The novella that provides the core of Friendly Fire was, as the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany explains in a preface, actually his first piece of extended fiction. But it was originally published privately, because "the opinions expressed in it" might have landed author, publisher or government censor "in jail". His acclaimed novel, The Yacoubian Building, was written later, became a bestseller when first published in Arabic and found similar success around the world when it was translated. Its Dickensian or Balzac-ian compendiousness and its portrayal of the sort of Cairo street life previously encountered in the work of the Nobel prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz made for a winning combination. Only after that success did anyone in Egypt feel emboldened to release Al Aswany's earlier work.
It is not difficult to see why touchy oppressors might balk at The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers (as the novella is entitled). It begins with the protagonist's view of a famous modern Egyptian pronouncement, made by the nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil: "If I weren't Egyptian, I would want to be Egyptian." That, thinks Isam, is "the dumbest thing I've ever heard".
The son of a failed Cairo artist, Isam is hardly a likeable character. We first encounter him tearing up a letter of praise that his father has received, and almost everyone with whom Isam has dealings - his mother and grandmother, the maid, his colleagues at the government Chemistry Authority, a local barber - are treated with cold indifference.
Isam believes himself to be a tragic hero, and even gives us a couple of little drawings to show how his apparently insignificant experiences fit into a grander scheme. But the truth that emerges from a life alternating between a dead-end job and a joyless home is more mundane. As Isam begins cutting out illustrations from glossy magazines, he diagnoses his own condition: "I have fallen captive to the spirit of the West."
Unable to travel outside Egypt, he goes in search of westerners in Cairo. His prayers appear to have been answered when he meets a beautiful German girl, who invites him to her apartment. The result for Isam is predictably unhappy. If the censors had reached the end of the novella, they might well have concluded that the seductions of the West are shown to be ephemeral at the very least.
Advertisement
One wouldn't expect censors to have much time for literary virtues, but those of an acute observer of the pettiness to which an idealist can be reduced are on show here. The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers is not a polished piece of work, but the anger of its central character, and Al Aswany's refusal to prettify him to win our sympathy, are as admirable as the dispassionate descriptions of the compromises and hypocrisies of daily life in the Egyptian capital.
The short stories that complete the book are rarely more than sketches. Some have a tricksy, postmodern quality, leaving the reader guessing, which in extended form could begin to grate. Here, however, as in Waiting for the Leader, in which a late-lamented nationalist politician makes an all too brief return from the dead, they leave the reader with the sense of a world beyond the story's borders. Al Aswany continues to be a voice worth hearing from a country of which we know far too little.
Friendly Fire by Alaa Al Aswany, translated by Humphrey Davies
Fourth Estate £10.99 pp219