Iran, in the aftermath of the war with Iraq, and is narrated in the third person by a writer. But which one? Asgari is an Iranian-Australian writer who lives in Adelaide and he dares the reader to identify him in or with the narrative. Desolation flirts with the narrative conventions of autofiction but has loftier preoccupations than the relationship between the author and narrator. During one of their last meetings, Amin tells the writer: “You can add whatever you want to my story as long as you’re telling the truth even when you lie.”
A storyteller who lies in service of truth and a writer who doesn’t believe in true stories: this is the framing for Desolation, a bleak and digressive coming-of-age story. It is inhabited by many doubles, starting with Amin and the writer, and the plot is advanced through a puzzle of nested stories and coincidences, further bedevilling a reader inclined to factcheck its truths. Our storytellers are unreliable, both because they are forgetful and because they are untrustworthy and changeable; dreams, religious belief, romantic rapture and a capacity to be transformed by art keep the characters from a rational grasp of the world and hold Desolation at one remove from realism.
We follow Amin through his adolescent infatuation with his neighbour Parvaneh, whose family exudes bourgeois cosmopolitanism. He becomes fascinated by western culture and develops a half-formed ambition to travel to the west to study, inspired by his older brother Hamid.
But the sudden, violent death of Hamid ruptures this reverie. Hamid died in an event that the reader can factcheck: the obliteration of an Iran Air flight in 1988 by a US guided missile, an accident that killed 290 people. Amin, in his grief and inchoate rage, experiments with new identities and renounces the dilettantism of his illicit dalliances with Parvaneh.
When Amin undertakes his compulsory military service he finds some temporary solace: “He slept, ate, and was worked to death: the kind of break he had been waiting for all these years.” Still impressionable, and still an utter romantic about love and friendship, Amin finds himself in the orbit of militant Islamists. His rage, his new friends tell him, is holy. Amin is unconvinced – yet he is drawn against his doubts to meet an al-Qaida official in Pakistan. The hand of fate deals the naive young man another disastrous suite of coincidences and explosions, and he must eventually flee Iran.
This is the weary man, a compound of grief and desire, his rage exhausted, who confronts the writer in the cafe. He has been a student, a restaurateur, a businessman and, finally, he moves to Adelaide where he “started doing the one thing that made sense to him: nothing.” Asgari thus presents Amin as the quintessential Dostoevskian antihero.
Desolation plumbs themes of exile and alienation explored by another novelist and close reader of Dostoevsky based in Adelaide: JM Coetzee, whose influence is apparent in the novel’s style, which is at once sparse and richly suggestive. It’s exciting to read a new work of Australian fiction with such an ambitious agenda, one that eschews the received tropes and facile morality of so much contemporary literary fiction. As the title of this novel presages, the ironies of Desolation are bitter indeed and, if there are lessons to be learned, none of them offer redemption.
Readers who seek a documentary account of life in Iran in the late 1980s and early 1990s may be disappointed by Desolation, a stylish novel concerned with truths that exist beyond the grasp of the historian, and indeed the factchecker. It is a work preoccupied with love, truth and the cruelty of fate. This, by implication, is the kind of inquiry that can only be undertaken by storytellers and, as such, Desolation is an accomplished affirmation of the necessity of the novelist’s craft.
Desolation by Hossein Asgari is out now (Ultimo Press, $34.99)
