Peter Hobbs, author
Is there a more storied, more startling fruit than the pomegranate? Islam's purgative for envy and hate, grown in the gardens of paradise, does some symbolic heavy lifting in Peter Hobbs's exquisite novel, In the Orchard, the Swallows.
When a 14-year-old farmer's son is entranced by a local politician's daughter, he introduces himself with a pomegranate in place of words. Later, the two ignore rural Pakistan's class differences and sneak away to watch the sunrise in the pomegranate orchards. The subsequent retribution leaves the boy imprisoned for the next 15 years – as if the would-be lovers had consumed Eden's putative apple, or like Persephone, enjoyed it in the wrong place.
This is simple yet breathtaking storytelling. We meet our narrator as he emerges from prison, a broken and disoriented 29-year-old who is nurtured back to health by a former government poet and his young daughter, living near the now-neglected orchards.
The younger man's family has disappeared, and so too his beloved Saba, the girl who entranced him all those years earlier, and whose memory helped him endure the unrelenting sadism of Pakistan's prisons.
Hobbs does a beautiful job of rendering the measured syntax and concreteness of a young man relearning to read and write in order to tell his story to an unreachable, unknowable lover. "You stood at a fruit stall, beside a tray of apricots – I remember because their colour was reflected in the white silk of your dupatta, a strange trick of the market light."
Suffering has scoured the excesses of youth from the narrator's voice, but not the sweetness of longing. What results is an affecting stillness, the character's inchoate grace. After making his daily trek from the poet's house to the orchards that once belonged to his family, he waits patiently for the swallows to arrive: "They are so quick so perfect in their lines, like little miracles in the air."
At 140 pages, Hobbs's second novel – his first, The Short Day Dying, was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award – is short and contemplative. And like a pomegranate's many arils, it metes out its pleasures in bursts of flavour both sweet and tart.
While incarcerated, the young man witnesses how the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan crowded Pakistan's prisons with men from many Middle Eastern nations, some of whom would be sold to the Americans as "terrorists or insurgents" including innocent men "or at least men guilty of other crimes than fighting Americans."
Ultimately, this is a book about resisting the kinds of darkness of which men are capable – hate, vengeance, sadism as a palliative for boredom – even if hoping means longing for what's more imagined than remembered.
Krista Foss's short fiction has twice been a finalist for the Journey Prize and has been long-listed for CBC Canada Writes. Her slow progress on a novel and subsequent caffeine consumption make her a café favourite in her hometown of Hamilton.