Soon-to-be-Iran...

The green-eyed Kurd boy aged approximately 12 to 14 can't read. But he can kill.

In 1929 in Persia, 'soon to be Iran', Reza Pejman Khourdi the Kurd, the orphan, is folded into a uniform and taught to play with 'metal flowers' (guns) to kill his people.

The Shah's soldiers have fanned across Persia to crush the Kurd ethnic minority uprising and in one of Persia's conquered villages in the Zagros Mountains the then-nine-year-old Kurd is 'acquired' after the soldiers murder his parents. Within moments of being forced to behold his 'baba's' decapitated head the boy is declared an orphan and conscripted into the 'great' Shah's army.

In the detainee's first parentless hours and days he is 'slapped' and 'suckled' and enslaved and his child mind 'turns to madness'. And after one year of reprogramming, the now half-maniac boy soldier is rewarded with a name - 'Reza' – the namesake of Iran's then-shah The Most Imperial Majesty Shahenshah Reza Pahlavi. The shah's first name is given to all Iranian boy cadets.

These are the discernible facts about a boy, "not a man, and no longer a son."

"A child erased."

And all that remains is the deadly quiet of his mind. And a terrible consequence.

Set herein is the fiction and non-fiction of Persia, of Iran, and how it birthed an 'age of orphans'.

Every sentence invokes a heady rhythmic hymn to these children. And on every page author Laleh Khadivi questions Iran's raison d'etre.

At a point in the story Kurdish villagers ask: "What is this Iran? Who is this Iran?"

And that is the question.

'Who' is Iran? The answers are delivered via Khadivi's first-person narrators – the boy's father or 'Baba', his 'maman', one of Reza's children, a child he kills, a girl he rapes.

Through them we discover that Iran is the 'he and she': the mamans and babas, the matchmakers and match-breakers, the possessed and dispossessed, the mongrels, the stubborn, the weak, the well-bred and inbred. Iran is the mountain Kurds that borrow the land for a while and use it and abuse it and then return to it. Iran is the city dwellers, the squatters, the gossipers, the moaners, the chai drinkers. Iran is the people that eat and play and whore and whine. Iran is a mélange of maculate cities of the filthy and clean, the opium inhalers and non-smoking, the old and young and in-between, the rheumy-eyed and clear-eyed, the holy and unholy.

Iran is the orphaned.

And it is the mountains, a "labyrinth of stones", "a reconnaissance of air and cloud and sky", and streams and birds and nests.

And what Iran should not be, screams Khadivi softly, is a land of painted kings and war-mongers and munitions and misconstrued manuscripts. Iran should not be a regime or pretend to be a monument to civilisation. It should rather be a testimony to civilisation.

The cleverness of Khadivi's distressing tale is that it loosens off the intellectualised, fact-telling, false history imperative in favour of less known facts – deeply personal revelations from the opening of the shattered, mutilated minds of the Persian shah's army of conscripted children – the Kurd orphans.

But The Age of Orphans is a difficult read – particularly while one's skin is sprinkled with sand and seawater and sky and sunset and summer, and many times it is hard to pick up the book to browse its curdling contours. During a mind's semi-functioning summertime, one may wonder why one needs to unwrap these pages of misery when unpacking the heavy world and turning toward the light-hearted and light. Standing at the peace-loving tree-hugging Woodford Festival, praying in the tent of the Tibetan monks, one softens at the sound of gypsy blues and bells and whistles. One wonders why one should scorch the hippie, bourgeois hide, the capitalist dogma and civilised holiday sentiment, or heavy one's soy cappuccino with this sorry tale of Persian orphans.

However, somehow the reading continues because apart from the supreme and obvious central theme is something very specific and something in this Kurd orphan story that is disturbingly personal and familiar. Something about how easily children bypass fear and suspicion. Something about how children develop an outer warped self after innumerable moments of abandonment. And how that warped self helplessly turns on itself and others.

The Age of Orphans speaks for Iran's children and other children. It reflects upon unreflected lives and colours in the blanks. It clarifies and clears the unseen middle-east, it writes the unwritten and unrecorded. It razes the dominant high-brow nonsense about a land and its people and presses out an album of frightening facts of an age of orphans.

In the 1920s terrible things happen to Persia, its people and children.

Some say the terror persists.