Hossein Asgari’s Desolation speaks powerfully of the destructiveness of war and the hope that lies in fiction
- Written by Michelle Hamadache, Director of Creative Writing, Macquarie University

Hossein Asgari’s Desolation tells the story of Amin, an Iranian man whose life and family are shattered when the USS Vincennes shoots down an Iranian passenger plane in 1988.
The plane was carrying 290 passengers as well as crew, all of whom were killed. Among the dead was Amin’s older brother Hamid, a gifted mathematician, who was travelling to an interview to enter a prestigious US university. Grief transforms Amin and his family; their lives are irrevocably shaped and reshaped in its wake.
Review: Desolation – Hossein Asgari (Ultimo Press)
In some respects, Desolation is a war story. The novel explores the far-reaching effects of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, US meddling and violence in the Middle East, and the “war on terror”. It boldly reimagines the events leading up to September 11 2001.
The tragedy of the downed plane coincides with the discovery of teenage Amin’s innocent yet forbidden romance with the girl across the road, the lively and sophisticated Parvaneh, whose family moved nearly 1,000 kilometres from Tehran to Mashad to escape Iraqi missile attacks. Amin is seen sneaking out of the house by a neighbour. Under the theocracy of Ruhollah Khomeini, Amin’s transgression risks flogging, but his secret courtship ends without punishment, in deference to the family’s loss and the shocking way Hamid died.
Decades later, Amin seeks out an Iranian writer who works in a cafe in downtown Adelaide. He watches him so closely that the writer becomes rankled enough to consider confronting the stranger.
The writer has absolutely no desire to listen to, let alone write, the story that Amin is determined he should not only hear but commit to the page. But Amin (a pseudonym he gives himself – we never learn his real name) secures his audience with a ruse older than the Thousand and One Nights.
He taunts and tantalises the writer with a mystery number, the meaning of which he will reveal the following day should the writer return. As the reader anticipates, the writer returns. This reluctant curiosity propels both writer and reader through the novel.
Despite Amin’s urgent need to share his story, there is no sense of it being a confession with the power to absolve or release the confessor. Rather, it is the story, in its purest sense, that must be passed on to the storyteller. The story matters for its own sake.
His urgent need to tell his story heightens the narrative momentum. Yet, once Amin has passed his story on, he relinquishes control to the writer. Stories are not tied to ownership and property in this exchange.
Truth and critical reading
Plot summary alone might suggest Desolation is about the radicalisation of Amin. At the start of the novel, he is an in-love adolescent. He becomes an angry and grief-stricken young man, acting as a proxy for the Iranian morality police. Finally, he finds himself involved in an Al-Qaeda cell.
But to read the novel in this way would be to ignore the many clues (including in the blurb and on the cover) that the book is about the relationship between truth and critical reading. It implies that limited and literal readers are always at risk of being duped by fake news and propaganda – of confusing “truth” with “facts” – and missing the message of fiction altogether.
In Desolation, inexplicable elements, often in the form of coincidence, disrupt and distort causal chains. Asgari excels at blurring the boundaries between the real and imaginary. Dreams and imagination have a subversive role in the novel. They are strange disruptions to the deliberate and precise enmeshment of historical events and realist fiction.
Amin was as likely as not to join a radical group. But the ironic distance Asgari establishes puts the onus back on the reader to interrogate and interpret the “why”. That Desolation is not a desolate novel is in part because of the challenge it presents to a flattened-out uncritical mode of engaging with narratives – a simplistic mode that tends to dominate in a world of conspiracy theories, “fake news” and Trumpian politics.