Tale of Old Iran Told in Sad Detail

IN THE WALLED GARDENS

A Novel

By Anahita Firouz

Little, Brown

256 pages, $24.95

A meditation on revolution, Anahita Firouz’s debut novel, “In the Walled Gardens,” holds the reader steadily while retaining the sadness of its period--the years just before the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s.

The author’s admirable skills include an observant ear toward the niceties of people, an eye for cultural details and an almost photographic sense of place.

She evokes the Iranian countryside with abundant and colorful affection. Firouz’s descriptions of urban locales and bucolic retreats, everyday plants and exotic flowers, people’s clothes and personal idiosyncrasies--all come to life in a kaleidoscope of memory. She has sensitively recorded her times and those days.

Firouz is a native of Tehran who earned degrees at Boston University before returning to Iran. She witnessed the years of revolution, married during that period and went to Europe, then the United States, in 1981. She says she wanted to show in this novel, “the complexity of an entire society, trying to find its sense of identity and balance, unaware that it was in fact on the verge of destruction.”

At one point, the author describes the sense of loss in the old society:

“The gardener helped bring the bags into the main house. We went out to survey the garden. He said, ‘This place isn’t what it used to be! What orchards? The cherry trees are diseased, but the grapevines are still solid. What stables? Only a donkey there.’ We walked. The pool was cracked and overridden with green moss. The flower beds overgrown with weeds, no new flowers were planted anymore. Only the rose vines bloomed regardless of who came and went.”

Told alternately through the two voices of her principals, Mahastee, a woman of affluence and power married to a successful businessman, and her childhood male friend, Reza, a civil servant and committed leftist, the novel views the coming revolution through the many contacts both have with a despotic government bureaucracy and through the portrayals of several layers of a society torn by competing and struggling factions. Mahastee and Reza love each other, yet their destinies are in conflict.

Without showiness or self-consciousness, Firouz tells the tale in colorful detail. Her descriptions of several leftist factions and their activities ring true, as does her close observation of family functions and social gatherings. She does not miss the subtleties of everyday conversation, and she describes perfectly the interactions of long-standing friends and acquaintances.

The protagonists become obsessed with attempting to rescue a friend taken as a political prisoner. They both pursue truth while living a day-to-day existence, whether working in an office, maintaining family connections and rituals, tending a disintegrating marriage or caring for children and aging parents.

Mahastee’s endless social obligations parallel her continuing and conflicting efforts to help her political prisoner friend; Reza finds, meanwhile, that his work on behalf of the friend brings harrowing consequences.

Firouz’s writing style suits her story. Her admirable and smooth prose is pointed, elegant, aphoristic and wise. This is an auspicious debut.