Home Is Where the Hedgerow Is

Though its sincere title, if it promises anything, promises sentimentality, Hisham Matar’s new novel, My Friends, tries to serve a more refined taste for preciousness. The qualities are surely related, but precious writing enjoys ambiguity, and withholds bigger gestures, never making you cry but making you suspect there is something to be cried over if it could be properly considered. The precious novel does consider a great many nuances of feeling, interpretations of the same event, and perennial questions that its author will usually find unanswerable. There can be no epiphanies, because those have a way of shattering delicate objects and changing the whole view of things, such that earlier musings look like folly. There can be almost no humor, and little cleverness, because cleverness is for students, not serious novelists. The surfaces cannot be too beautiful or detailed because the precious novel wants to get on to something about the oceanic currents under the gentle waves, and because the precious novelist doesn’t have that kind of talent anyway.  The precious novel is not trying to show off how clever its author is, or how beautifully he or she can write, or trying to make you laugh or cry, so it can only demand one thing: look how thoughtful I am.

The story begins at King’s Cross Station, where the narrator, Khaled, sees off his friend Hosam Zawa, who is moving to Northern California. They are both Libyan expats who left as teenagers; theirs is a twenty-one-year-old friendship, from youth to middle age, that began in Paris and continued in London. Khaled is a teacher, Hosam a former writer, and there is a third friend, Mustafa al Touny, whom Khaled met at the University of Edinburgh in the early 80s. Mustafa and Hosam were involved in the Libyan uprising, and Mustafa lives in Libya still. Khaled, who because of his involvement along with Mustafa at a protest at the Libyan embassy in 1984, has not visited the country since he left, will be staying in London, where he has some kind of relationship with a woman named Hannah. He takes a long nighttime walk from the station to his home in Shepherd’s Bush, passing the sites of experiences shared with Mustafa and Hosam, and remembers and narrates it all as he goes.

Matar uses short chapters to switch frequently between the walking narration in the present tense and the memories, done in the past tense. These start with his adolescence in Benghazi as he and his family hear a short story written by Hosam Zawa read over the radio by Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan, a London journalist who criticized Gaddafi. Initially, there are interactions between the two time frames: middle aged Khaled visits the Central Mosque by Regent’s Park, where in 1980 Mohammed was assassinated. The framing of the near forty year story within a single night’s reminiscences provides a certain atmosphere—I was reminded of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time novels, in which nocturnal walks through a London layered with memory give the narrator time to tell stories within stories about his friends—but unfortunately Matar does not remain committed to the conceit, and as he lets it fall away the novel becomes less novelistic and more like a fictional memoir. Late in the story, once Hosam has returned to Libya and stays with his family, his story becomes the center, leaving Khaled defined as the one who did not go home to see or join the revolution, and Hosam writes long emails to Khaled, which briefly assume the narration of the novel. These are stylistically indistinguishable from Khaled’s narration, and this resemblance may be intended to show the influence of Hosam’s writing on Khaled’s, but it effaces Khaled’s personality.

Some readers will be disappointed by a kind of bait and switch that happens as early as Chapter 2, not dissimilar from and perhaps related to the falling away of the nighttime narrative idea. Matar starts the novel with this type of sentence:

We would meet there, and the neighborhood, arranged around the train station, which fills the surrounding streets with a transitory air, made us both feel like visitors and accentuated the sense that our friendship had become a replica of what it had once been when he lived here and we shared the city the way honest laborers share tools.

Lengthy, digressive, mostly well balanced, yet a little stilted with their educated diction, these early sentences are not unlike those of Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrator Stevens in The Remains of the Day. In that novel, the narrator recalls his decades of service at Darlington Hall as he drives to Somerset to meet a former colleague, and the gentle locomotion through the country, like Khaled’s walk through London in the quiet hours, is an analogue to the dignified, winding language. One has the sense, and then learns for sure, that the narrator is using this high verbal manner to say in part what in its entirety would bring embarrassment. But the first chapter of My Friends proves a misleading sample, as Matar’s default mode will be the dead-eyed, dead simple reporting of much contemporary fiction, stuff like this: “She wanted to know about my childhood. I said there was no river but there was the sea. Then in bed she wanted to know about the scar.”  This voice has latent drama. This is the voice that declares in its stark pauses that yes, I was there, this all happened to me. Try reading aloud or imagining the following read aloud, at a healthy volume and with an exaggerated pause between sentences: “Then the poetry came. One man leaned forward, placed a hand over his eyes and the room fell silent.”

But Matar does not trust the quiet, precious drama of this clipped narration. There are cheap, conventional dramatic signals, as the Oz-like author fires up the smoke machine or triggers the thunder sound effect: “That was the trip that brought me face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author who had cast such a long shadow on my life.” Or, as we endure the novel’s Major Traumatic Incident: “I will never forget what took place next. Out of everything that happened that day this is the one detail I cannot bear thinking about.” Such portentous announcements show that Matar is not quite comfortable with the precious mode, at least not when he’s approaching the scenes and images that he wants you to remember. Khaled and Hosam are keen on the modernists, especially Joseph Conrad, a Polish expat late to the English language in the company of Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, et cetera, and Conrad’s theatricality may be, if not an influence, then a reassuring precedent.

Like anything in fiction, the signposts for important moments are manipulative, but not dishonest. But there are imaginative movements in My Friends, from the immediate scene to the realms of theme and character, which one suspects are simply bogus. Fiction is fiction, but there is a different kind of honesty about interpretation and metaphorical vision, and this Matar disregards. In 1984, Khaled and Mustafa go to the Libyan Embassy to join a protest based on the real event in which a British police officer was shot and killed. They are chanting “Libya” pronounced as “a-Lee-be-ah”, and Khaled wonders if it sounds like the word “alibi” to the police and journalists—try that one out loud, too—speculating that “perhaps we had deliberately merged the two words because at that moment we understood, more vividly than ever before, that each and every one of us had lived a life that was in desperate need of validation.” You’d need to put on an unstructured blazer and some funny little glasses to even begin to indulge that. And here is Hosam, the poetic visionary returned to Libya, describing to Khaled his beauteous mother’s cousin’s daughter: “The nose, like those few statues of Cyrene that have managed to remain intact, stops just before it is due, with a slight flatness, making her seem as if she is constantly coming up against the obstacle of the world.” Mustafa, the man of action, who gave up reading for real estate, might be willing to call this what it is: nonsense. Our friends can abet or avert our worst tendencies.

Someone ought to study the uses of that word—“world”—in contemporary fiction, starting with titles; it is a key word for the precious novel. The “world” refers in part to politics, in part to other people, and it’s used to move between the personal and the social in the many novels that hope to be acclaimed for doing something profound with those two concerns. Because it includes other people without naming them, “friends” or otherwise, “the world” avoids sentimentality. Matar’s title is warm and knowing, and sometimes so too is his account of Khaled’s friendship with Mustafa: he has learned the new language, but he has not quite let go and replaced sentimentality with uncertainty and preciousness. You can see this replacement happening in Zadie Smith’s recent The Fraud, which chides Dickens for sentimentality before it murmurs about how people are unknowably complex. How quaint, Khaled’s confidence in friendship, another creed lost to the world: “There were moments when, sitting together in silence, I believed I knew exactly how he felt; I do not mean only his opinions, but his innermost temperament, what it would feel like to be in his skin.”

Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in The Adroit Journal, Cleveland Review of Books, The Oxonian Review, and Chicago Review of Books. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.