Love Among the Ruins

1.

James Buchan’s recent remarkable novel, The Persian Bride, can be read and enjoyed as a romantic thriller about a young Englishman’s search for his kidnapped wife in the aftermath of the fall of the last shah of Iran. But Buchan’s adventure story is also an artfully detailed homage to Persian culture, and a kind of hybrid offshoot of Persian literature. The Persian Bride combines the English thriller genre with an archetypal narrative of Persian literature, the quest for the beloved, which is also a quest for a mystical experience of the divine. Grandly romantic, but unsentimental, The Persian Bride alludes to ecstatically tragic classic Persian love tales like Layla and Majnun by the twelfth-century poet Nizami, a writer much admired by Calvino, or the story of Khosrow and Shirin from Ferdowsi’s tenth-century epic, the Shahnameh, a poem central to Iranian literature. In these poems, as in Buchan’s story, love is both a salvation and a harrowing.

The story opens in Isfahan, the city of the well-known proverb “Isfahan-nesfe-jehan,” “Isfahan is half the world.” It is a city known for its magnificent tiled mosques, its public gardens, its square laid out on a sixteenth-century Savafid shah’s polo ground, and its lyrical seventeenth-century bridges, with teahouses on the riverbanks beneath. It is 1974, and the Pahlavi crown is still “picked out in fairy lights on the mountain to the south of the town.” An eighteen-year-old Englishman named John Pitt has found his way there during his Wanderjahr, and is eking out a living teaching English at a school called the House of Language, while he learns Farsi and calligraphy, and tries to discover what it is he is ambitious to do. He is by turns awed, enchanted, disgusted, and ignorant of the Iranian life he observes.

John Pitt is an unusual hero for a novel with the picaresque elements of The Persian Bride. He is of a generation of Englishmen who have lost their imperial certainties, and of a generation of Western men who have begun to question their received ideas about manhood. Moreover, in a culture where men’s decisions through custom and law have been rendered with the finality and force of a god’s, John’s choices in Iran have only a mortal’s force, remaining choices, not decrees. They compel him to meet experience with capacities he is not sure he possesses. John can be self-absorbed without being a monster, virginal without seeming girlish, foolish without being mocked for a fool, virile without swashbuckling.

Although he is indulgently urged by his Iranian mentors to sow his wild oats by taking a sigeh (a temporary marriage acceptable under Shiite law, which absolves a woman of prostitution without involving a man in full marital obligations), when he encounters the young Iranian aristocrat Shirin, he recognizes that he has a chance to experience love profoundly, “the single unrepeatable opportunity of my existence.” For Buchan, love is as much action as emotion. And in undertaking a full experience of love, John Pitt sets himself on the path described by so many of the Persian Sufi poets, for whom apprehension of God begins with human love.

John is both keenly observant of the environment and people around him and mistaken about them—simultaneously right and wrong. He is conscious of the extent of his privileges as a male (his future wife later describes his proprietary way of walking down a street) but he is deceived about the way these very privileges incapacitate him; he has no idea, for instance, in his unexamined freedom, of being the object of intense and continuous scrutiny, observed by everyone from the Savak and the KGB to local families for whom an unattached male represents an opportunity for a marriageable daughter. John is equally deceived about the way the local women’s elaborate submissiveness can conceal implacability, and the ways in which wearing a chador may disguise unexpected private strength and skill, as well as exhibit a public restriction.

John Pitt is a pilgrim. If one thinks of what the swaggering hero Hemingway or even James Buchan’s thriller­writing grandfather John would have made of John Pitt, one can recognize him for the original and substantial creation he is. His understated, often bewildered human complexity is all the more remarkable for being juxtaposed with the mercurial, imperious, and flamboyant figure of his young Iranian bride, Shirin.

Shirin is the daughter of a Qajar princess (the dynasty ousted by the Pahlavis) and an ambitious American­trained commander of the Shah’s air force. John meets her in a secondhand trash and treasures shop where he works part-time, a shop used by Shirin and her schoolgirl friends for a club, where they are passing a hashish cigarette in a circle, blowing its narcotic smoke into each other’s mouths. “I was shocked to the core of my nature… I thought: Persian girls aren’t like this; they’re grave and timid and prone to put on weight.” It is not the narcotic that shocks John—if modern Persian fiction is any guide, the use of narcotics is tolerated far more consistently and generously than the use of alcohol—but the revelation of this frustrated energy, recklessness, intelligence, and lust for life underneath the black veils. It is the first of a pattern of misapprehensions, shocks, and reversals of judgment that John will be compelled to make during the course of the book.

