Book review: 'In the Orchard, the Swallows'

Book: In the Orchard, the Swallows
Author: Peter Hobbs
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Pages: 139
Price: Rs450

Peter Hobbs writes a timeless love story of such beauty and cruelty that one can only refine the other by comparison. He sets his book in Northern Pakistan, an area troubled by its “fluid and unmarked” borders with Afghanistan. It is Eden to the unnamed hero, a young farmer’s boy who grows up in his father’s pomegranate fields, innocent of the power and corruption that dominate the workings of the world.

Hobbs opens his story with this boy returning as a man after 15 years spent in prison, “not to be punished, but to be forgotten.” His crime was the artlessness with which he fell in love with Saba, a powerful man’s daughter, and attempted to defend her. Rescued from near certain death, by a kind poet, the narrator is nursed to life and given pen and paper, to help him heal. He spends his days stumbling to and fro between his current refuge and his father’s erstwhile lands. While doing so, he is visited by remembrances of his idyllic past alternating with horrifying memories of his ordeal in prison. 

There is a unique rhythm at play in the novel. On one hand it is a simply told story of one man’s entrapment, unjustified torture, equally unpredictable release and slow recovery; all shadowed by the sensation of lost love. Hobbs’s storytelling reaches out to something that eludes even the most degrading physical punishments: an inner resilience, by which the narrator is able to imagine the Eden-like surroundings of his childhood simply by the visitation of swallows through the prison bars. This spiritual impregnability makes the story somehow magical and redemptive.

Hobbs’ language is pitch-perfect. Every sense is stoked by his descriptions, from the slow swelling of fruit in summer to the feel of leaves on cheek (“beneath the dust they are glossy, smooth as polished leather…”). The purity of the narrator’s longing for Saba stays with the reader, leaving you feeling almost cheated at the end and wanting more. According to Islam, pomegranates grow in paradise and we can but taste them fleetingly in this life. This is the bittersweet lesson with which Hobbs leaves his readers at the end of In The Orchard, The Swallows.