The girl who knew too much

Most of the deception in “Flash House” is intentional. It’s a novel about spying, about an American family in India that is torn apart by great-power politics at the beginning of the Cold War. Aimee Liu means to keep us guessing along with her heroine, Joanna Shaw, whose half-Chinese, left-wing journalist husband, Aidan, may have died in a plane crash in the Himalayas in 1949 -- or may have defected to the communist forces seizing control of China.

Other characters have more information than Joanna does. Lawrence Malcolm, for instance, a friend of Aidan’s and an Australian intelligence agent, knows enough about Aidan’s disappearance to feel guilty about it. But Liu hides much of what’s inside his mind until the plot demands that she reveal it.

Another example of Liu’s narrative sleight of hand is the story of Kamla, a 10-year-old girl who escapes a “flash house,” or brothel, in Delhi and finds refuge in a shelter for former prostitutes that Joanna operates for the Indian government. This is the only part of the novel told in the first person, but Kamla tells it as an old woman, a half-century later, filtering its immediacy through an adult sense of irony.

In this way, Kamla, the novel’s most interesting character, can shape her story rather than simply react to events in her childhood. She can hint at crises to come without being specific. Already a survivor of kidnapping and rape, she views Westerners such as Joanna and her young son, Simon, as incurably naive. Joanna adopts Kamla and promises to keep her safe forever, but Kamla knows better.

“Who in this world ever gave an advantage to the poor, or the ignorant, or the weak?” she asks. “One was always having to prove oneself. Even beggars climbed over each other to claim the scraps of the rich ... [T]his notion of fair play, I decided was a [foreign] invention. It had only to do with games, and nothing to do with truth.”

Liu, whose previous novels, “Face” and “Cloud Mountain,” dealt with East-West conflicts, has researched “Flash House” exhaustively, setting its post-World War II espionage in the context of the Great Game played by the British and Russians in the 19th century. She has an eye for scenery and a feel for the details of period life in India, and the first half of the novel -- in which Joanna, Lawrence and the children cross mountains and deserts from Kashmir to Sinkiang in search of Aidan -- is memorable.

After this journey, however, is a lull, in which Liu leads us astray in a way she probably didn’t intend. Something in the cute way Joanna and Aidan met, something in the flavor of Liu’s style, suggests that “Flash House” is a romance novel. The political issues -- war looming in Korea, McCarthyist hysteria in the United States -- are two generations old because they don’t matter, we come to think, except as stage-setting; what does matter is whether Joanna will abandon her stubborn faith in Aidan in time to realize that the man she and the children really need is Lawrence.

But this proves not to be true. The realpolitik is central, not peripheral. We are meant to consider its consequences in Central Asia today, where the hopes of ordinary people remain hostage to ruthless leaders. Liu has created, in fact, a sobering anti-romance in which Kamla, who has the last word, concludes that “blind faith and bewildered longing ... for some impossible goodness” are a sure recipe for tragedy in which even the most decent people, subjected to enough pressure, betray one another and in which nobody is innocent of “ineptitude at love.”