Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday: book review

Asymmetry (2018) is set during the early years of the Iraq War in 2003; in 2008 at the time Barack Obama won the American presidential election; and in 2011. The novel is written in three sections: Folly, Madness, and Ezra Blazer’s Desert Island Discs.

In Folly, in 2003, 25-year-old Alice is an editorial assistant and aspiring writer in New York. Internationally acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning writer Ezra Blazer meets her in a café and dares her to begin a relationship with him. Ageing at 70, in pain due to several back operations, Ezra is a manipulative old man.

In Madness, Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi-American, having just finished an economics degree, is at Heathrow Airport in 2008 to see his foreign correspondent friend Alastair in England, before he leaves to visit his brother in Kurdistan, Iraq. The British Immigration Office detains him for the weekend. The details are told in the first person, from Amar’s point of view.

The last section is the transcript of an interview with Ezra Blazer, recorded at the BBC Recording House in London on 14 February 2011. He is 78 years old. The program is called Desert Island Discs – Blazer is questioned about the songs and music he would take on a desert island – and the songs are played for the audience.

Blazer is also questioned about his childhood, ‘the origins of his romantic life’ and the beginning of his writing career. Readers learn of the connection between the seemingly two disparate stories of Folly and Madness.

Asymmetry explores uneven, imbalanced, asymmetrical relationships and their power dynamics. It highlights the differences in age, gender, culture, justice, talent, fame, wealth, place of birth, lifestyle, and politics. The writing is simple, yet the issues are complex. Section three is the best, in which the it appears superficially to be about art and music, yet it is also a probing interview; one that reveals the hidden secrets of Ezra Blazer.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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