Yumna Kasssab has a magnificent understanding of the soft machinery of community power.

Yumna Kasssab has a magnificent understanding of the soft machinery of community power.

We will never learn the name of Amir’s homeland (“his country is simply an area bordered by a line”),nor the affluent city that Jamila has left. Like Mohsin Hamid’sExit West,these details are missing so that we might furnish them instead. How we fill those gaps – the assumptions we make,the images we evoke – is telling,and the source of this novel’s subtle power. As we conjure others,we reveal ourselves.

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But so much is withheld fromThe Lovers – so much remains gossamer,gauzy and dreamlike – that it’s hard to see Amir and Jamila as much more than archetypes:feckless rich girl,earnest,life-hardened boy. There is no heat in their desire. We seldom see the streets they walk,the beds they sleep in,the meals they eat,the faces they wear,the bodies they touch. The couple are reduced – confined – to their yearning.

At their best,these lovelorn passages have an incantatory music – the insistent rhythms of a beating heart (and of classical Arab poetry). But stretches of Kassab’s third book feel cloyingly repetitive. All the fables and omens – bewitching though they are – swirl around unmoored. Perhaps this is her intention:to mimic the whorls and torments of new love. ButThe Lovers is most alive when it is most tangible.

As Kassab showed in her last novel – the myth-puncturingAustraliana – she has a magnificent understanding of the soft machinery of community power:gossip and shame,enculturated violence and wilful myopia,the well-patrolled borders of class.

As Amir and Jamila pine,hushed stories emerge around them – tales of women shunned,judged and abandoned,of bruises nobody is willing to see. Sometimes,Kassab shows us,love can be another word for cruelty. Sometimes the stories we hide behind reveal our deepest truths. After all,“fact and fiction use the same words”.

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