The winds portend bad omens

As a former staffer on an international breaking news desk, I have a fondness for novels set in newsrooms. There’s Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, a bitingly funny satire that takes Fleet Street to task; Michael Fray’s Towards The End of the Morning, which centres on the folk who’re responsible for the thankless task of putting together a newspaper’s dull miscellany, Annalena McAfee’s The Spoiler, which tracks two very different kinds of women— a war correspondent and a celebrity gossip editor— at newspapers right before the dot-com boom, and Tom Rachman’s sublime debut The Imperfectionists which profiles the people that make up a fictional international newspaper.

What each of these novels gets right is the astute descriptions of newsroom culture: the bloated egos of the staffers, the ways in which the pressures and clinical decision making further sculpt their personalities, how the bleakness of the job can lend itself to superb moments of humor. But it’s the universality of any high-pressure environment that makes a newsroom such a perfect place to set a novel about the human condition: Almost everyone can understand the hysteria and elation of realising only ten minutes to print that the 80-point headline says ‘pubic’ instead of ‘public’. Add that to people who’re responsible for disseminating information about the world, their individual personality quirks and you should have a recipe for success.

Iqbal worked as a journalist in both India and the Gulf– the book is set primarily inside newsrooms. In the prologue, there’s a promise of the kind of book this could be– Abbas is the editor of the newsroom, he’s perfected the art of censorship: “He knew exactly how to bury the unsavoury stories about the sheikhs- their tribal in-fighting, indifference and cruelty to expatriate workers, their nauseating and eccentric heights of luxury- and how to blow up stories that held no news value in any newspaper anywhere in the world. He knew the importance of page two stories, of visiting chefs and magicians or music bands, or overrated paintings by rich expatriate housewives. More importantly he knew how to focus more on world news to hush down the local stories concerning human rights violations.”

This is exactly the kind of insidery, gossipy take on newsroom culture and how it leads to burnout, disaffected workers and an immigrant population that’s deeply considering their role in the world. Which is why it’s such a surprise that Sabin Iqbal’s Shamal Days, about Abbas, a middle-aged narrator working as a proofreader turned editor in an unnamed Gulf desert country– a novel that’s got everything a winning formula should need– is so lackluster. Despite a few brilliant moments peppered throughout the book, Shamal Days is a grim read that meanders too much for readers to make much of its central premise about alienation and the immigrant experience.

For the most part, the book is told through the close third person perspective of Abbas, a Malayali expatriate who gets his start as a proofreader in an international newsroom. Abbas’s personality can be neatly summed up as overwhelmingly insecure, extremely horny, and desperately unhappy. Abbas is a miserable character, sticking with his perspective is an exercise in suffering– Abbas is incapable of understanding his own agency. As a character he thinks things happen only to him. This may be bearable in a shorter book, or perhaps in a book that’s more plot driven or one that is less over-stuffed with unnecessary secondary characters. In Shamal Days, which unfortunately suffers all of those things, it’s the book’s fatal flaw: Iqbal chooses to jump backwards and forwards in time to explain Abbas’s story. It’s unclear why the book is structured in this way, the narrative will sometimes jump to characters that have never been introduced and will simultaneously place the reader in a time that they haven’t been in before. Sometimes this leads to delightful surprises, like that of a World Cup hopeful footballer, Abdullah, whose story is so beautifully rendered it could be from a different novel entirely. At other times we will simply leave the main thrust of Abbas’s narrative to wander down a tangent. The reason for the tangent will never manifest for the reader, othertimes it will happen so much later in the book, and after so many other tangents that the significances will have been lost. There is a sense here of a muscle being flexed to impress someone who will never quite see it. The end result is this: Often, Iqbal will leave a thread open, starting a small but somewhat tantalising mystery for the reader. As a result of these tangents, this narrative mystery will be abandoned, the reader will be distracted with characters and other needless information. By the time the narrative mystery is solved, the reader may no longer care about the outcome.

All of this added up to make Abbas one of the least likeable male characters I’ve read in recent memory. Returning to his morose narration, reorienting myself to the thin plot, and moving forward was tiresome. A much-too-long prologue at the beginning implied that Abbas would be making a choice. I assumed we’d watch Abbas grapple with that choice or the aftermath of that choice. This does not happen. Instead, we’re treated to a book about an indecisive man who spends the majority of his life unable to see that not making a decision is in fact a decision in and of itself. It is unclear if Iqbal is aware of this and by extension if we’re to understand that Abbas becomes aware of this.

In either case–whether Abbas learns to become decisive or not feels unearned. Because we shift to the perspectives of so many other characters, almost exclusively men, and all of these men tend to describe women in such callous and physical ways, I never quite understood if all of the men in this book were deeply misogynistic or if Iqbal was the misogynist. I’m not usually the kind of reader that believes characters in the book hold the opinion of the author, however, this book never made any women out to be anything other than sexual objects while men were afforded all sorts of shades of characterisations. For Abbas to have any sort of humane epiphany towards the end of the book after almost 200 pages of seeing women as objects or the recipients of his unquenchable sexual desire is difficult to believe.

The writing in Shamal Days is uneven at best. There are paragraphs that are overwritten, distracting from the thrust of the novel itself. Sometimes the prose is simply repetitive, and not masterful enough for the reader to know if this is unintentional. But there are moments where the writing is clear, and precise and incredibly astute about the fact that everyone in this novel is living in a nation built on the backs of an imported labor class. This is not something I’ve seen visbilized in English language fiction before. Jobseekers are described as “looking at one another like possible in a walk-in boxing bout, totally in the dark about each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” while “Petite filipina and frail Sri Lankan housemaids loitered around phone booths like fumblings ants, waiting for their turn to call home at reduced rates.” It’s also one of the few places that Abbas’s as a character really works– his affect and general despair are the correct lens to shine on his observations for the city around him. Each time Abbas encounters someone in the labour class, he notes their ethnicity and their homeland, makes sure to add a beat so the reader knows what role they play in the machine that makes the country work.

Abbas tells he reader that the shamal winds comes with a lingering feeling of a bad omen, and perhaps this is the feeling that the book is supposed to evoke in readers, instead the book left this reader primarily with the feeling of promise unfulfilled.

Mariya Karimjee is a freelance writer. All information and facts provided are the sole responsibility of the writer.