What connects a novel set in the walled inner city of Lahore in 1968, and another situated in a Birmingham secret service agency known as Alaska in 2023?
They handle murder and escape exceptionally. With their newest works — The Return of Faraz Ali and A Bird in Winter — British authors Aamina Ahmad and Louise Doughty, respectively, prove why women make for excellent writers of thrillers. Their departure from Cold War-plotting novelists Ian Fleming and John le Carre opens a new frontier, going forward from Val McDermid’s tartan noir and Gillian Flynn’s American psychological thrillers.
I meet Ahmad at London’s Victory Services Club, a commonwealth of history between us. It sets us off to talk about her prize-winning debut historical thriller. What sparked the idea behind The Return of Faraz Ali? “Born British, of Pakistani origin, the conversations in middle-class drawing rooms in Lahore and Karachi made me curious about the lives of others, beyond these compound walls. How do women sex workers live without choices and cope across decades and generations?” This drew Ahmad into Lahore’s mohallas, into the world of politics, sex, murder.
In the novel, Faraz Ali, the protagonist, is investigating a teenage prostitute’s inexplicable murder. Shahi Mohalla’s labyrinth reveals a psychological layer to the reader — that of Faraz’s kidnapping as a child, separated from his mother Firdous and sister Rozina by none other than his powerful father, Wajid, who steers Faraz to a career in the police, remotely.
Ahmad’s skilled metaphor of investigations and abduction enables Faraz to examine his adult relationships, leaving him with a residual sense of unbelonging. A bold stroke of writing places Faraz in 1970s’ East Pakistan. He tries to make sense of national boundaries and bilingual identities through the turmoil of another partition; one country stretched across the boundaries of another, and his marriage alienated by that distance, just as his courtesan mother and father are distanced by social unacceptability.
Ahmad’s craft is no linear one-character narrative. The women in the book make their way through the politics of birth, and the world at large, with vigour. She cites her mother, the writer and playwright Rukhsana Ahmad, as a strong influence. “She introduced me to the writings of black British and Asian writers like Bapsi Sidhwa, among others. The noir elements of my novel are drawn from reading Raymond Chandler, and more contemporary authors like Attica Locke.”
Aamina Ahmad
Her superbly paced ‘thriller’ embodies location, well-ground characters in a socioeconomic ethos, and historic detail. Everyone wants to escape from the clutches of a system that holds them captive.
To the Northern Lights
Not dissimilar in the intention to escape an oppressive future is this line from Doughty’s novel: “‘It’s no more than thirty paces to get out of the building,’ Bird tells herself before escaping the life as she has known.” These lines ring in my ears as I set out to meet Doughty in London’s Gold quarter. “My novels are about placing a woman in a circumstance, and they are often middle-aged professional women, and certainly not me,” says the bestselling author, whose 2013 book Apple Tree Yard was made into a TV series starring Emily Watson.
A Bird in Winter is Doughty’s tenth novel. Heather, the story’s protagonist, is nicknamed ‘Bird’ by her father whom she admires. Bird, reassured by her father’s special affection for her intelligence, goes frosty on discovering he is a ‘liar’. She unconsciously seeks out his profession — he’s constantly safeguarding exits from home and her mother discloses this in the most matter-of-fact way, having stored a secret for decades.
Soon, Bird, a military- trained secret service agent-turned-survivalist, goes off radar as she sets out on a new journey that will take her all the way to Iceland. She escapes being tracked by changing clothes, being homeless, clinging on to skylight windows, dodging the police. Doughty had access to the big chiefs of MI5 and British Intelligence, and le Carre’s literary estate — no mean feat. But she also talks about going on her investigative journey, literally, to research Bird’s flight. “I trekked through the rail journeys in the novel. I mapped the timetables, the best times to slip unrecognised out of one platform on to another train and then getting to the north, timing the last travel across water...” Doughty makes us relive how haunting it is to be a woman on the run.
Louise Doughty
Into worlds unknown
Circularity is central to the plots both Ahmad and Doughty set in their novels; moving forward is about facing oneself as much as meeting obstacles externally. Ahmad establishes context by opening a world of men and women whose profession is unnoticed yet groomed by inheritances of power in Pakistan. Doughty embarks on a new era of military professional women who want to escape the corruption powered by men; and the fear of killing does not stop them.
Both novels deal with actual and virtual disappearances. With women writing about women to whom this happens, the tension and perspective are significantly humanised. For me, these are thrillers about survival, where characters are interlocked by unpredictable circumstances. The way we, at times, find ourselves to be?
The writer is a novelist, reviewer, fellow at RADA and Professor of Practice in London.
Published - November 24, 2023 09:26 am IST
