The Bones of Grace
Tahmima Anam
[Canongate]
The Bones of Grace, the ambitious third book in a loosely connected trilogy, is in essence a sprawling, epic love letter from Zubaida, a young adopted Bangladeshi palaeontologist, to Elijah, the waspy, wispy, concertedly quirky philosophy PhD student she meets and falls in love with at a Shostakovich concert while at Harvard. The love story at the centre at the book in some ways fails to convince. It is hard to believe that Elijah Strong (great-grandson to the original Indiana Jones), is a real person, and harder yet to believe that anyone could put up with him. The diaphanous romanticism of the relationship often tends towards the cloyingly sentimental. However, the depiction of Zubaida’s failing marriage to Rashid, her childhood sweetheart, is much more emotionally powerful. This is inextricably linked with her struggle to place herself within the world ordained for her; her search to find her birth family, and her obsession with Ambulocetus, a whale that once walked on land.
These plots serve as a nail on which to hang a much wider and ultimately remarkable book that spans many realities, encompassing and contrasting the privileged worlds of Harvard and the super-rich of Dhaka with the brutal, stark existence of Bangladesh’s most vulnerable and exploited people. These worlds are depicted vividly, deftly, and with a sensibility that is simultaneously sensitive and matter-of-fact: there is no sentimentality here. The book addresses horrific human rights abuses in the Bangladesh shipbreaking industry and the construction of the glittering skyscrapers studding the Dubai skyline; it turns to the war of Independence and its messy aftermath, the frailty and expendability of marginalised peoples in these worlds, and the complex issue of Bangladeshi identity, interwoven with that of Zubaida.
In this context, the heavy-handed and unrealistic depiction of her Anna Karenina-esque “grand passion” with Elijah makes sense: the need to fantasise and idealise a person, a life, an identity. And ultimately it doesn’t detract from this novel as an astonishing achievement: lyrical, linguistically gorgeous, upsetting, and wholly worth reading.
Words: Liza Cox
