Shahnaz, a first novel from Nanaimo-based author Hiro McIlwraith, is a troubling book, only in part because its major theme is the oppression of women in India. The novel begins in 1972 when Shahnaz, the eldest daughter of a privileged Parsi household in Bombay, departs for graduate school in Oregon. She is escaping from a home dominated by her mad mother, a former scientist whose nervous breakdown was, in Shahnaz’s opinion, precipitated by her inability to resist generations’ worth of expectations that Indian women find fulfilment in home and children.

Shahnaz’s feelings of bewilderment and helplessness as a child left alone with her cruel and unpredictable mother are affecting and genuine. Scenes between Shahnaz and her sister, aunt, and household servant are similarly dramatic and deft. The book is undermined, however, by a pervasive sense that its primary purpose is to illustrate a series of well-known types of Indian sexism. Once a character’s thematic purpose has been served, they tend to vanish from the story. The reader is only permitted a deeper, or, at least, lengthier, acquaintance with Shahnaz. Furthermore, the years since the 1970s have demonstrated that sexism, oppression, Indian culture, and immigration are more complex than Shahnaz – or McIlwraith – appears to believe.

McIlwraith’s descriptions are detailed and frequently original, but character voices are often oddly homogenized – the central characters speak exactly like each other, while more peripheral characters are granted grammatical tics. This may be because the book is told from the point of view of a sheltered, upper class young woman, but sometimes the task – and privilege – of the novelist is to reveal those things her characters cannot see.