Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Lydia Beyoud for the Portland Oregonian, June 26, 2010
Sicily, Spain, Istanbul, Jerusalem. For over a quarter-century, Tariq Ali has been transporting readers to Muslim lands through the historical novels of his Islam Quintet. In them, the staunchly leftist British-Pakistani filmmaker and historian marries tales of art, political intrigue, and sensuality with his particular blend of invective, highbrow intellectualism and bawdy humor.
Though Ali’s writing is always a commentary upon the present day, the Quintet’s previous four novels are set in a different historical era when the bright lights of cosmopolitan and intellectually curious Islamic civilizations still shone but had begun to fade. In each, the fortunes of the West are inextricably bound to those of the waning East, a narrative theme commenting upon the preposterousness of an inherent rift between civilizations.
Ali’s fifth and final book in the series, Night of the Golden Butterfly, is a departure from the others. Not only is it set in the present, but it differs radically from the others in structure, genre and tone. While the strong opinions and authorial voice that characterize Ali’s work still thunder across the page, this novel is marked by a deep sense of nostalgia, like that of a man looking back on the halcyon days of his youth:
“Was it old friends I was mourning or an old city,” Ali writes, “an old world that had since changed so much and for the worse, a world in which expectations for a better future were always high and in which the ultra-Wahhabi beard, gangster politics and cancerous corruption had yet to appear and drown all hope.” read more
Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Aamer Hussein for The Independent, May 28, 2010
Naughty Lateef, a Pakistani housewife who sleeps with powerful men, is “masquerading as a wronged Muslim woman, describing her oppression in lavish detail” in a book of kiss-and-tell memoirs disguised as a denunciation of Muslim norms.
On a French TV show, she finds herself in opposition to a “hijab-clad Maghrebin Frenchwoman”. Unexpectedly Yusufa, who wears the hijab as a “gesture of defiance”, wins the round, moving her adversary when she recites a verse by the 15th-century Persian poet Jami which uses the veil as metaphor.
Dara, the narrator of this novel, has been asked by his artist-friend Plato to tell the latter’s story; but Dara insists he will tell a multi-vocal story and tell it as fiction. Plato serves mostly as a facilitator, bringing Dara back into contact with homeland, and introducing the passionate Zaynab into his life. Dara is a wily storyteller, who simultaneously constructs, and dismantles, orientalist takes on Pakistan: honour killings, gender discrimination, corruption and betrayal—yes: but not for the reasons the Western world assumes. It’s the web of political skullduggery Dara decries: he tells the story of his idealistic 1960s youth in the Fatherland (as Pakistan is referred to) and of the companions who sold friends and went off in a rightward direction.
“Fiction, thinly disguised as fact”, is only one of Tariq Ali’s targets in this wonderfully exuberant and mischievous novel. Naughty pays a price for her success, but earns a fortune on her way to perdition. Zaynab, who really has suffered—in her native Sindh, she’s been forced to marry the Koran by her feudal family—refuses to see Islam as the sole enemy (such practices aren’t condoned even by extremists). read more
Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Tom Adair for The Scotsman, May 23, 2010
Reminiscent of John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest—the final volume of his Rabbit quartet—there’s a mighty, resounding thwack of satisfaction for the reader at the conclusion of Tariq Ali’s ambitious Night of the Golden Butterfly. Both books conclude with a sense of finality mingled with loss—the death of a larger-than-life leading character has just happened—yet something adheres.
For Ali winds up his audacious, prize-winning, epic Islam Quintet by rounding up his key players for a finale marked by a wonderfully worked set piece (the unveiling of a major, totemic painting, the culmination of a life’s work), leaving the reader in little doubt that the manifold foibles and achievements of this colourful cast of players will continue into the ether. This is a book I will read again.
Its narrator, Dara, in that scene, in contemplation of an amusing erotic image of Jindie, his first love, surveys with pleasure one of her breasts depicted suggestively on the canvas, something, he notes, that in real life he has yet to see, a harbinger clearly of sexual conquests in the offing. Jindie’s husband and brother stare; they are embarrassed.
The painter, Plato, the eldest of the coterie of old friends who have gathered to marvel, somewhat like Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in Updike’s novels, hovers above it all—as does Ali, engaged, yet detached, his satirical distance denying any possibility of nostalgic sentimentality. “It was over,” barks the novel’s final sentence. The nail in the coffin. read more
Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Michael Arditti for the Daily Mail, May 21, 2010
Tariq Ali may still be best known as a 1960s political firebrand but, in latter years, he has reinvented himself as a novelist of distinction. Night of the Golden Butterfly is the fifth volume of his Islam Quintet. Having traced the tortuous relations between the Muslim world and the West in key historical eras, he now takes on the fraught task of tackling it in the present day.
Switching between Pakistan, China and Europe, the central narrative concerns four men—Dara, Zahid, Plato and Confucius—who were intellectual and political comrades in 1960s Lahore and are thrown together more than 40 years later when Plato asks Dara to write his biography.
Dara agrees, but his account focuses less on Plato than on two women: Zaynab, Plato’s mistress, and Jindie, his own first love and the Golden Butterfly of the title. Narrative coherence is not Dara’s forte any more than it is Ali’s and there are far too many digressions such as that on Jindie’s ancestors in 19th-century China. Elsewhere, however, Ali offers a persuasive account of the corruption of contemporary Pakistan, especially the brutal sexual politics, and his wry, ruminative account of lifelong friendship rings with truth.
Tariq Ali profiled by James Campbell for the Guardian to celebrate the launch of Night of the Golden Butterfly, May 8, 2010
In photographs and news footage of political demonstrations of the 1960s, Tariq Ali is unmistakeable: the thick black hair and thatchy moustache; the clenched fist and characteristic surge to the foreground amid a sea of fair faces. Almost immediately on coming down from Oxford in 1966, Ali began to agitate for a workers’ uprising—not just in Britain but across the world. His book 1968 and After: Inside the Revolution (1978) stressed “the key importance of the working class as the only agency of social change”. His hero was Che Guevara. Meeting Malcolm X at an Oxford Union debate in 1964, he was pleased to discover that Malcolm was “a great admirer of Cuba and Vietnam”. Ali was Britain’s own “other”, a role he took up with zeal and played with dash and style. He didn’t get his revolution, but he did get a Rolling Stones anthem in his honour. Mick Jagger is said to have written “Street Fighting Man” for him. Ali returned the compliment by calling his autobiography Street Fighting Years.
Ali had a strong personal presence then, and he has it still. Now 66, he lives in a roomy neogothic house in Highgate, north London—friends have been heard to call it “Chateau Tariq”—with his partner of 35 years, Susan Watkins. She edits New Left Review, to which Ali has been a longstanding contributor. They have two children (Ali has another, with a former partner). In 1974, he ran for parliament as the International Marxist candidate, but the sloganeering public persona is tempered by an erudite domestic man.
He has not forsaken his opposition to “neoliberal economic policies” (capitalism, in a word) but is resigned to the fact that the predicted disintegration of the system has not occurred. “It’s a problem people have had to come to terms with at different times in history: what do you do in a period of defeat?” In his case, the realignment took an unexpected form: he turned to writing fiction. The second act of the drama of Tariq Ali opened after the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989. read more