Book review
Blood and sand
By Peter Millar
The Times, London
September 25, 1999
James Buchan writes like a dream. Almost literally.
But he also knows his stuff. His years working in the Middle East as a
foreign correspondent for the Financial Times have brought home
a rich harvest in his latest book, A
Good Place to Die, which must be one of the most perceptive attempts
to understand the Iranian psyche ever undertaken in an English work of
fiction.
John Pitt, an English 18-year-old, travels to Iran in the spring of
1974, finds himself work as a school-teacher and ends up falling in love
with one of his pupils, who just happens to be the daughter of a general
in the air force of the Shah, already promised in an arranged marriage
to his aide-de-camp. Their flight from the Iranian establishment and into
the whirlwind of its destiny is an epic love story, littered with references
to Persian cultural traditions.
Here are two cultures attempting a fusion but destined to clash. As
the revolution of the ayatollahs sweeps the country, Pitt is separated
from his young wife - how can an Englishman be the true husband of a Shia
Muslim, the fundamentalists demand? The rest of his life is to be spent
seeking her and their infant daughter, through the horrors of imprisonment
and torture. Caught up in anti-Western frenzy, Pitt faces execution only
to end up as cannon fodder in the murderous war against Iraq.
The first-person storytelling is both paced and elegant, Buchan's prose
cutting between action, reflection and rich description to bring alive
both the exotic beauty and terrible brutality of the region. This is a
rare achievement in writing about a part of the world that too often is
reduced to a handful of clichés. Buchan maps out the tragedy of
modern Iran with sympathy and understanding and the ending has a perfect
bittersweet poignancy.
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