It is a fervent hope for the children of violent civil war that their most keenly remembered pain should be of the death of a pet chicken. Mercifully for the reader, Piklu's tragic journey from idly scratching around in the garden to steaming on the family dinner table doesn't describe the extent of his boy-owner's memories; but it is, clearly, a formative moment. "No, thank you," he replies, when offered a serving. "I don't care to eat a friend of mine."
The cruelly betrayed child is Saadi, the narrator of Scenes from Early Life; his full name is Zaved Mahmood, and he is the Bangladeshi husband of the novel's author, Philip Hensher. In a recent interview with Guardian Review, Hensher explained how he became aware that Mahmood, who is an international human rights lawyer, was unlikely to find the time to describe his rich and dramatic childhood in writing, and how he decided to take on the job himself, interviewing his partner about the tiniest details of his early life. The resulting book is consequently something of a hybrid: an autobiography written, as it were, by proxy, and finessed, by choice and by its creator's natural affinities, into a novel.
And how well that mash-up of fact and fiction works, coalescing into a narrative shaped by cataclysmic historical events but inflected with small-scale personal drama and individual idiosyncrasy. That the death of Piklu should occur so near the book's start seems no accident; its first 50 or so pages unfurl in a series of semi-comic, scene-setting vignettes that place us firmly in the heart of a well-to-do family in 1970s Dacca. Historical back-story – for example, the departure of Saadi's grandparents from Calcutta for East Pakistan after partition in 1947 – plays second fiddle to more immediately human establishing details: a little boy's fascination with his grandfather's red Vauxhall, or with the sewing thimble belonging to one of his six aunts, or, indeed, his addiction to imported television programmes.
One of the highlights of this straightforwardly memoiristic opening section is an extended description of Saadi and his friends' devotion to the television blockbuster Roots, complete with their intense competition to take the part of the slave Kunta Kinte in their re-enactions. Saadi himself ends up as the slave-owner, on account of his comparatively pale skin ("He can be the white man," say his friends), but this is no bad thing, given that the slave auction is their favourite bit, the climax of the game that fills them "with a terrible, inexpressible excitement".
But the realities of the recent past lurk behind even the most childish and innocent play. Saadi is dissuaded from including one neighbourhood boy, Assad, in the games, with the portentous words: "You know why." Chillingly, he does: even at a young age, he's aware that Assad's parents must have sided with the Pakistan authorities during the war of independence that raged for eight months in 1971. "It was as if," his older self reflects, "there were two cities laid on top of one another, each quite invisible to the other, each engaging only with its own sort."
Gradually, the novel's domestic palette relaxes and expands to encompass larger social and political events. Now, alongside the affectionate rendering of the household – of Saadi's parents and grandparents, his aunts, Mira, Nadira, Mary, Era, Bubbly and Dahlia, each with their different talents and family role, and of his feckless uncle Laddu and artistic uncle Pultoo – come other stories.
There are tales of family friends – one of them Bangladesh's first leader, Sheikh Mujib – and servants, including a chauffeur charged with sealing up the household's forbidden Bengali books and music in a secret cellar, and a beautiful ayah exiled from her marriage because her father could not afford her dowry. There is a deeply painful, sparely rendered account of the quasi-romantic relationship between two musicians, Altaf and Amit, abruptly sundered when the Hindu Amit has to quit Dacca as the repression of the authorities begins to bite. Throughout, these stories illustrate the dreadful conflict that settles over India and West and East Pakistan, the hastily divided area that resembled on the map "a broad-shouldered ape with two coconuts, one on its right shoulder, one under its left armpit".
Hensher's skill in combining the story of a family – one with its own tensions and tiffs, separations and reconciliations – with the story of a country coming into being is highly impressive. And, as the novel travels from Saadi's childhood back to his birth, the two strands become horribly enmeshed.
Now we understand that the reason Saadi was allowed to eat anything he liked as a baby was not because he was indulged, or even because he was unwell or a poor eater, but because he had to be kept quiet as the family hid in their home while vicious battles overtook the streets outside; we realise that his grandmother's fondness for a particular recipe for steamed fish – and her fondness for repeating it, over and over again – proceeds from that same experience of besiegement in 1971. Both stories have become part of family folklore, trauma reinvented as humorous anecdote. The accounts of families who did not survive the war intact are inserted in and amongst, with all the terrifying dispassion of a newspaper report.
But for all Hensher's accomplished ventriloquism – his ability to inhabit the voice of a Muslim child and a history teacher at the same time – his own voice is not lost. As much of his previous work, The Northern Clemency in particular, has shown, he is drawn to describing the minutiae of everyday life, and the sillinesses and sadnesses and comedy of family life. This new work shows that he is able to co-opt somebody else's story with generosity and ease. But it also suggests that he was right not to turn biographer; even a life eventful enough to be only minimally garlanded with invention benefits from the novel's capacity to blend the absurd and the heart-breaking so effectively.