THE geography of Afghanistan is a melodrama of mountains, caves and barren plains. The evidence of the country's violent history is obvious — a large population of amputees, an architecture of mortared roofs and shell-shocked walls. Anyone can tell you stories of offhand depredation. The women behind the cerulean burkas let you know that the horrors aren't over yet. Easy for even a casual visitor to grasp, at least superficially, Afghanistan is a difficult place for a serious writer. The lessons of Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz — that less is more when it comes to rendering brutality on a monstrous scale — have yet to be learned by most of those who hope to capture this country in literature. Yasmina Khadra's novel “The Swallows of Kabul” is thick with purple passages. Khaled Hosseini's two best-selling novels, “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” are little more than exotic potboilers. Perhaps that's why some of the most powerful recent writing about Afghanistan has appeared in travel books: Jason Elliot's “Unexpected Light” and, most impressively, Rory Stewart's understated account of his solitary walk across the country, “The Places In Between.” So far, the most intelligent fiction has kept a tight focus. Novels by Francesca Marciano (“The End of Manners”) and James Meek (“We Are Now Beginning Our Descent”) and Tom Bissell's wonderful short story “Death Defier” all feature Western journalists as protagonists, English-speakers whose encounters with Afghanistan refrain from any ambitious sweep. Nadeem Aslam, a Pakistani novelist who lives in England and has visited Afghanistan extensively, has now made his own bid for the fictional peaks. In “The Wasted Vigil,” he ranges across the country's ancient and modern history, punctuating his narrative with cross-cultural allusions. Unafraid of political complexity, he is also unflinching in his examination of depravity — of torture, rape and gore. Yet his writing also encompasses tenderness. Aslam's characters are intricately wounded and geographically diverse. Lara is a Russian who has been attacked with a tire iron for letting her feet point toward Mecca while sleeping amid a crowd of travelers. She has come to Afghanistan to find her long-lost brother, a soldier who is, she discovers, also a rapist. Casa, wounded in a trip-wired field of flintlock guns on tripods, is an Afghan orphan raised by Taliban jihadists in sadistic training camps. Marcus, a Briton who is missing a hand, lost his Afghan wife to the Taliban, and their daughter to the Soviet invasion. David, an American, is a former spy whose brother disappeared during the fighting in Vietnam. They all come together in Marcus's house in the countryside near Jalalabad. It is a noisy house, and for a particularly bizarre reason. Marcus's now deceased wife, forced by the Taliban to cut off her husband's hand in front of a crowd at a local stadium, went mad in the aftermath and nailed their extensive book collection to the ceiling. The books often fall down with thuds and thwacks. It is also a dirty house because Marcus was forced to put mud on the walls to hide painted images of lovers that had been banned by the Taliban. And it is a suggestive house, filled with strange scents, because Marcus's defunct perfume factory lies under the ground nearby. As if this weren't unsettling enough, a giant relic, an ancient stone Buddha's head, was uncovered during the excavation and left in place on the factory floor. As the novel unfolds, Aslam meticulously includes all the documented savagery of Afghanistan: land mines (especially those that look like toys, designed to lure children); inventively vicious rapes (of girls, of a main character, of a historical figure); rough public justice, including a stoning and the amputation; warlords and their intractable feuds;misguided Americans and their obstinate meddling; abominable methods of torture, inflicted by both warlords and Americans. There is moral complication on display in “The Wasted Vigil,” but this novel is more expansive than his previous ones, documenting several decades intensely and several centuries tangentially. It seeks to reveal the psyche not just of one rural village or one immigrant community but of Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and Afghanistan. The revelations throughout are artful, at times carrying a dramatic emotional impact. But Aslam's unexpectedly florid writing, as in the following passages, often makes reading this novel painful. Perhaps Afghanistan, a place of extremes, invites this overblown style. It certainly seduced Aslam, a writer of considerable talent, into thinking he could render its titanic tragedies by pushing his language into operatic effusion. __