At the club, the girls explain,

“We want to speak English and be friends, and smoke cigarettes and listen to music…”

“Black Sabbath!” “Tom Jones!”

—all pursuits that were daring for well­brought-up girls of the period, and perhaps are still. When John turns to the most intense of all the girls, Shirin, and asks what it is she wants amid all these shouted wishes, she replies, “I need to be free, sir.” He immediately recognizes that among this gaggle of Iranian schoolgirls, he finds himself, without expectation or preparation, in the presence of a person he can love.

Shirin leaves with her friends before John can find out exactly who she is, and in a state of exhilaration, he roams through the public gardens of Isfahan, where he encounters the Soviet consul, true to the inevitable way foreigners in this kind of close-knit, hierarchical society eventually meet. Ryazanov is an opium addict (the quotidian presence of opium is a condition frequently described in novels about and by Iranians) and a KGB spy who is himself being watched by the Shah’s secret police. He vividly remembers the days of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, when Russian and British agents neatly divided Isfahan between them.

Ryazanov’s entertainment of John is another unfolding of the divergences of his expectations and assumptions from reality, from the service of tea which turns out to be vodka, to the volume of writings on Islamic government by a severe cleric named Khomeini that John finds in the sensualist Ryazanov’s garden pavilion, to the late-night appearance of a military officer meeting secretly with the Russian consul, whose own allegiances are unclear. Although we never know the exact nature of their business together, John will later learn that the officer is Shirin’s father. Like a deck of tarot cards, the garden contains John’s future in these accidental presences.

Ryazanov is more than he seems to be. Although he warns John not to trust him, since his “service” to “Lord Opium” has eroded his will and therefore rendered him incapable of friendship, at great risk he transforms his despair into a magnificent selflessness, by later arranging for the lovers’ escape, though he foresees that his collusion will cost him his life. Although he is a spy, addict, and the consul of another government, he is also a lover of Iranian life.

Ryazanov’s own background and love of Iran perhaps evoke the great photographer Antoin Sevruguin, the son of a Russian diplomat. Sevruguin was brought up in Iran in the late 1830s, and returned there to settle, creating a photographic record of Iranian life of incalculable value. He was so devoted to Iran that he described himself in official documents with the epithet “pavarde-ye-Iran, nurtured by Iran.” He made one of the most beautiful of all nineteenth-century photographs, the Veiled Woman Wearing Pearls, and one of the most terrifying, a photograph of a thief paying the penalty of his crime by being buried alive in the Iranian desert. By evoking Sevruguin’s own career, as well as his photography, Buchan is suggesting one of the paradoxes of Iranian life. Rheza Shah, the last shah’s father, concluded that Sevruguin’s photographs presented an image of a primitive Iran at odds with his ambition to modernize the nation, and confiscated Sevruguin’s negatives. A ruler of Iran attempted to obliterate an archive of the country’s history and the work of one of its great servants, but luckily many of Sevruguin’s pictures were preserved.

It is through Ryazanov that we absorb both the political background of the period and some of the domestic and cultural particularities of day-to-day Iranian life. Given over almost entirely to his addiction, Ryazanov is a near ghost. His conversation has the unrestricted range and valedictory tone a ghost’s might. Buchan gives his speech a singular pitch and a kind of delayed beat; he speaks as if his speech can no longer express immediate perception but only memory. Through this filter, though, emerge scenes of life lived in Iran, exquisite gardens with tiled pools and pavilions, intricate classical music, chador-draped schoolgirls being harried through the gates of their school by an old man with a stick. Ryazanov’s impressions, too, give us glimpses of the country’s messianic nationalism, its conflicted admiration and anger toward the West, its lasting sense of betrayal by the British. Ryazanov remembers attending one of the famous Shiite passion plays, in which the villains (who traditionally wear red) were dressed in “the English red-coats and sun-helmets of two hundred years ago,” a compact glimpse of the conflation of popular religion and politics. “The Iranians,” says Ryazanov,

believe themselves to be special. The Arabs were satisfied with the word of God as preserved in the Koran but we were not: we had to have the family of the Holy Prophet among us… Look out at the world, and you will see that we are clearly not God’s special people. How do we resolve this contradiction, which is the conflict of scripture with reality, of faith with phenomena? There is a conspiracy against us.

