Joseph's Box by Suhayl Saadi

Since Modernists began to write about absurd lives as metaphors challenging thought (those ever reliable grand narratives) a lot of us have come to find comfort in the reliably unreliable nature of existence, and as books like Joseph's Box show, we have come, to an extent, to require real life to be absurd. Absurdity is in a way, the new Realism. While the absurd or fantastical is still taken in metaphorical senses, it now takes its place mundanely and comfortably in a lot of contemporary novels as the everyday, teaching and allowing characters to understand the complications (existential or otherwise) of real life, rather than challenging it. Now that we know that disorder and coincidence rules, the place of the absurd, the unusual and the damned strange is presented as a comforting presence to guide us through this new and shiny thing called life. This means that the puzzle narrative would have been perfect for Saadi's unusual story, as it provides the frame on which absurdity may act, complimenting its intriguing ability to reveal and paradoxically, to clarify.

The reason we enjoy a good Absurdist novel is because of a thread of order that runs through the work, as it is by defying this structure that the chaos is thrown into sharp relief. One would imagine that a puzzle narrative, with the clearly outlined path of challenge, discovery and solution, would provide this order. Good absurdist writers, Haruki Murakami for example, create multilayered, reality-bending narrative puzzles which the reader will pursue with passion, while entwining the lives of their characters tenderly with the puzzle itself, so that this passion is one of the heart, not just the mind. What Saadi seems to have done which Murakami doesn't, is to use the puzzle narrative (in this case embodied in a puzzle box discovered floating in the Clyde River by the protagonists) as only a frame from which to hang a vast and nebulous concept: In Joseph's Box, Saadi's is a vision of life and death, all that is human as endlessly connected; all cultures, languages, myths, memories, loves and losses. Every aspect of the story is transmutable, which leads to innumerable cases of the shockingly weird, the confusing and the impossible. This idea of Saadi's is intriguing and eye-opening, though at times it can be clamorous and confusing. Unfortunately the power and the insistence of the two elements (the puzzle narrative and the life view Saadi wishes to teach us) refuse to sit democratically together, and one - namely the puzzle - is sacrificed for the other.

In Saadi's book Zueikha and the lute playing Alexander are brought together over the mystery contained within a puzzle box. The box drags them into a history of suffering and love and art, and particularly with the dark past of Archie, a Second World War airstrip worker. The narratives of the two parallel before converging irreparably into one another. At one point however, I returned from a stint with Archie to find that not only had Alex and Zulie solved a part of the puzzle without me, but their relationship had suddenly and dramatically progressed, the pair having somehow come together through that subterranean idea of connectedness, not through the puzzle as I'd anticipated (this was either an exciting innovation in romance or a narrative let down and it was difficult to decide). At that point my interest in the story flagged as the natural progression disappeared and I no longer felt I had any involvement in the solving of the puzzle; I was simply an observer to the minor personal ways in which Saddi's hypothetical web touched on relating to the real world (which wasn't always as exciting as it sounds) And all this was unfortunate as I had at least 400 more pages to go.

In fact at each stage of the box there seemed to be no puzzle to solve, the two would turn up at a historical site indicated by a map found in each successive layer of the box and then Alex would play his lute. At which point would follow yet another predictable moment of unpredictable weirdness (sex with Gods and spirits, transformations into historical figures being two examples among many). Most of which seemed to hold no significance to the continuation of the puzzle at all. Having nothing to do with the actual box myself I started trying to connect the individual moments of strangeness into some sort of whole but found myself mostly unable. Only with the first mention of Joseph (Saint Joseph as it happened) which was long after my attention had vanished, did things start to come together, by which time it was much too late for me. And as I had been surmising, each of these events held no real significance in the end, but indicated the activity of the previously mentioned concept of historical and cultural concatenation which I had already acquired a reasonable understanding of by page 270.

There are also problems with the way Saadi has tried to present his life view. The knowledge of this great connection is acquired at length (unnecessary length) through means which have, for years, made students of literature despise TS Eliot and James Joyce. Meandering sentences where one intertextual reference overtakes another, where allegories vie for precedence, until the sentence ceases to act as a sentence but rather more like a cosmic book list, which as it attempts to suck the reader into this multilayered, clamouring, colourful world of ever present history and culture, only drives him further away. At a basic level descriptions which involve many of these connections and slips into foreign languages only cloud, rather than clarify what they are trying to describe. Rather than being acquired by this cosmic system you may feel more dizzied by it, or even just locked out by ignorance.

But I draw the line here between Saadi and Eliot, one doesn't have to read The Golden Bough to be allowed into The Wasteland. This is because in the comparatively terse form of the poem, everything is geared to that one thing, the pervasive depiction of The Wasteland - desolation, fecundity, sterility, the dethroning of noble feeling in the wake of the new century. Even with no knowledge of intertext these things are still evident.

In Saadi's sprawling and particularly huge novel there appears little such direction. Novels tend to steadily exemplify and put an idea into practise, more than a poem might, whose idea must be laid out quickly and passionately to get the same depth of meaning. I found myself searching constantly for what all this intertextuality was trying to reveal only to find myself, right at the end of my search, suddenly with such a meaning - a heavy sense of moral responsibility and a new outlook on love which no longer relied on personal connections but a baptism in a continuous river of loss. There seemed to be no consistent building of knowledge or maturing of a philosophical outlook on the reader's part as you'd expect from a slowly revealing puzzle narrative, only a sudden coming together and revelation of understanding at the very close of the book which I had worked inordinately hard for, having long ago lost the entertainment aspect of the novel.

Towards the end of Joseph's Box however, I was rewarded by a sudden and very enlightening look at modern Pakistan. While it didn't satisfy my jadedness over the unpuzzling puzzle box or my rejection at the hands of rampant intertextuality, I had the wonderful pleasure of being able to look at the misinterpreted place and culture in a way I had never done before. Far from justifying or merely pitying the iron-fisted moral rule over Pakistan, Saadi ingeniously used his continuum of history to undermine opinion. The dead presence of art and sex is alive in Saadi's Pakistan, an old Pakistan with poetry and dancing and a glory all its own without the influence of yet more and more God. This country is the one of Byzantium, not the one where 1% of government money is spent on education while 20% is spent on 'defence'. Here, where Saadi's intertextual theories are, at last, effectively applied rather than floating fallow, his writing becomes truly fascinating and important. The replacement of sacred art with the manufactured self righteousness of God appears to Saadi as what initially choked Pakistan. The horror of the now is so horrible because it is juxtaposed with the immediacy of what went on before and the present becomes a gross and shameful pantomime in the face of the past it tried to kill. Here I really admire Saadi for his active rehistoricizing where it is so very important, not just for Westerners but for anyone who has forgotten the past and what has been rubbed out with it.

The above shows the core problem with Saadi's book and it's an unfortunate one. Saadi's idea is fascinating, enlightening and important, his style is trying but produces a profound effect of both alienation and assimilation. Saadi has hold of something which I would recommend to anyone to experience, if only he would apply it to the right form. So much has been sacrificed in bringing together Saadi's thought-provoking interpretation of what it means to live, and the novel form. If only in one comparatively brief part of the book can Saadi demonstrate his concept so that it becomes relevant, understanding and truly engaging, then surely it would better suit poetry or the short story. Compromising both Saadi's vision and the novel form by forcing them together has been to the detriment of both, which is disappointing because taken in different directions the stories of the puzzle box, Alex and Zulie and the never ending connectedness of everything could have flourished. For these reasons I want to recommend Joseph's Box, but I doubt you'll like it.

Catherine Woodward

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