disappointing. Abida, Qayyum's distant cousin, who in the beginning passes some brilliantly caustic remarks on her husband with whom she has fallen out, gradually fades away. Prof. Suhail, Qayyum's alter ego in a way, who keeps jumping from one philosophy of living to another, Seemi Shah, Qayyum's first love and an awful bore, Amtui, the down-and-out hustler, and others, never quite come off. They are mere cardboard figures. As it is, the novel is far too long. It can easily be halved. The prose is overblown, with the omniscient narrator going on endlessly in a pompous, preachy manner. The dialog is often messy, the imagery, awkward. The author cannot resist putting into her book everything she may have heard or read recently. A novel, after all, need not be a nursery of ideas for for essays or overt social commentary. Also ploughed in into the novel are three chunks of an inverted 'Mantiq-^al-Tair' which contribute nothing to the overall view. It is noticeable that Bano Qudsia has appropriated practically all the undesirable mannerisms and hobbyhorses of Ashfaq Ahmad, her husband, and learned nothing useful from him. Ashfaq Ahmad, of course, writes a very precise, controlled prose. She is anything but precise. Like him, she too is fond of lacing her narrative with scientific or technical jargon. What is the pair trying to prove? Is this their idea of sounding modernistic? Anyway, its obvious faults and prolixity notwithstanding, the novel is readable. There is a breath of contemporary air in it, some sense of immediacy, of familiar crisis. There are quite a few scenes and passages which stand out, e.g., Qayyum's visit to his ancestral village ravaged by salinity and waterlogging reminds one of Anna Kavan's devastated landscapes. M. Salim-ur-Rahman Lahore [Reprinted with slight changes from the Pakistan Times (Lahore), August 10, 1981, p. 4.] 116