Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

The predicament is not peculiarly Egyptian. I can think of at least two eminent writers in Calcutta whose plots and material are uncannily similar to Mahfouz's (though Mahfouz is the more skillful practitioner of the craft). This is the kind of fiction that grows out of the sensibility of literate, urban "salaried employees" — who, caught between a vast sink of poverty and tiny, impenetrable enclaves of wealth, begin to look for some kind of meaning and authenticity in what they see as their own traditions of respectable gentility. That is their cruelest delusion, for their gentility has very little to do with the traditions of Egypt or India, Islam or Hinduism, and everything to do with Victorianism.

Much of Mahfouz's work seethes with the indignation that grows out of this particular sensibility, indignation at the corruption that allows the unscrupulous to grow rich while decent people labor to earn an honest wage. But indignation is about all it is. Its sources are not interesting enough to give it the fire of real rage or even the anger of outraged morality. Mahfouz has written some quasi-mystical parables, but he is not essentially a religious writer. Indeed, the Arab thinker whose name occurs most frequently in his work is Abu'l 'Ala al-Ma'arri, a medieval freethinker and rationalist. And although Mahfouz has written political satires, he is not essentially a political writer either. In his books politics and history generally serve as part of the background and mise en scène.

If there is something suspect, in the end, even about Mahfouz's indignation, it is probably because it never appears to be turned against his People's own ethic of respectability. His mother figures are impossibly good and forbearing, and girls who leave the sanctuary of the home and go out to work all too often fall prey to temptation. At its best, Mahfouz's work has some of the texture and the richness of detail of the nineteenth-century masters whose influence he acknowledges — Balzac, Tolstoy, Flaubert — but even at its bleakest and most melancholy (as in The Beginning and the End ), his writing never approximates real tragedy. Its pathos seems to spring almost entirely from a sense of violated gentility. Even for a writer with Mahfouz's skill, it is hard to create tragedy out of the scramble for respectability.

It is in the observation of the small details on which the edifices of respectability are constructed that Mahfouz is really acute about his society. What the foreign reader needs explained is the real meaning of what it is to be a "salaried employee" in Egypt, the importance of the baccalaureate examinations, what it is to be an eighth-grade functionary. These are arcane and peculiarly Egyptian details, although they have nothing to do with the Egypt of the pharaohs or Mamelukes, or with anything particularly exotic. But it is those details that make up the fabric of respectable middle-class life in Egypt, and it is Mahfouz's singular gift that he is able to transform them into the stuff of fiction.

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The American University in Cairo Press has long been doing a difficult and thankless job in making good writing in Arabic available in English translation. With Mahfouz's Nobel Prize and the sale of rights to their translations, their efforts have been richly rewarded. It is to be hoped that more and still better translations will be forthcoming soon, so that a wider spectrum of modern Arabic writing will receive the kind of attention it deserves. The four novels published by Doubleday are revised versions of the original American University in Cairo translations. Two of them were written in Mahfouz's early "realistic" period. The Beginning and the End is the melancholy but compelling story of a family pauperized by a sudden death. Palace Walk is the first book of Mahfouz's Cairene trilogy, written in 1956–1957, in which each book is named after a street in the old city. The trilogy, which charts the history of a Cairene family during the period between the wars, is a chronicle of the changes that occurred in Egyptian society over that period.

Palace Walk sets the stage for the later books; it is a depiction of what went before the changes, so to speak. The central figure in the book is a patriarch of rather extreme convictions: he has never once, in their decades-old marriage, allowed his wife to leave the house. This is a condition with which she is entirely satisfied, for she reveres her husband, except for one small thing — she longs to visit the mausoleum of Sayidna Hussein, which is down the road. One day one of her sons persuades her to venture out. She does, and for her pains she is struck by a motorcar. (Why do such terrible things happen, in Mahfouz's work, to women who leave their houses?) Worse still, the wrathful patriarch, upon discovering her dereliction, packs her off to her mother's, where she languishes, wringing her hands, until he summons her back. In the end, however, the turmoil of Egyptian politics — the last part of the book is set in the period of the 1919 riots against the British presence in Egypt — catches up with the apparently invincible patriarch and leaves him a broken man.

The novel has the feel of the sort of stories people tell about the old days, when they want their children to marvel at how much the world has come on since then. In a sense, of course, it is exactly that: Mahfouz was a very young child in the years in which his book is set, and his family had already moved out of the old part of the city. There are some perceptive observations about the psychology of patriarchy — there is a wonderful scene, for example, in which the patriarch's son, a brave and ardent nationalist, finds himself reduced to a quaking heap by the tone of his father's voice. But the reader would be better able to savor those moments, perhaps, if Mahfouz's sympathy with the patriarch were not so patent, if the book were not so pervaded by nostalgia for a time when men were men.

The other two novels, The Thief and the Dogs (1961) and Wedding Song (1981), date from Mahfouz's later period, which was less realistic and more experimental, and they are, frankly, awful. When the spirit moves Mahfouz to be technically adventurous, it also tends to push him away from his accustomed material, leaving him stranded in various exotic enclaves of society. Wedding Song is set among a group of raffish theater people who drink, gamble, take drugs, and have sex (the underworld again). A particularly disreputable couple has a son who is an idealistic young man; appalled by the lasciviousness and the immorality of his parents' circle, he exposes them in a play before staging his own death. The Thief and the Dogs is about… well, it's about an idealistic sort of fellow who becomes a thief because he is shocked by how rich some people are.

Unfortunately for Doubleday, and fortunately for English readers, the most delightful of Mahfouz's translated works, Midaq Alley, has long been available in a good translation by Trevor Le Gassick. It has recently been reissued by the Quality Paperback Book Club, and it is more worth reading than any of Doubleday's four. The novel is set in Mahfouz's familiar world — in a street in the old city — but it lacks the portentousness of some of his other work. It is written tongue-in-cheek, almost as self-parody, and it brims with moments of pure delight.

For instance: the homosexual café owner Kirsha — inevitably of dark and sullen aspect — is interrupted by his wife while entertaining a youth in his café. His wife marches up to the boy and screams, "Do you want to ruin my home, you rake and son of rakes… Who am I? Don't you know me? I am your fellow-wife…" The boy escapes, and she turns upon her protesting husband and shouts, in a "voice loud enough to crumble the walls of the café," "Shut your mouth! You are the… lavatory around here, you scarecrow, you disgrace, you rat-bag!" Among the awestruck spectators is the baker's wife, who regularly beats her husband. She turns to him now and remarks, "You're always moaning about your bad luck and asking why you're the only husband who is beaten! Did you see how even your betters are beaten?" But eventually Kirsha has his say as well. "Oh you miserable pair, why on earth should the government punish anyone who kills off people like you?" His son declares that he wants to leave home and live in a place where houses have electricity. "Electricity?" retorts Kirsha. "Thanks be to God that your mother, for all her scandals, has at least kept our house safe from electricity!"