The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is about a most passionate, maddening kind of love. Orpheus, one of the most famous musicians and poets of ancient Greece, fell in love with the beautiful Eurydice, who was, in turn, enamoured by his magical voice. Their love expanded to the extent of consuming both their lives within it. Life without each other was unimaginable. Losing each other meant the dissolution of all rationality and realism, driving them beyond the confines of madness.

In her stunning new novel, The Giant Dark, Sarvat Hasin breathes refreshing new life into the characters of Orpheus and Eurydice. In a reversal of genders, Orpheus is Aida, a rock star with a cultish fan base, and Eurydice is Ehsan, a poet working as a book editor.

Aida and Ehsan first meet in their youth, when both are struggling to pursue their craft. Thrown into juggling their individual dreams along with their impassioned relationship, their tumultuous companionship comes to an end after 10 months, but it has left an unfillable void in both.

In a manifestation of everything she had been striving to attain when they were together, Aida goes on to become a world-famous singer. Meanwhile, Ehsan lands a job at the publishing house Lyre Books, and works his way up from assistant to book editor.

Sarvat Hasin’s take on the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice is a stunning achievement of breathtaking prose, razor-sharp imagery and psychological imagination

But, disillusioned with everything he has and hasn’t been able to achieve in life, and broken over his failed dream to write poetry, Ehsan quits his job without any plans for the future. Despite being the publishing house’s longest-serving employee, he has nothing to show except for savings that will last him a month, maybe three.

Then, a whole decade after they first met and drifted apart, Aida and Ehsan reconnect in London, the city where their love had been born and bloomed, only she is at the peak of her fame and he is about to hit rock-bottom.

In the 10 years of separation, neither has been able to find love, or anything near to what they had with each other, which makes their reconciliation all the more intoxicating. Slowly permeating into each other’s life again, Ehsan gives up his home and city to follow Aida on tour, where secrets and jealousies begin to unravel.

What hooked me most in The Giant Dark was the perspective of Aida’s fans throughout the story. It is how the story begins, and it is also where the true dexterity of Hasin’s exquisite writing is on full display. This characterisation transports readers to possibly the most whimsical days of their lives, when one finds their first musical love. The intense devotion and profound admiration with which the fans — who call themselves “Starlets” after her song ‘The Night Full of Cheap Stars’ — idolise Aida resolutely establishes that no one could love or care for her more than them.

With the advent of Ehsan in Aida’s life, the Starlets become incredibly protective of her, harbouring jealousy for anyone who would get close to her. By starting the story with this glorified and gold-plated image of Aida, Hasin masterfully enlists the readers among the mass of admirers who want to know more about Aida — it is natural for fans to want to pry into the lives of their idols, wanting to see if they are human like them, or the divinely perfect beings in their minds.

Listening parties, streaming her live performances into our living rooms. Often ramshackle, last-minute affairs: her schedule was unpredictable and she never played more than three songs in one go. Still, we gathered in basements to listen together ... Dressing for the occasion, mouths sticky with lipstick, lace and black suits, the swish of long dresses. — Excerpt from the book Hence, when Aida’s character is slowly peeled and all the layers are removed to reveal her bona fide self through her own perspective, the reader is left breathless.

She lives an almost nomadic life, constantly travelling from one country to another — partly because of her musical career and partly because of her attempts to not visit London. Being as she is of South Asian descent, her relationship with her mother would also be interesting and relatable for people with South Asian parents. Her mother comes off as intrusive and patronising at times — much to Aida’s dismay — but the evolution of their relationship is one of the best things about the book.

Unlike her fans, the readers learn that the real Aida is shy and sensitive, she loves deeply and is utterly grounded and unpretentious. Yet, at no point do the two images of Aida conflict with each other, or even make her appear as two different people. They are both perfectly different, and exactly the same.

In Ehsan, one can find a museum of all the things we had to be, but didn’t become; all the dreams we dreamed, but never lived. His loss of appreciation of art or anything creative, his deploring of the poetry he had written in the past, his inability to write anymore and his desperation to vault out of the loop he has been stuck in for years without any safety net — subtly, yet painfully, it all weaves his life together with the overall tragedy of the story.

Even his resentment of Aida evokes empathy because of how vastly his life has been turned upside down. Ehsan is supposedly Aida’s muse, but how he is rejuvenated through her existence makes her somewhat of a muse for him as well.

The story is divided into two parts, which are surprisingly very different in terms of both mood and pace. The first comes off as slow-paced and it is a bit difficult to be drawn instantly into it. The second part, meanwhile, is much faster, darker and a lot more intriguing. Hasin’s prose is smooth and continuous, her imagery is razor-sharp and the meticulousness with which she probes around in the minds of her characters is something to be marvelled at.

More than the story, it is Hasin’s breathtaking prose that makes the reader turn page after page. The Giant Dark might be a very loose retelling of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus but, at its heart, it is the same story of what it means to be insanely in love, how ephemeral love can be and how unbearable the agony of a romantic collapse can be.

The reviewer is a student and freelance writer. She tweets @nawillanelle

The Giant Dark
By Sarvat Hasin
Dialogue/Hachette, UK
ISBN: 978-0349701745
240pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 6th, 2022