Book review: Tell Her Everything by Mirza Waheed

Tried too hard

Mirza Waheed, the London-based Kashmiri journalist and novelist’s third book, Tell Her Everything, is a ‘heart-breaking novel about human ethics, filial love and the corrosive nature of complicity’, says the blurb. The form of the novel is a man who talks to himself, in preparation of an anticipated meeting with his estranged daughter. Through a series of introspective monologues, Dr Kaiser, the protagonist, is building up the courage he thinks he needs in order to come clean to his daughter, Sara. He wants to “tell her everything.”

This book comes on the heels of his highly acclaimed novels, The Collaborator and The Book of Gold Leaves.

This confessional novel is set in an unnamed city and covers the span of Dr Kaiser’s life from his formative years in India, his immigration to London as a young adult, subsequent parenthood, and life thereafter, some details of which are murky, including place and time.

This is the first pain point one encounters while reading the novel. The reader never feels situated in Kaiser’s world, which might have been a literary trope deliberately employed by Waheed as a metaphorical device. Dr K’s world — his past, his choices, separation from his daughter — all work towards creating a hazy landscape that make up Kaiser’s bleak world. And in this world, he wants to seek forgiveness from Sara for sins he doesn’t quite seem to think of as, well, sins. Each part of the story that leads up to the revelation of his sin or crime is riddled with rationalisations that don’t create the expectation that this is a man who wants to unburden himself to his daughter.

Waheed tries to characterise Dr Kaiser as an unreliable narrator, with all the gravitas of a downcast Burt Lancaster as Ernst Janning in Judgment at Nuremberg, but doesn’t quite manage to get the emotional heft of the character who is aware of his sins.

The sin for which Kaiser carries around guilt through the entirety of the book is revealed towards the end where several tangential threads come together. What is particularly jarring is the lack of connecting threads from one chapter to the other. Leaving the dot-connecting between the two to the reader seems like an unwise choice for what is essentially a read that is heavy on exposition. To make it worse, the daughter comes in sometime during the last quarter of the novel as a character who communicates with her father in epistolary form. Had she entered the story earlier, it might have helped to get the other viewpoint and break through the tedium of keeping up with Dr K’s homilies. Alas, Sara’s point of view, while revelatory, is too short, and too much of an afterthought to fully become foil for the reader in making sense of Kaiser’s past.

The language is crisp, economical, and has the right dash of Indianisms to attract readers from the sub-continent, and is friendly enough in its sparseness for those that might not know these colloquialisms. There are no writerly flourishes and Waheed is not given to extemporaneous, showy prose. A plot such as this would have benefited from a merciless editor who could have snipped off several parts of the book without taking anything away from the overall story.

Kaiser seems to always be in pursuit of redemption, but just when the reader expects to offer up empathy and understanding as a stand-in for the daughter, the novel’s protagonist becomes an all-too-reliable narrator with his predictable justifications. To quote Robert E. Heinlein: “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalising animal.” Never more so than in the case of Dr Kaiser’s shambolic narrative.

And does it work as a novel? Not quite. Like Heinlein also said: “God created men to test the souls of women”. Never more so than in the case of Mirza Waheed’s protagonist, at least for me.