"A God in Every Stone is an ambitious novel in both theme and scope, but in the end one that I think over reaches itself.

Set largely in British India between 1914 and 1930, it tells the stories of Qayyum, a 20-year-old Pashtun soldier and Vivian, an adventurous young British woman with a passion for archaeology. Caught in the immense upheaval of the First World War and then the Indian uprisings, both characters experience devastating personal losses, and have to discover for themselves the cost of betrayal and the meaning of loyalty.

It should be an affecting read and yet it is hard to feel much for any of the characters. One reads about what they see, and sense, in often overwhelming detail, but very little is written about how they feel or how their thinking changes. The result is surprisingly dull.

The novel opens with quotes from Herodotus and scraps from the life of an ancient adventurer, Scylax. We soon learn that he was the faithful servant of empire who came to decide that his loyalties lay with his own people rather than to the Persian Emperor Darius. His story is connected to the present of the novel, firstly, through the quest for his missing silver headpiece, and secondly through the obvious analogy between the trusted Scylax and other servants of empire in the story: Tashin Bey, the Armenian Turk, who secretly supports the cause of independence, and the other loyal Pashtuns, who are sent to the frontlines in France to fight for the British Empire and then begin to question where their allegiance really lies.

It is Scylax’s lost silver circlet, symbol of imperial patronage, which brings Tashin Bey, and then Vivian to India, and finally connects all the characters as Vivian inspires her Indian protégée Najeeb to continue the search.

For me the Scylax story was problematic. It promised something epic, some interesting new perspective on the story of struggle between colonizers and colonized, but it didn’t really deliver. Beyond the truism that empires rise and fall and the observation that:

“If a man is to die defending a field, let the field be his field, the land his land, the people his people�,

there is not much more of substance to be had here.

The circlet though is the first of many circular references rippling through the novel. There are unraveling turbans, characters spinning on train platforms, journeys that end where they began, and chapters repeating the events of previous ones to give us a revolving perspective on all that is happening. The effect is somewhat dizzying. Enclosing it all though, just as Scylax’s story encloses the narrative, there is the great cycle of history and the sense that Vivian and Qayyum are part of something bigger. It is here I think that the novel over reaches.
Its climax unfolds on the Street of Storytellers from which perhaps we are supposed to intuit that these two stories are never really their own, but belong instead to a never ending and often shifting narrative. Unfortunately this has the effect of reducing the characters to somewhat predictable ciphers and in the absence of a more robust cache of ideas this reader simply lost interest.

One never doubts for example that Qayyum will begin to realize that his real loyalties lie with his own people. His trajectory of political awakening is a familiar one. Sent to fight along side the British in France during the First World War he is initially in love with this new world and full of pride for both his people and their service to Empire. In battle he loses an eye and as he recovers in a hospital in Brighton he begins ironically to “see� his situation differently. At first he is overwhelmed by gratitude that the British are looking after him. Their empire is like the great light of the chandelier in his hospital where:

“the King was the silver dragon, one single claw bearing the weight of smaller dragons, glass lotus flowers, a star of mirrors�.

Slowly however he senses something darker. All the young nurses are withdrawn from caring duties to Indians because Natives can’t be trusted with “our� women. Next he is forcibly denied access to his best friend and then lied to. When he eventually returns to India he is full of anger.

He remains torn however. His strongest sense of loyalty is still to the members of his brigade who are fighting in Europe. He feels ashamed of himself for being injured and he is alarmed by the radicalization of his friend Kalam, now back in India and working with the Turks to overthrow the British. As he tries to recover from a loss even greater than that of his eye, he learns to remove his “blindfold “and turns away from the path of revenge and blood feud and towards the cause of non violent struggle.

Despite this somewhat predictable political awakening, Qayyum’s character is the most fully developed and most interesting in the novel. Although it is hard to get a real sense of his inner struggle as he moves from faithful servant to campaigner for freedom, his grief at the loss of a friend is well handled, as is his desperate search for his younger brother Najeeb at the end of the novel.

Vivian on the other hand seems to become more one dimensional as the novel progresses, until she is finally just a faceless character trailing after others in a burqa. At first she is something of a romantic heroine, a naïve young Englishwoman finding her first love in the exotic setting of a dig in India. There are girlish blushes of embarrassment and thrilling vistas of “cloudless blue skies�.
Although she is depicted as a very unconventional young woman for her era, she also holds very conventional views. Opposed to women’s suffrage and comfortable with a world in which there are rulers and ruled, Natives and Englishmen, like Qayyum one never doubts that this story will be about her finding where her true loyalties lie.

Both her burgeoning romance and her naïve worldview are shattered by the outbreak of World War 1 when she returns to England and the grim routine of nursing victims from the war. Unfortunately her transformation happens at light speed. For me the great weakness of this book is the way in which it races through moments of trauma and transition while lingering on the decorative and descriptive.
While Qayyum is at least given some recovery time in which to process his losses, for Vivian it all happens in one short chapter. We are told about the horrors of nursing (there are bugs and dead people), her breakdown gets one quick paragraph and when we meet her next she is on her way back to India.

Here we’re taken back into a Merchant Ivory production. Lots of swirling sounds, colours and sensual descriptions as she bathes, sweats and wanders about.
It’s very unsatisfying and also quite unbelievable especially her putative passion for archaeology and quest for the circlet. When asked by her young protégée Najeeb � Why do you English like to dig?� She gives the dim answer “To find history� and when he sensibly responds “Why?� She replies, “I don’t know�.

I’m not sure this is a credible response from someone who we are supposed to believe later becomes a senior lecturer at University College. It is however typical of the dull exchanges between her and others in the novel.

Overall I found the novel disjointed and unaffecting.

The last part of Book 2 is titled “The Only Question�. For me this was “What is happening?� Closely followed by “Do I care?�

Unfortunately the answer was no.

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