In her first novel, Justine Hardy relies on a time-honored premise to shape the plot: The Arrival of the Outsider. In this case, the outsider is a young British journalist named Hal Copeman, and the place is Kashmir.

At first, Hal's visit is filled with purpose and direction: he is to interview Gracie Singh, an old Englishwoman who, since the death of her Indian husband, has lived among the Kashmiri in a boathouse called the Wonder House. Hal's introduction to Kashmir is also our own, and Hardy's vivid prose is a worthy guide. At one point, Hal asks about the meaning of the word asal. "It means beautiful, pretty, lovely, anything that is good," he is told. "We use it so much in my language that it is like a common call."

The asal in Hardy's book is present on every page—in itself, an accomplishment for a first novel. We see the "ice skirt" that surrounds the Wonder House in the winter, and the old transistor of Suriya's radio, hung with a strip of cotton on the side of the dunga; we smell the "crushed cardamom and the musk of coriander seeds" that fill the boat before dinner.

The journalist's visit, however, falls during a time that threatens to rupture this beauty: it is 1999, and Musharraf has just overthrown the Pakistani government. There are soldiers everywhere. Irfan, Gracie's young neighbor, has just run away to join a band of Islamic insurgents. The tone of the plot is pitched very high; it is difficult for any book to maintain such intensity without veering off into melodrama, and The Wonder House is no exception. Tension quickly tumbles into nostalgia and sentimentality. The interview between Hal and Gracie gives way to reminiscences about England. Hal falls in love with Gracie's surrogate granddaughter, Lila.

If this all sounds a little complicated, it sort of is. If it sounds unlikely—well, Hardy's novel is not exactly farfetched; she has, after all, chosen to set her characters within a time of strife, and it is inevitable that violence and passion should become features of their day-to-day lives. Yet, even if each point in the novel contains its own internal logic, the different episodes do not always cross or culminate in a satisfying way. The plot comes to seem loose and aimless, and ultimately, this gives the events a tinge of implausibility.

The problem is exacerbated by Hardy's detached approach to her characters. The Wonder House opens with a fascinating group of people that seems to burst with the potential for a good story. There is Gracie, the old English widow; her surrogate daughter Suriya, a mute; Lila, Suriya's tragically beautiful daughter; Irfan, the conflicted young man; Hal, the lonely journalist. Rather than developing these characters, however, Hardy's writing tends to fall back on more concrete material: the narrative often lingers more on mundane accounts of teatime than on the characters' motivations. When we do get a moment of introspection, often it is of a very general nature: Irfan, at one point, asks: "Do you really believe that Allah wants us to carry the gun and to kill in his name?"

It is worth noting that Hardy, throughout most of her career, has herself worked as a journalist. There is much of the journalist's political mindset at work in this novel, and, while the author's viewpoints are rooted in real passion, they often come at the expense of more nuanced fiction. When Lila, early in the novel, is raped by soldiers on the street, her uncle responds by asking: "What did you do?" "What did I do?" responds Lila, enraged. "I am a woman, that is all that I did."

It is clear that Hardy cares deeply about the place and the people portrayed in her writing. A balance still needs to be struck, however, between writing about the material and letting the material speak for itself. The characters often become flat beneath the weight of the author's pen: Irfan is less a boy than he is a personified indictment of religious violence. If indictment is indeed Hardy's aim, however, the testament of a well-rounded character would have been more compelling than a stiffly constructed composite.

Fortunately, Hardy is far more successful in her portrayal of Kashmir itself. She seems to relax when describing the landscape: the writing is allowed to breathe, and readers can sense for themselves the beauty of the place. What remains is to tie all these beautiful moments together into the larger elements of the book—the characters, the plot arcs—so that we can truly experience Kashmir in the same way that the author has.

 

Catherine Tung is a senior in Dudley House.