John and Shirin meet again when Shirin, whom social restrictions have made a formidable strategist, shows up in his English-language class, where the irrepressible, privileged schoolgirls chatter in class and make ingenious use of the resources of their language to flirt with John, whose name “by a tiny lengthening of the vowel, becomes Jan in Persian, meaning, ‘My love’ or ‘My darling.’” The scene shows off Buchan’s gift for comedy, an important balance to the gravity of his romance, as the schoolgirls delightedly revenge themselves on their condition by imprisoning their teacher through their coquetry, knowing he is even more powerless and endangered than they are if he responds.

Their proposed essay topics are a kaleidoscope of juvenile aspiration, pedantry, and provocation, as one calls out, “May we write about love?” In the midst of the high-spirited classroom chaos, John and Shirin find perfectly correct public ways of carrying on a private dialogue. He manages to continue their previous conversation, in which she had spoken longingly of her need to be free, by means of assigning “freedom” as the day’s essay subject.

John may be teaching Shirin English, but she is also teaching him that what a culture decrees for women will also have consequences for men, that where women are veiled, men will be also. The splendid, desperate essay she writes in class, clearly at the utmost risk of her young life, is a small miracle of Buchan’s ventriloquism:

My name is Shirin Faram… Mr. Farameh is a General of the Imperial Iranian Air Force… My mother is a princess of the ancient regime… I have a sister whom I love. His excellency tells me to marry… I do not know what to do. I speak from the extremity of darkness. If you come to my house my darling bring me a lamp and one windowpane so I can see down into the glorious street.

Buchan reminds us that the most convincing evidence of love is not so much in the prolonged hypnotic gazes with which movies have saturated us as in a heightened, almost telepathic speech. It is there between Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, who speak to each other in cascades of verse as they can speak to no one else. It is there between Beatrice and Benedick, whose most brilliant jokes are reserved for each other. How irritated Milton must have been when he realized that he’d captured it, but with the wrong couple, Eve and Satan.

Buchan’s couple manage to speak to each other with absolute intimacy and reciprocity even in public. Still later, in moments when they excruciatingly dislike or misunderstand each other, Buchan convinces us that what they have to say to each other is inexhaustible.

Buchan’s work here is that of an explorer’s, attempting to bring back information about territory that has been notoriously difficult to chart, that of fulfilled love. What Buchan shows us is a metaphysical as well as physical desire. Shirin’s love for John is entwined with her desire for freedom, while John’s feeling for Shirin is in some ways a desire to possess something of Iran itself, to come alive as a human being in a way that only coming to Iran has ever made possible for him.

The Persian Bride, along with the elegant realism of its portrait of political chaos and corruption in 60th Pahlavi and revolutionary Iran, is also an exploration of the nature of faith, both romantic and religious, and a meditation on the nature of love itself. The coexistence of two kinds of stories, of both historical and spiritual adventure, is reflected in the language of the novel, whose prose quests for a kind of evolution into poetry. Scenes are embedded with fragments of classic Persian poetry by Hafiz, Sa’adi, and Rumi, as well as the fearless modernist Forough Farrokhzad, a woman who wrote passionately about the lives of women in Iran, and died in a car accident at thirty.

I do not mean that Buchan’s prose strains after precious poetic effects, but that within the narrative, poetry coexists with prose, signifying a parallel body of experience, in the way an ordinary walk down a city street may lead to a transfiguring event. The recurrence of poetry also serves to evoke the manners of a culture in which the words of poetry are believed to have the powerful effect on the sensibility that the words of pornography do on the body.

In The Persian Bride, debates are resolved through verse, lovers use it as code, and prisoners describe their experiences in extempore stanzas. A reminiscence of an accidental meeting in a bar in pre-Khomeini days is summed up in verse: “Last night I dreamed an angel rapped upon the tavern door/ and held to me a cup fired from the clay of Adam.”

Poetry is a kind of supreme speech an attempt at recovering a language momentarily adequate to truth; it is the language of paradise, in which lovemaking and prayer do not contradict each other. This feature of the novel remains true to the place of poetry in Iranian life and education. The poet Hafiz is a tutelary presence in the book, as he is in daily Iranian life where editions of his poems are consulted as oracles. Farsi conversation is studded with allusions to verse, and the practice of committing swathes of verse to memory is still valued in Iranian education; Shirin, the bride of the novel’s title, tells her husband that she knows some ten thousands couplets by heart, and teaches him poems as if to make him fluent in the ultimate, essential language.

