MOST often than not, when I read a piece of fiction what I’m looking for are characters that stay with me long after I’ve put down the book. Souls I could transport to any city, to any era, and still find compelling. This means I’m always eager to happen upon a story about people whose trajectories depend more on their personalities and less on their circumstances.
To my delight, Roopa Farooki’s The Flying Man is just that. Maqil Karam, the novel’s central character, is one of the more enigmatic fictional personalities I’ve come across in a while. Samira, the novel’s other stand-out character, is a feisty mix of sensuality and wisdom. Deeply in love and tragically ill-suited, Samira and Maqil lie at the heart of the novel’s central question: does living life on one’s own terms ultimately become the opposite of freedom?
Freedom is a concept Maqil has never had any trouble embracing. Though we’re told Maqil was born in Pakistan, his Pakistani-ness is of refreshingly little significance to the story or to himself. In fact, Maqil geographically and emotionally distances himself from Pakistan as quick as he can, diving into New York City’s womb as a teenager to be reborn as Mike, or MSK. It is here that he finds his true calling as a con artist with a taste for the high life. Maqil’s greatest pleasure is his game, the quest to achieve maximum gains (mostly monetary and material) with minimal effort. Though his IQ is high and his pedigree rich, he abhors hard work and any sort of long-term commitment. This quirk governs his every action; he will do practically anything to get his way, even if it means deceiving the people who love him or shedding and adopting personas.
And so we find Maqil can carve out a comfortable space for himself anywhere on the globe, relying on gambling and clever scams to keep himself afloat. We follow him to Cairo in the 1960’s, where we observe his casual abandonment of first wife, Carine. We watch him find love in Pakistan only to lose it in London. We see his fortunes fade in Europe only to be rebuilt in Southeast Asia. We keep pace with him all the way to present day Biarritz, where he sits in a crumbling hotel room and contemplates his life.
Though the list of Maqil’s sins is long — he is an inveterate liar, a fraud, an irresponsible husband and an abominable parent — Farooki has cleverly endowed him with just enough self-awareness to make us reserve our judgment of him. Regular access to Maqil’s interior monologue gives one the sense that he cheats, lies and deceives without malice, that he drags his predilection to deceive around with him like a disability. In a quiet moment he is bound to call himself a coward, chiding himself for his inability to stick to anything or anyone. “Do you ever wonder that if you’re from Anywhere, you might be from Nowhere?” he asks himself one day. “That if you can do Anything, that means you do Nothing? That you’re just getting away with it, day after day, but not getting anywhere at all?”
Maqil’s doubts are not unfounded for he never quite manages to break his cycle of self-destructive behaviour. If Maqil had been the book’s sole preoccupation, The Flying Man would have been less successful, hampered by a conspicuous lack of character development.
Luckily, Farooki trots Samira out at just the right time. Samira is Maqil’s second wife and the only person who truly manages to understand and later outwit him. She is such a vibrant, forceful personality that the very act of her choosing Maqil over all other suitors redeems him, albeit momentarily.
I suspect Samira will soon become a cult heroine to those who crave some distance from characterisations of Pakistani women that glorify self-sacrifice and stoicism. Glamourous, selfish and opportunistic, Samira is sassy enough to keep Maqil while he’s worth keeping, and pragmatic enough to let him go when he damages the family. Farooki plays up Samira’s mysterious allure with delicious tabloid-style descriptions — we’re told she “stalks through society perfectly dressed, with the regal insouciance of a jungle cat,” and “is universally admired.” Samira demands nothing more from Maqil than what his nature can provide, and often eschews romance in favour of tangible demonstrations of commitment. She’s a breath of fresh air since both film and fiction have idolised simpering, needy heroines of late — an unpardonable offense since Farooki clearly demonstrates that someone like Samira is so much more engaging. In fact, the novel rises to its greatest height when Samira, with admirable foresight and her typical panache, pulls off a coup that humbles Maqil like little else has in life.
The Flying Man loses some of its momentum when Samira is missing from its pages, for she isn’t only the perfect counterpoint to Maqil’s outrageousness but also doubles as the novel’s narrative voice. This omniscience allows her to give us gems like this: “Everyone pretends they’re so modern and liberated, but the truth is women are still judged by how they look. It’s alright for you Maqil, you can flap around in those old flares without anyone noticing or caring. But the wrong choice of hat could ruin my career.”
It’s difficult, then, to choose whose cause to champion — Samira or Maqil’s? One gets the sense that Farooki places herself firmly on Samira’s side somewhere in the middle of the book, which makes sense given the context. After all, the book was inspired by Farooki’s father’s life, a nomadic, careless existence similar to Maqil’s. By Farooki’s own admission, she didn’t get much in the way of paternal support and supervision and the burden of organising family life was shouldered mostly by her mother. To her credit though, Farooki keeps just enough distance from her characters to allow for our independent critiques, with the result that The Flying Man is far from a moralistic tale of the dangers of excessive individual liberty.
It is instead a celebration of love and the possibility of love. Even when the novel trawls the depths of Maqil’s depravity we’re allowed to hope for change — if not in his life then in the lives of those he’s touched. And though the success of their union may be questionable, I expect Maqil and Samira to endure, in the way that larger-than-life characters confound, compel and ultimately inspire us.
The Flying Man (NOVEL) By Roopa Farooki Headline Books, UK ISBN 0755383389 352pp. £16.99