The setting was Afghanistan, 1946. A young American, Mark Miller, is stationed there at his country's embassy. He is given the responsibility to discover what happened to a Pennsylvania woman who had married an Afghan man and disappeared. This mission takes him all over the foreign country, and Miller learns of the past, present, and future of Afghanistan as he finds the woman and learns the same of her.
Mark Miller was an excellent character. A Nordic Jew in a Muslim country just after World War II, he had all kinds of splendid issues to work out. He was an able and congenial first-person narrator, a terrific person through whom to experience Afghanistan.
Ellen Jaspar, the Pennsylvanian, was less agreeable. She ran off with the Afghani because she considered the Afghan life as polarized as possible from the apparently vapid one her parents lived and desired for her. But her Afghan husband, notwithstanding his skin color and second wife, turns out to be just as conventional and progress-minded as Ellen's father. So, she runs off with a tribe of nomads, believing theirs to be a life of true freedom and fulfillment. However, even her nomad lover aspires to a position of land-holding power and political clout. Ellen seems to be a queen without a country.
That is where we leave her, too. She is escorted away by the American embassy agents, and that is that. Mark could see the logical fallacies in her philosophy, but he still harbored affection for her. Fine. I suppose that's his prerogative.
Michener's writing was lucid, crystal clear, riveting prose. I thought it superb.
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