In The Persian Bride Buchan sets himself the question: What happens when love is requited? In his version love has an evolving impact on lives as powerful and consequences as permanent and unforeseeable as tragedy does, an embrace has as profound an impact as a wound.

His description of John and Shirin’s first kiss is sexual without being pornographic, striving to set down the full swift contradictory range of the experience, terrifying, inept, ecstatic, silly, awkward:

I smelled a scent like geraniums sunshine. I guessed she had made up her face and now regretted the presumption. She took my hand in hers, but didn’t know what to do with it… I knelt before her and parted her chador… She raised her face. Its nudity filled me with panic… We became hopelessly entangled. Her bosom pressed my armpit. Her right arm had somehow become caught between her stomach and my groin. She yelped…

“I must go to Layly in National Shoe.”

John’s transcendent joy is mixed with unheroic panic when he realizes that he has married Shirin with this kiss, that a kiss under these social circumstances is irrevocable.

After Shirin fully enters the story Buchan is faced with a problem of style for which there is no ideal solution. He makes it clear that most of the dialogue in the book is to be understood as taking place in Farsi which means that he is writing a great deal of English as if it were in translation. John Pitt’s private thoughts are conveyed in rich and fluent English, but much of John’s English dialogue is written in simulated Farsi This can have a distracting and irritating effect, but it also delivers us more fully into a world of alien elegance and equally alien obscenity. Farsi, as described in classic travel accounts, a rhetoric-loving language that insists on elaborate courtesies and formal tendernesses extended even to strangers; its abundant impersonal endearments seem to assume that even passersby know the dignity of being cherished.

2.

Thanks to a small scandal created by one of the schoolgirls who tattles that John has allowed them to write essays on the topic of love, John is forced to apologize to Shirin’s “violent and subtle” father, Colonel Farameh. John arrives in a neighborhood of “shade and opulence” of the kind inhabited only by the affluent in the Middle East, where water and greenery are a measure of luxury, which make it poignantly clear why a popular name for Iranian girls is “breeze.” The Farameh family, like their house, has a veneer of modernity superimposed on the traditional architectural patterns of andarooni and birooni: “It was… just another old-fashioned Iranian house with rooms for women and rooms for men and a place where they met in the middle.”

Colonel Farameh himself is a painstakingly muscled technocrat, with the bluff, treacherously egalitarian manners, air of casual expertise, and “American accent… that I recognized… was… the true voice of power,” as a legacy of his Fort Bragg training. “You think I give a damn, boy?” he responds to John’s attempt at the elegant formal apology he has been trained to deliver. “Christ, I hate civilians… I’m going to give you some advice, boy… Don’t mess with these people, and above all don’t mess with their women… Understood?”

The incongruous Texan overlay is, as John discovers, simply a technique, a new American method applied to an ancient patriarchal sense of power so exaggerated that justification is unnecessary. He would, John concludes, “throw his daughters to the cadets on their commencement night,” or have John himself killed without a second thought. “He saw himself not as a man but… a sort of god… I saw that there was no limit to his conception of self.”

Farameh conducts John into the women’s salon; it is his prerogative to exhibit his wife and daughters, dressed for a European visitor, a possible suitor, in sleeveless party dresses. In the Farameh household, John begins to understand, the chador covers the daughter, but belongs to the father, a symbol of his will to veil or reveal her to whomever he chooses.

Here is the overwrought and oppressive lyricism, with its imitation Louis XV furniture, electric chandeliers, silver bowls of confectionery of “a kitsch and tedious femininity.” When the colonel impatiently sweeps John off to take his measure we see the corresponding ideology of masculine décor, another kind of

stifling opulence… expressed in heaviness and bulk and force and scope, in an immense desk of some dark tropical wood, a suite of leather armchairs,… a bank of telephones… I was bewildered by the contrast with the guestroom, or rather the continuity: that, still dazzled by beauty and drunk with scent, I should now be exposed to this masculine blandishment, this dark wood and metal, high strategy, the Iraquis, violence, war…

In this room, the refreshment is not pastry but scotch, a liquid gauge of the guest’s politics. Buchan catches with relentless precision the European aspirations encouraged in the women of the household, the counterpart of the American ambitions of the colonel, evidence of a clash of classes, an unstable power matched with a fading prestige that is the mark of a disastrously arranged marriage. In the guest room, the women speak only a kind of precious old-fashioned French, dropping phrases like crystallized fruit, while Farameh, unable, as his wife explains, to understand a word of French, lacking their background and education, blusters in American, his vulgarities a claiming of virility. In a superb scene like an opera quintet, each of the principals speaks to his own purpose, using French, American, English, a bit of Persian, articulate silence, and the language of symbol, each to forge his own alliances, make threats and declarations, and force revelations from the others. Each of the participants grasps only partially what is being communicated, yet this meeting will alter their lives irrevocably.

