‘I seek to be better than the person I am’ – In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs

Peter Hobbs’ new book feels like something of a departure even as it shares the lyricism, poetry and search for beauty and faith of his debut, The Short Day Dying. Where his debut was a historical novel set in south-west England in 1870, In the Orchard, the Swallows is vividly contemporary, set in Pakistan and delivered to us as a rumination of sorts by a frail young man recovering from a long and terrible bout of imprisonment. Each day he walks, gently, slowly, between the house where he is being looked after by Abbas, an elderly gentleman who found our narrator gasping his last in a ditch, and the orchard that once belonged to his father and in which the pivotal event of his life took place.

Over a series of quite short chapters (themselves comprising a short book, In the Orchard, the Swallows clocks in at 139 pages which may make some readers question what Hobbs has been up to in the five or so years since his last book but the book itself packs such emotional density as to render this question needless), we learn about his life up to this point (how he could have been a more dutiful son, how he became infatuated with a young girl in the nearby market, how it led to his disgrace and downfall) and the gentle unravelling is suffused with acceptance, wisdom and hope. The experiences of his narrator’s life have left him someone capable of wringing beauty from the slightest gust of wind – and yet this is an attitude cultivated in the direst depths of a tragedy, wrongfully imprisoned and subject to beatings at the whims of bored guards.

The shadow of events from the last decade hang over the book, of course, and yet it is fable-like in the telling, divorced from the actual minutiae of who did what to whom and when. More than anything else, the book is a love story but the love is as much between reader and author as it is between narrator and lost love. There are lessons here for all of us:

‘The anger has faded. I have no desire to seek revenge. I do not think it was anything I did. I think, simply, that I was just fortunate that my rage did not overwhelm me. Perhaps I came to understand that it was not real. And as I write to you, the last of my resentment is subdued. I seek only peace. I seek to be better than the person I am.’

Like Craig Thompson’s Habibi, In the Orchards, the Swallows demonstrates the fascination the Middle Eastern world holds for the Western author, but Hobbs makes a far better go of it than Thompson – thanks in part to the understanding that sympathy rather than fireworks is the way to succeed.

Any Cop?:  The first great novel of the new year.