This string of events I have recounted has left me with a belief that we are indeed at the end of the world. I am only waiting for it to happen now; indeed, preparing for it. Normally one would imagine that such a conviction would lead to despair, but strangely enough, instead of despair, I feel liberated. I feel lighter since I have resigned myself to live this way… (from The Scatter Here is Too Great)
I read this book wrong. I get a short book, I assume it’s meant to be read quickly, gulped down like me trying to eat a cookie before Tesfa notices me doing so and asks to share. This isn’t a book that’s meant to be gulped. It’s a book meant to be savoured, but I doubt you could find anyone who didn’t do like me and read the book up as quickly as possible. You can’t not – you read and you read and you read and suddenly you’re done and you realise because you’ve blown through this whole thing because you’ve become addicted to Bilal Tanweer.
What is it about: Intertwined stories about a bomb going off in Karachi. A simplistic sentence that does nothing other than give a framework to the novel. The bomb is there but this isn’t a book about a bombing. This isn’t a novel with the bomber’s point-of-view giving us his reasons or his politics or his religion. For a novel whose central conceit is a terrorist event, it’s surprisingly light, almost sparse, rather than being bogged down in accusations or justification for anyone’s actions. The bomb is there and the people are there, where the people are a group of family, friends, and neighbours, all tied somehow to the bomb going off at Cantt Station, Karachi, during rush hour. But again, that’s too simplified. I don’t want to say the novel is intricately constructed because that makes it sound like it’s some sort of tricky mystery and I don’t want to say that the novel is taut because that makes it sound stressful and I don’t want to say exact or precise because that makes it sound like a factual rendering. So I will say, and I mean this in a wondrously complementary way, you can not strip away anything to summarize the novel because Tanweer (I want to call him Bilal and pretend we are friends but I think that might be a little presumptuous of me) has balanced the novel already perfectly on a fulcrum. One less word and we collapse. One more and we tumble down. I can not add anything to describe The Scatter Here is Too Great, nor can I strip words out to give an adequate summary.
The Scatter is Too Great has no manipulation, religious or political. No overt condemnation of ideals, conflicting or matching. There’s something really pure and really true about this novel made up of stories. We meet people, they fade out, they reappear as secondary characters in other stories, they come back as protagonists in later ones, they fade away again. And the momentum, as I said earlier, pulls you along to the end when you realise there’s more here than you thought, that you should have slowed down, a focused meditation on each word. Nothing is wasted here. Nothing is extraneous. It really, just, simply, works.
Sometimes it’s easier to review books I disliked or books with which I had some weird emotional relationship. It’s harder to review books that are like a clear ting of a tuning fork, because there is nothing I can write that the book itself doesn’t already do better than I could.
It’s not a long read. You should go read it.
The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer went on sale August 14th, 2014.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.