In the Light of What We Know

Now and again you read a book that you realise will change the way you think and In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahmen is one of those books.

I've just taken a copy back to the library after spending at least three weeks reading it and I was even tempted to keep it for a bit longer to go over a few sections again.  

Take note of the title as events in the final chapters throw a different light on all the thousands of words that have gone before, much like the ending in The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  The part of the story that you didn't know is never spelled out, but glimpsed as shadows flickering in a crowded room.

Much of the book is set out in narrative memories and each chapter is preceded by excerpts from other books.  Ignore these at you peril as they indicate the direction of travel and are not simply window dressing.  One of them taken from John Donne (Meditation 17) provides the guiding light for 'what we know' at the end and Rahmen has used these excerpts to great effect.

This is a debut novel and at one stage I thought that Rahmen will never be able to write another book as he seems to have crammed so many thoughts and facts into this one that he must have exhausted his supply of material.  The whole thing is an education and there are diversions into investment banking, architecture and mathematics to name but a few, but the most important is the constant references to Godel's Incompleteness Theory.

As I am not a mathematician, I had never heard of it, and I am not going to attempt to provide an explanation here, but Rahmen gives us just enough of an understanding to allow me to suggest that the lives of the two main characters might represent the two theoretical paths described by Godel.  The unnamed narrator appears to have lived a more structured life, and made many choices that would be expected of someone from his privileged upbringing, while his friend Zafar has had to adapt to life at an unexpectedly high social level.  The Theory of Incompleteness is tested as the two become friends as young people and progress through life with different expectations and prejudices. 

By the end of the book, none of the characters are without blame for some serious wrong-doings, and it becomes difficult to have sympathy with any of them, but each one has provided the reader with an opportunity to consider human behaviour and how we perceive others.