John, for instance, has brought gifts with a message only Shirin can understand, a common oil lamp and a nineteenth-century mirror whose glass has been replaced with a windowpane. Her mother views the valueless gifts with contempt, but he has, of course, brought Shirin the lamp and windowpane that are the pledges of the love and freedom she wrote of in her essay. At the same time, she and her mother, with intricate evasions, are negotiating together that Shirin will elope with the uncomprehending John without interference, and are in fact saying goodbye to each other for life.

It is clear after John’s visit that Farameh has recognized him. His compromising nighttime glimpse of Farameh in the Russian consul’s garden has put him in grave danger. Ryazanov, who understands John’s peril, at risk of his own life gives him a jeep and a key to an abandoned villa in a town on the Persian Gulf, where John is to stay until he gets himself on a boat out of Iran. Not long after he sets off, he is shocked to discover Shirin hiding in the back of the jeep, with money and a certificate of marriage Ryazanov has provided to protect Shirin from accusations of prostitution and John from accusations of rape.

Buchan resists the temptation to make an idyll of their flight, although it contains moments of great beauty and comedy. They are terrified of the enormity of their decision, angry that they know each other so little, with no choice but to rely on each other. Each is uncertain of the measure of the other’s feelings, each suspects that the other is committed to the marriage out of principle, following a moment of abandon. John is rescuing Shirin from a hateful forced marriage; and Shirin, he learns, is saving his life: she knows her father has ordered him disappeared, as a witness to his intrigue with the consul and an obstruction to his plan for his daughter’s marriage.

Buchan writes poignantly of their bridal sex, their paralyzing fear of it, and its desperate importance. The writer’s aim is to render this relationship as close to its full range as possible, and the measure of his success is that the long section in which there are only two characters in hiding is never monotonous to read. The pair never cease to surprise each other, for both good and ill. John is spoiled and self-absorbed, while Shirin is headstrong and regards men with empirical contempt. The groom is too shocked to carry the bride over the threshold of their hideout when he realizes that she has killed the snakes on the porch with her chador-wrapped hands, an Iranian country woman’s skill. And the bride reacts with poignant mistrust and disbelief that her husband feels love for her as well as appetite.

Buchan gives us a portrait of love as a kind of dynamic, evolving, passionate quest for knowledge, sought through an intense meditation on another person. John’s acquaintance with life outside Iran gives Shirin a glimpse of a new world, while he is bemused by the fact that even planting roses in the little garden of their hideaway is an act of moral philosophy for her; she explains to him that she is adding a measure of goodness to the perpetual struggle against evil, in the terms of Zoroastrianism, Iran’s pre-Islamic religion. Their love for each other is not a refuge from the world, but an engagement with it. The characters are so vividly written that when Shirin is discovered and kidnapped on orders from her father, the book, too, suffers a loss from which it never quite recovers.

3.

After Shirin is seized, John makes his way to Tehran to trace her, his task made even more difficult after the country has plunged into the chaos of the Khomeini revolution. Buchan’s vignettes of Tehran, with its scorched movie posters, liquor stores set ablaze, escaping soldiers with roses between their teeth and pockets full of paper money, capture the terrible glamour and strange festival exhilaration of revolution. Because of his connection with Farameh, who will be commandingly involved in the “Black Friday” of September 1978, in which the Shah’s troops kill thousands of demonstrators, closing off escape routes and firing on them from the air, John is arrested. He is taken to Evin prison, where if he has once tasted paradise, he now knows inferno:

I pushed up my blindfold and saw a sight that broke my heart. I was in a corridor… and on each side, stretching out of sight, were young men and women in blindfolds. Each was absorbed in his own blindness, disconnected, submissive, ignorant that his plight repeated and repeated itself, dreaming, at rest.

