Known unknowns of the Class War: Review of Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know

The two protagonists in In the Light of What We Know, Zafar and the British-Pakistani narrator, were friends at Oxford in the late 1980s, drawn to each other as one of the few Asian faces at that elite institution. At some point in their lives, their post-school arcs separated, and they fell out of contact: The Margins

When you turn to page 186 of In the Light of What We Know, you encounter an illustration. The novel’s two main characters have by this point discussed many things, and readers may have already been craving visual aids. But this is the first time the text is interrupted by a diagram. You sense, therefore, the arrival of a crucial digression.