Books

Hossein Asgari
Desolation

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, some authors in the West became so unhinged they wrote books of uncharacteristic ideological rigidity. Recall John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), which explored the interior life of an American-born Muslim teenager who gravitates towards extremism. In those pages Updike paints a character trapped in the pure binary of his radical faith, who asserts that the “pleasure-seeking West is destroying the world with its machines and its appetites. But Islam will purify it”.

Martin Amis was even more stark and vengeful in 2008’s The Second Plane, a work that combined short stories and essays. For Mohamed Atta and his fellow 9/11 jihadists, wrote Amis, the “twin towers … their height and majesty, their glass and steel, were in themselves a taunt. They were an insult made by the West against the rest”.

It was left to authors from the borderlands of East and West to furnish the more anguished liberalism which the West abandoned in its rage. In Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002), for example, the Turkish novelist provides a critique of both Westernisation and religious absolutism.

Hossein Asgari’s second novel, Desolation – which takes as its subject the radicalisation of Iranians in the years leading up to 9/11 – is a work very much on the Pamuk side of the ledger. His narrative is part of that stubborn tradition, old as the 20th century, that sought openness and the rule of law in Iran, even as authoritarian modernisation or theocratic rule dominated the political realm.

Asgari was born in Iran and worked as a physicist in Malaysia before settling in Australia and embarking on a creative writing career. It’s a biography that makes him a cosmopolitan in terms of language and nation and also in terms of the two cultures of science and art. His prose is fastidious and orderly, while his narratives have the rigour of a theorem being solved.

But they are also open to the strange, warping effects of human imagination. Desolation contains the kind of fateful repetitions and weird coincidences that feel closer to folktale than Western novel. Even the novel’s framing device partakes of an older storytelling glamour: in this case, a worn-looking man, stinking of cigarettes, who accosts a younger Iranian writer in Farsi as he tries to work in an Adelaide cafe and grips him with a story worthy of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

The hook the older man lands in that first meeting is the number 655, offered without context. The young man is perplexed: it means nothing to him. Later, he recalls Iran Air Flight 655 – a passenger jet out of Tehran that was shot down in July 1988 by two surface-to-air missiles fired by USS Vincennes, a United States Navy warship. The missiles hit the aircraft while it was flying over Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.

After setting this initial test, the stranger begins his real story at a subsequent meeting. The framing narrative falls away and we are returned to the regional city of Mashad in the 1980s, where young Amin is the son of a successful, self-made restaurateur, and younger sibling to two brothers whose beliefs could not be more diverse: one, Vahid, a devoted Muslim; and the other, Hamid, a brilliant mathematician and as near an atheist as it is possible to be in that time and place.

It is Hamid to whom Amin is devoted. Most significantly, the older boy helps set Amin up with a pretty neighbour, Parvenah, even though a teenage friendship of the kind they embark upon is forbidden. There is a documentary charm and clarity to the world Asgari summons in these early chapters. This is an Iran in which parents order bootleg Western videotapes and slip booze into family weddings. The calf love between Amin and Parvenah only adds to the sweet nostalgia of this relatively open moment – the time before Hamid, having won the chance to attend an American university, boards Iran Air Flight 655.

Asgari’s portrait of Amin’s unravelling in the wake of his brother’s death is powerfully achieved. His descent into grief is arrested only by his obligatory military service in the distant city of Zahedan, where he befriends a troubled, devout young man named Ghazzi and falls in love with Ghazzi’s cousin, Ayesha.

His connection with these two draws him into the orbit of radicals who are involved with clandestine activities. Their activities oblige Amin to make terrible, life-destroying choices – choices that our young scribe records in horror and pity as a middle-aged Amin drinks himself into a morning stupor in Adelaide’s Botanic Garden. The radicalism that concerned an earlier generation of writers has been modified by time in these pages, becoming more human and less ideologically freighted. Amin is not some impeccable liberal whose beliefs force him to act against those he loves most: he’s a damaged youth who flinched when caught on the crosshairs of history and has never recovered from that fact.

Desolation can seem mysterious at points: I suspect there is a fabular architecture at work that I lack the knowledge to appreciate. It remains a grave and gripping portrait of a man whose hopelessness and loneliness turned him towards belief but who, even in his despair, could not find God.

Ultimo, 272pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 30, 2025 as "Hossein Asgari, Desolation".

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