The risk Buchan takes with style comes to seem dramatically necessary in the second half of the book, which takes place largely in prison, where John is first held by the Savak, then by the revolutionaries. We feel the violation of the intimate tortures and random executions more profoundly because of the portrait Buchan has given us of Farsi. In a cell where a meal of a “hundred-gram piece of sheep’s cheese [cut] into twenty-four equal pieces with a sharpened metal spoon” is accompanied by the wish “Eat, my dear, and may it be nectar to your soul!,” the language retains an indomitable dream of civilization.

In prison, we see an almost Zoroastrian parallel, a world of evil straining against the world of goodness John knew in the garden of the little house on the Gulf; this place exists not to create lives but to break them. John’s interrogator, “wearing a black hood slashed with eye-holes,” strikes him before he can say a word, “a blow of a violence I had never suffered, which simultaneously blinded me and filled me with sorrow.” It is the counterpart of the first kiss he had shared with Shirin, she too wearing a black hood, a touch that had given him a glimpse not only of joy but of security.

Buchan describes torture with the abundantly observed realism he brought to love, not with pornographic physical detail, but by creating a world so grievously cruel that the life possible in it is barely worth the resistance it takes to sustain. The prison he shows us is a violation of the idea of God, a world in which torture is accepted as part of the daily order, even a religious duty, in which beatings and executions are punctuated by the shout of “Time to wash for prayer!”

The revolutionary interrogator, Shahid, is in a way the counterpart of the brutal royalist, Farameh. If Farameh’s affectedly vulgar deracinated Texan English was a sign of his corruption, so is the bombastic Persian of the prefabricated confessions Shahid tries to force John to sign:

We had puerile squabbles about wording… He kept trying to alter my Persian into an inert, verbless succession of Arabic malapropisms which was the new style of the hard-line newspapers.

“… Mr. Shahid, I thought those honorific titles were a feature of the Qajar despotism and the Idolaters’ regime. Now it is the age of Islam, why can’t I just write: Mr. Najafi?”

“Correct form is: His Excellency the Grand Sign-of-God Mr. Najafi, God extend his Shadow!”

Buchan shows us the politics of life in prison with an eyewitness’s power. And although beauty, desire, tenderness, the lyrical aspects of love have disappeared from the book, he shows us love in another guise, almost as a honed skill, which enables John to survive. This is not so much because John is inspired by a sustaining hope of reunion as because his almost religious contemplation of his wife during their life together has developed in him an uncanny capacity to attend to other people. In the passages with his torturer, we see John

probing for the limits of his patience and intellect… I sensed he was not experienced in the world, or consistent in his mental attitudes; and I would be hit many times more before I could make out the shape of his nature or instructions.

What John knows of life with another person informs his efforts to create a piece of civilized society within his cell, which he shares with an urbane homosexual, a street criminal, a child drug smuggler, and a devout Muslim whose passion for God and generosity toward people reminded me of Platon Karataev in War and Peace.

John’s efforts to teach the alphabet to the imprisoned street child are the outgrowth of Shirin’s nourishing of roses for strangers during their life in hiding, a commitment to some impersonal principle of goodness. Buchan’s portrait of human love in which the quotidian and the mystical are seen to be inseparable reflects the Sufi vision of love expressed in the poems embedded in his novel; if love is at first an opportunity, it is ultimately an achievement.

John volunteers to fight at the front during the Iran-Iraq war, knowing that if he survives, he will be free to search for Shirin. His quest to trace his wife takes him later to Kashmir and Afghanistan, following in the wake of Islamic fundamentalist movements. These final sections of the book are less satisfying than the previous ones—John’s relation to each place is too truncated, the relationships he forms too fleeting, the events that touch him too apocalyptic. He goes from battlefield to bombsite to minefield to single combat showdown with a relentless drama that is too compressed not to become monotonous. There are some marvelous scenes in the final sections, but they remain scenes, they don’t give the dazzling glimpse of the inseparably enlaced worlds of the Iranian sections of the book.

Even so, Buchan has created something unforgettable, an enactment of a human love whose uncertainties are inseparable from faith, necessary to its vitality and evolution. For all its imperfections, this human love is an approach to the divine. It is a love whose relation to the beloved is not fixed, but dynamic, in which uncertainty is compatible with faith as strict orthodoxy often is not. After all, it is the faithful who are not always certain of their relation to their loves—the unfaithful know exactly where they stand.

In The Persian Bride, Buchan has written of human love in a way Hafiz would recognize. “In heaven,” the poet wrote, “the Song of Venus sets even the Messiah’s feet to dancing.”