First Impressions
I love an engaging family epic that gets into all the messiness and drama of family life, and there's certainly a lot of that in “Floodlines” by Saleem Haddad, which follows three generations of one family, primarily three adult sisters who've mostly been estranged from one another. Living in different places, they're pulled back together partly because their aging mother, Bridget, is facing increasing mental and physical difficulties, raising immediate questions about her care, but also because of a much bigger question: what happens to their father's legacy. Their father was a very famous artist in Iraq, and the rediscovery of his paintings raises the question of who gets to be their caretaker, whether they should be sold, or displayed as a representative example of Iraqi art. We follow the sisters as they come together to argue this out, with their mother Bridget drawn into the discussion too.
Family, History, and Art
In working through all this the novel explores facets of Iraqi history I wasn't aware of before alongside a real sense of how each individual's perspective on a nation and its history depends entirely on their own experience of it. Each of the sisters grew up in Iraq alongside their parents but left at different points in their lives, which has given each of them a genuinely different point of view on the country's history, all of which feeds into their disagreements over their father's legacy. All three women are also practicing artists in their own right, each working in a different form that feels tied to their individual personalities and how they see the world. This novel engages with the complex question about what it means to create art, how art can express an individual point of view while also representing something much larger about a community or a nation's history, and how art can be manipulated for political ends, something their father discovered firsthand while creating a major commissioned piece in Iraq, shaped by the shifting governments around him.
Structure and Characters
The novel moves between the sisters' perspectives, though we actually enter the story through another character, Nizar, the son of one of the sisters. At the novel's start, Nizar is deeply disillusioned with his career as a war journalist, having traveled through the Middle East reporting on various conflicts, left physically scarred and mentally traumatized by moving through those war zones. He's drawn into his mother and aunts' conflict over his grandfather's art, and the novel moves between his perspective, the three sisters', and Bridget's. I often find myself favoring one perspective over the others in multi-POV novels like this, but here I found every account equally engaging. Most of the action takes place across the middle of 2014, though the characters frequently loop back into memory, and there are buried family secrets and old dramas that surface and reshape the present as the novel goes on, full of intriguing surprises and plot twists. Getting to know each character's backstory only pulled me in closer.
Zainab, Nizar's mother, had a very difficult early life, including the loss of her first husband, raising her child while moving between countries and struggling to get by, before eventually marrying a wealthy man and arriving at real financial comfort. She wants to establish her father's legacy and celebrate his art in the country where it was made, a position her sisters don't fully share. Her older sister, Ishtar, is strong-willed and opinionated, one of my favorite characters in the book, someone I loved reading about even though I'd never want to actually meet her, given how intimidating she is. She lives on a houseboat on the Thames in London, is a lesbian, and has this grand conceptual art project: recreating an ark to sail down the Tigris, an attempt to reconnect the region with the ancient art and tradition of Mesopotamia. We follow her on that journey, sailing through countries including active war zones, and it generates high tension throughout the book, as this family's present increasingly entangles with both world events in 2014 and the nation's history across previous decades. There's one very dramatic scene involving a dance with a historic figure at a public function that reminded me a little of Alan Hollinghurst's “The Line of Beauty”, a completely jaw-dropping moment.
Verdict
What struck me most is how tenderly the novel explores each character's backstory and their difficult, halting effort to come together as a family, moving the story from tense family arguments toward something like hope, hard-won and incomplete, but genuine. Nizar spends much of the novel in a place of deep despair, reflecting on a broken relationship with a man named Alfie, a good and supportive relationship undermined by fundamental differences in perspective between them. There's an especially moving section at the novel's center focused on Bridget, the mother, at a point in her life where past and present have started to blend together, and the memories that surface for her are rendered with heart-wrenching beauty.
I think this is a genuinely inspiring, informative book, one that offers such a different vantage point on displacement and on understanding your own relationship to nationhood from a position of remove from the country of your birth. But beyond all that, it's simply a wonderful family story with so many compelling characters that I wanted to keep reading about, and there's so much in it, too, about the richness and power of art itself. I think it's a wonderful, finely written, and very accomplished novel. This is an impressive follow-up from Haddad’s debut novel “Guapa”.
Interviewing the Author
I had the pleasure of interviewing Saleem Haddad at a live event at Hatchards bookshop in London, and it was fascinating hearing his perspective on writing this book, which took him many years given how complex and layered the story is. I think it's impressive how he draws in so many characters and layers of history while keeping everything clear; I was never confused about what was happening, even moving between all these different perspectives.
Before our live conversation, I filmed a short segment with Haddad in the bookshop discussing books that influenced him while writing “Floodlines” which I’ve included at the end of my video review. His final recommendation was Virginia Woolf's “The Waves”, which happens to be my own favorite novel of all time, something I found genuinely touching, especially given that he discussed it at Hatchards, the historic bookshop that's actually referenced in Woolf's “Mrs. Dalloway”. Haddad said he thinks of it, in many ways, as a book about life itself. While writing the ending of his own novel, he wanted a dreamy atmosphere built around a kind of collective, polyphonic voice, and someone recommended “The Waves” to him as a model; he read it and fell in love with it, describing it as ultimately about the human experience.
If you've read “Floodlines”, I'd love to know what you thought of it.
