Any book that offers a description of a face ‘like a landscape liable to bad weather‘ has got my love. This is a writer with poetry in his soul. ‘We shared the city the way honest labourers share tools,’ he says of two young men finding their way around London. He describes a nurse who ‘would gently tuck in my bedsheet like a skilled cook filleting a fish.’ This is classy writing.
Enough of the gorgeous language, suffice to say the word pictures will carry you through what might otherwise be a slow book, hooking one sentence to the last, making closing the book at night a thing to do with reluctance. Nothing much happens for the years and years between the major incidents in the story, but you want to be there.
My Friends is a sad story in so many ways. You can feel the autobiographical weight, but don’t go looking up those details until you’ve read the book because it doesn’t help to know what actually happened and what not. There’s truth in every word.
So here is Khaled’s story: he is a Libyan refugee in London, walking home to Shepherd’s Bush from St Pancras, where he has just seen his friend off on a train. As he walks he thinks about his life, his family back in Libya and his friends, Hosan and Mustafa. All three men are in exile, unable to go home as they are marked by the Qaddafi regime. The walk home is circuitous, as are the reminiscences, there is a weird, almost nostalgic feeling for a life that was never lived, a life that Khaled might have had that was denied to him. He is safe from tyranny, but he is not home. Do all refugees feel this?
Mustafa is a fellow student, both boys sent to Edinburgh University with the expectation that they will graduate and return to Benghazi. Khaled’s love is literature and his reading list is vast and interesting (this feels more like an author sharing favourites rather than name dropping). But Mustafa hears of some action and the boys sneak past the ‘wires’ sent by the regime to keep tabs on Libyans abroad, and head to London. This is in 1984, when a protest outside the Libyan Embassy in St James’s Square ends with an official opening fire through a window into the crowd. The boys are shot. They wake in hospital and know they are marked as hostile to the regime. They must disappear. They can’t go back to university. They can never go home. Because mail is opened and telephones are bugged, Khaled’s communication with his family becomes a fabrication. He tells them he has changed universities, has a job, a new flat with friends, he is fine. Everything is fine.
He has a fascination for a Libyan writer in exile whose short story is read on radio, and the reader subsequently shot. The story is revolting and I will spare you the details – only say that it is about a man being eaten slowly by a cat, a symbol of Qaddafi chewing up Libya, I assume. I really don’t want to think about it. Anyway, Khaled meets the writer and this is Hasan, the second friend, older and gentler than Mustafa. Khaled introduces them, but to begin with they’re not a good mix (funny how that is often the way with one’s great friends.)
There are women in the book, girlfriends who are merely props for the men. I’m sure (I hope) this is deliberate, but am unsure if this is a comment on exile and the inability to form stable relationships, or the author’s comment on his own culture. Every woman is gracious and agreeable despite the lack of consideration shown them by the three men, which feels unrealistic. (I knew women in London in the 80s with Arab boyfriends who, despite their lovely eyes, were sent packing pretty fast for the lack of commitment). And the mother adoration thing. Do women not exist except in relation to their men? So that’s a wee black mark on an otherwise wonderful book.
Khaled lives out what feels so very much to be an alternative to the life he would have had if his poor country had not been eaten alive by the monstrous dictator, Qaddafi. Khaled’s friends go off to engage in the Arab Spring and he finishes his walk and his reminiscences and goes home. His home is fine. But we all know it is not his home.
This is a seriously good read: literary, intellectual, and totally engrossing. Thoroughly recommended.
Cristina Sanders' blog 