Boyd Tonkin: The surge in stories from an endless war

Change has come – but not yet to Afghanistan. We know that President-elect Obama intends to step up the pace of combat there. Every week brings news of British losses in the badlands of Helmand, and their rancorous aftermath at home. For once, no one can justly accuse Western publishers and readers of turning a blind eye to a messy war – and its opaque origins – in a faraway land. After the enormous global cult of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini's second novel about the roots of the quagmire – A Thousand Splendid Suns – has been bobbing around the top five of the British paperback fiction charts for weeks. The post-2001 resurgence of the country, and its knotty conflicts, in the public mind coincided with British literary landmarks both in fiction (Philip Hensher's historical epic The Mulberry Empire) and reportage (Rory Stewart's The Places In Between).

This autumn, the BBC's David Loyn has offered a salutary overview of blunder and barbarism in foreign interventions via his history Butcher and Bolt. Nadeem Aslam's new novel, The Wasted Vigil, entrancingly explores the tangled Afghan past and its deadly grip on locals and incomers alike. And, this week, continental Europe's most venerable prize for fiction has gone to another anguished Afghan tale.

Born in 1962, Atiq Rahimi became a refugee from his ravaged homeland in the wake of the Soviet invasion. The French-based novelist and film-maker has until now written in Dari, the Afghan variant of Persian. In the UK, Chatto & Windus published (rather beautiful) translations of his previous novels, both lyrical dreams – and nightmares – of a despoiled past: Earth and Ashes, and A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear. With Syngué Sabour (roughly, "stone of patience"), he switched for the first time into fiction in French. On Monday, his book won the renowned – and, pretty often, thoroughly stuffy and reactionary – Prix Goncourt in Paris.

It's still extremely rare for the jury of this august prize to garland global fiction, as their Booker counterparts routinely do. That they managed to move so far outside the Goncourt comfort zone this time reportedly owed much to the advocacy of one judge in particular: the terrific French-Moroccan novelist, Tahar Ben Jelloun. On the same day, another leading literary honour – the Prix Renaudot – went to Tierno Monénembo from Guinea. Cue a flurry of excited Parisian commentary about the multi-culti tide in fiction and a belated challenge to the "franco-français" literary establishment.

As with Hosseini and Aslam, the plight of Afghan women under an enduring burden of oppression looms large for Atiq Rahimi. His novel takes the form of a wife's spare and intense monologue, voiced over the wounded body of her guerrilla husband. Both Earth and Ashes and A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear ran strongly in the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; I would hope that, when it duly arrives, the English version of his prize-winner might at least equal their power.

Part of Rahimi's inspiration came from the fate of a gifted young poet, Nadia Anjuman. She was beaten to death by her husband in Herat three years ago. This glimpse of the background to Syngué Sabour put me in mind of a heartbreaking recent report by my colleague Kim Sengupta. Several of the women activists he met in Kabul after the Taliban's downfall have since died violent deaths. "Talk to the Taliban" advise the hard-nosed champions of realpolitik on either side of the Atlantic. Fine, but should we talk to them about their "traditional" right to murder upstart women poets?

If an Obama-led spring "surge" rips into the rebels, expect a fever of liberal ambivalence as the partisans of universal rights and anti-colonialism clash yet again. On such a ragged front, good fiction will never deliver any watertight answers. It may help us to frame better questions; and, most of all, it can make us care enough to ask them.

P.S.Much as I enjoy tracking the many appearances by The Independent in contemporary literature, I'm not quite sure that every allusion burnishes the brand. In her – still – wonderfully droll and well-observed new volume, The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001 (Michael Joseph), Sue Townsend (left) puts her hapless Leicester single dad back in touch with his horribly successful Oxford-based half-brother, Brett. In the aftermath of 11 September, this ghastly golden boy alarms Adrian by drafting "a 1,500-word article for the Independent, headed 'The Osama Bin Laden I knew'." Brett claims to have chatted to the terror guru in a Blackpool boarding-house, where Osama disclosed his fondness for EastEnders, pork trotters and visits to garden centres. Adrian hopes that "the Independent throws this piece of fiction back in his face". I think it did.