Burnt Shadows
Kamila Shamsie
Book notes
The title of this wonderful novel derives from one of the most haunting effects of the atomic bombs which were dropped on Japan in 1945. Women wearing white kimonos imprinted with dark patterns ended up with the designs seared onto their bodies by the intense heat of the blast. Hiroko Tanaka, a 21-year-old translator, survives the Nagasaki bomb, but with an image of three birds forever branded on her back and heartbreaking memories of her German fiancé, Konrad, who is obliterated in the attack. It is the start of a sweeping story which covers 60 years and half a dozen countries, beginning with Hiroko’s decision to seek out Konrad’s sister and her English husband who are living in colonial privilege in India. Against a backdrop of global events - the final days of the British Raj, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, post-9/11 America - the author threads the evolving relationship between two contrasting families whose lives are intertwined through love, friendship, betrayal, reconciliation and death. This is a bold and ambitious novel, which tackles big themes about the world we live in through people affected more than most by its creation. The writing is lyrical, the storytelling imaginative, the characters compelling, and the author’s knowledge impressive – a perfect combination.
About the author
She is the author of In the City by the Sea, Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/ Mail on Sunday Prize), Salt and Saffron and Broken Verses. In 1999 she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature and in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award - both award by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Her first four novels are set in her home city of Karachi, while Burnt Shadows, shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction, covers several continents. As well as writing novels, she also contributes to The Guardian, The New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect magazine, and broadcasts on radio.Writer and journalist Colm Tóibín, the second youngest of five children, was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1955, and was educated at University College Dublin where he read history and English. After graduating in 1975, he headed to Barcelona, the city that later inspired his first novel, The South, the story of an Irish woman who leaves her husband and begins a relationship with a Spanish painter. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for First Book. During the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, first in Ireland and then in Argentina, the Sudan and Egypt. Two of his novels The Blackwater Lightship, published in 1999, and The Master, published in 2004, were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. As well as writing novels, he is the author of a number of works of non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E M Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brooklyn, which is partly set in his home town of Enniscorthy, won best novel in last year’s Costa Book Awards.
Discussion points
1. What links is the author drawing between the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and internment at Guantanamo Bay?
2. Did the book increase your understanding of the terrorist threat facing the world? What else did you learn?
3. Hiroko is a resourceful and resilient character. Where does her strength come from?
4. Cross-cultural ties recur throughout the book, beginning with Hiroko’s love for Konrad. What is the book saying about the effect of culture on personal relationships?
5. Apart from its political themes, the book is the story of two families, the Burtons and Ashrafs. What keeps them together over the years?
6. What attracts Raza to join a mujahideen training camp? Does it seem out of character?
7. Do any of the main characters have a country which they can call home?
8. Which of the characters is the most content?
9. Why do you think Kim acts as she does at the end? Can you understand her motives?
10. The book begins with the question: ‘How did it come to this?’ Do you think that by the end Kamila Shamsie answers the question?
Author's view
All my novels begin with a single image or sentence which, at the very moment it lodges itself in my head, announces itself as The Start of Something. Burnt Shadows, my fifth novel, was no exception. Except for one crucial detail - all the other novels started with an image or sentence which I can’t trace back to anything - ‘it just came to me’, I can say with total honesty. But I know precisely where the originating image of Burnt Shadows came from.
I was reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima - the first account written by a journalist of the effect of the nuclear bomb on the inhabitants of that city - and I came upon this line: ‘On some undressed bodies the burns had made patterns - of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin) the shape of flowers they had had on their kimonos.’ As soon as I read it, an image came to mind of a woman facing away from me, her bare back marked by three bird-shaped burns from the pattern on the kimono she had been wearing at the moment the bomb fell. And I knew right away that this woman was to be the starting point of my novel. All I needed to do was find a way to make her turn around so I could see her face, and know her story.
Having said this, I’ll also readily admit that the reason I was reading Hiroshima was because I was hoping for something to spark a story. I already had a notion that I wanted to write a novel which started in Nagasaki with the dropping of the bomb; but I knew I couldn’t start a novel with something as vast as an atomic explosion. I needed an opening of intimacy; something as small and as searing as a crane with outstretched wings below a woman’s shoulder blade.
It should have been unsurprising to me that the woman in that first intimate image would become the heart of the novel, but it wasn’t. When I started the novel I thought she would fade away from the book after a very short prologue, and the novel would jump forward from 1945 to the turn of the millennium with an entirely different set of characters, Indians and Pakistanis, living in a nuclear-armed subcontinent; by that point, I thought, the woman with the bird-shaped burns would already be long dead. But as soon as she turned to face me, and I gave her a name - Hiroko - and a mole on her cheek, it became evident that I was going to follow her story. Every plan I had for where the novel would go, what spaces and time periods it would inhabit, what the concerns of its characters might be, went right out of the window. Which makes sense, I suppose - one of the first things I saw in Hiroko was her ability to look at someone else’s plans and say, ‘No, let’s do something else instead.’