Book review: The Good Children offers Pakistani perspective from afar

An Indian novelist recently suggested that families in South Asia are so far-extended, so tightly-woven and so deeply-enmeshed that no writer in the region should ever run out of material. Nonetheless, with The Good Children as yet another example, many of the most acute and astute stories about Indian and Pakistani families are published by expatriate authors, living in London or the United States.

Roopa Farooki, born in Lahore but brought up in London, now divides her time between England (the South East) and France (the South West). Her characters in The Good Children likewise scurry between the family home in Pakistan and their studies, jobs and loves in the wider world. The focus of their gaze is insistently outwards and away; Farooki's family is diametrically different from the claustrophobically constrained  Pakistani family in Salman Rushdie's Shame. If this family tale proves any moral, that would be Bob Dylan's judgment, "your sons and your daughters are beyond your command".

After a silly false start at a behavioural science laboratory at Yale, The Good Children opens in Lahore in 1938. "This story begins and ends in a place that no longer exists, and was even then disappearing." Two pairs, of sisters and brothers, torment and tease each other, occasionally resorting to a mild version of domestic violence but usually relying on the "slag-spit-spite" which words can convey. The couple of girls are cosseted and spoiled, meant to "live their lives as light as birds in flight", at the same time that they endure the "many-coloured mournful brightness" in the make-up their mother assiduously applies. The boys are simply meant to stay out of the way.

As they grow up, move away and return, their mother perceives little but "disgrace, dishonour and disobedience". She is a tough disciplinarian; in this family, even a normal hug is transformed into "a cage of arms". The children do, however, achieve a lot more than their mother's three D's. Each of the four is alive, engaging, changing subtly as time passes and disappointments accumulate. Farooki's considerable skill is to open up banal incidents, to explain most carefully just what is happening, and to weight the dialogue and descriptions with a lot of emotional baggage.

The best of those scenes may be the pitifully maladroit attempt by one of the sons to take a girl on a date at Yale. Despite the boy's clumsiness, the unfortunate girl, Radhika, is allowed to emerge as a wonderfully composed young woman. "All her surfaces were smoothed, stripped and bare." A similarly lovely passage recounts the ways in which a daughter checks out her prospective mothers-in-law. Plump cheeks, untidy hair and smooth foreheads are taken as tokens that the women concerned might be tolerable as boss of the household. The reader accompanies another woman as she slides past "sharply beautiful" to become "sharply elegant", without ever passing through the trough of appearing conventionally pretty.

Despite large print, the shifts of narration between characters, and the charm of much of the events going on, The Good Children is still a long slog. You could not trim the book without unravelling its deliberately intricate connections between stories and characters. You could not abbreviate scenes without losing the pitch and pacing of dialogue, which here generally means arguments and quarrels within the family. Here, length is warranted by charm.