Hinterland - Review

I was looking forward to this book - so felt disappointed at it's over-written early pages and feared here would be one more fetishisation-of-suffering through aesthetics book.  But no, it soon settles down to tell the story of two brothers travelling overland from Kabul to London and it does this very well, detailing the many obstacles that they find in their way, the small victories, the small mercies. It is, as Barbara Trapido commands us on the cover, 'a story everyone should read.'

There are times in the narrative, however, when you feel very distant from the characters - as if they are acting out their lives underwater - and I think this is a danger of any such book: Western journalist ventriloquises the experience of small-town Afghan boys.  I ended up feeling very uneasy about this.  As a reader and as an activist on human rights, I want this book to be read and for the story to get the attention it deserves.  As a writer, however, I struggled to take seriously the close third person point of view, the slide into first person at the close of the book: whose stories are these, whose voice is speaking, where does the power lie?