In 2015, Usman Tanveer Malik’s non-fiction piece in the Herald titled Rockets, Robots and Reckless Imagination: How Science Fiction can Spur Pakistan into the 21st Century claimed that “Encouraging science fiction, fantasy and horror readership has the potential to alleviate or fix many of Pakistan’s problems.” The basis of his belief was that we as a nation lacked empathy and imagination, and reading these genres could help nurture those traits in us, which in turn would solve many of our issues such as intolerance and fundamentalism.

I thought so too, and the idea was novel, but I couldn’t see it happening — couldn’t see us changing our hearts and our heads with a dozen hundred page-flips. The spite had, after all, settled in deep.

But one bright and searing afternoon in Lahore, I detoured to The Last Word bookshop and walked out with Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale. The novel’s beauty preceded even the first page: the hardcover embellished in textured hues of green and orange, illustrated in the style of traditional Russian folkloric art. This was a book you didn’t just want to read, but wanted your friends to know you were reading, and you would lend it to them if it didn’t look so lovely on your drab bookshelf as a piece of literature worth reading.

A debut fantasy novel draws readers into medieval Russia and manages to create empathy for women’s struggles in societies such as ours

I spent that night immersed in its world through the light of my phone.

The story begins with the birth of the protagonist Vasilisa Petrovna, in a village in Rus’ — what in the real world would probably consist of Belarus, Ukraine and parts of Russia — during a time when men travelled the soaring and aching lengths of the land to hunt for treasure, sell wares and fight wars. Women stayed at home; they mended clothes, cooked food and bore the men healthy children. That was what they were brought up for and that was what they were happy with.

But Vasilisa is not like other women. She roams through the forest by herself, hunts animals and forages for berries and herbs. She can outswim and outrun many men and many demons. She is not as attractive as the other village girls — too thin, too proud, too outspoken — and, for what it is in her world (and ours), she hates marriage.

But, she is magical. She can see the Chyerti — spirits and magical creatures of Russian folklore. The domovoi, for example, is a small, bearded, brown, gnome-like spirit that protects her home from evil in return for bread and milk. The spirit of the horses, the vazila, is similar in appearance (except that it is more rugged) and tends to the equines in her stable, giving them food and grooming them when need be. Many more similar spirits live scattered throughout the forest near her house. She can talk to them and learn from them. But the belief in the Chyerti is waning; Christianity has begun taking over as the leading religion and its propaganda is spreading, mystifying the people of Rus’ through the churches, icons and priests that have been steadily migrating into the cities and villages. Vasilisa’s role is manifold: she labours to protect her family, her faith and herself — who she is and what she believes in — but there are enemies working against her, demons and humans, sometimes both being one and the same.

But — and this is the best part — Vasilisa’s magic is not the convenient plot device of the lazy writer. She has no easy way out, no miracles to fix everything in her life, no one-shot kill for the demons. Throughout the book, the greater magic manifests in how she strives for her friends and her family through no strength but her own.

The prose is written in a fresh, Maximalist style, one that I haven’t enjoyed reading so much in a very long time. Arden places an adjective or an adverb at every place she is able and it works, because she doesn’t just stuff them in there; each word is carefully selected to be thematically relevant, and bring every bit of this fantasy world alive: “The wind sobbed. The trees whispered. The sun was a live thing, throwing its hot arms over their [the farmers] necks.” In Arden’s hands Rus’ isn’t fiction; Rus’ is a world that once was real, and is now real again. Arden’s novel breathes and lives and so does the world in it.

The story often crosses genres, spanning historical fiction, fantasy and feminist literature. And surprisingly, it has one of the best horror segments I’ve read in over two years now, passages that robbed me of my sleep and made me hear and see things crying and crawling in the dark.

I completed the last hundred pages in a single stretch of night, pulling myself out of Rus’s well near the chill of dawn. I thought a lot in that moment, when it was quiet and only my own breathing filled my ears, and I hoped I would dream that night, and I did, and then I continued dreaming for the many days and the many nights that followed.

Perhaps Malik was right.

Pakistan is a country for men. Maybe it wasn’t made that way, but it exists that way now. And while growing up is difficult for all of us, it is even more so for the women. It is easy for men to say that we make an effort to sympathise with women’s pains, with what it feels like to be birthed and raised in a country of oppression, in the same way we try to sympathise with the minorities, the ill, the poor. It is easy to say that we can imagine how it feels to lose out on equal opportunity, to be dictated to, to be unable to walk the streets and public places as we wish, not be allowed education or live life in a dozen or more ways as we wish to and others do. It’s easy to say, but so much more difficult to live.

But Arden’s brilliant masterpiece does its best to try and emulate that; the beautiful prose and structural excellence help the reader slip into the shoes of the protagonist, and then walk a mile and then two and then a thousand in them, all through her birth and up till the novel’s climactic finale. Vasilisa’s struggle helped me understand the everyday plight of the Pakistani woman, of having to fight to be yourself, in a much better manner than any other medium had so far.

It would be surprising if Arden’s debut is not nominated for the World Fantasy Award. With exceptional skills at building a world and an evocative imagination, The Bear and the Nightingale is a performance worth admiring, and its themes make it a significant work of fantasy fiction that everyone should read. With this being just her debut, it’s exciting to see what Arden will conjure next.

The reviewer is a student at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and an editor at the LUMS Business Review

The Bear and the
Nightingale
By Katherine Arden
Del Rey, US
ISBN: 9781101885932
322pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 15th, 2017