On Mulberry St

This Booker-longlisted novel invites comparisons with The Kite Runner

On the day nine-year-old Suleiman overdoses on fruit from the single surviving tree after which Mulberry Street is named, his father disappears. Unannounced exits are not unknown even to a child. This is Tripoli, Libya, in 1979, 10 years after a military coup established the military rule of Muammar Qadaffi, and everybody knows that the Revolutionary Committee keeps watch on everyone, all the time.

Ostensibly the story of Suleiman8217;s ninth summer, a narrative of the inward musings of a solitary child who must describe, observe, rationalise the best he can, In the Country of Men is actually an indictment of state repression and its impact on intimate aspects of a man8217;s life.

8220;Take care of your mother, you are the man of the house now,8221; Suleiman8217;s father Faraj whispers into his ears every time he leaves on a business trip. The care extends into areas Faraj knows nothing about, into sleepless nights spent smelling for gas or listening for glass breaking, for Najwa is a closet addict to 8220;medicine8221; the baker smuggles into parcels of bread. Life, when Baba is around, is much more predictable, but Suleiman longs for these periods when it8217;s just the two of them.

But the day Suleiman eats too many mulberries from the neighbour8217;s tree, the sunlit certainties and fevered imaginations of a nine-year-old life begin to unravel. The Revolutionary Committee comes visiting, a white government car takes up position in front of their home, a photograph of Faraj gives way to a gargantuan portrait of the 8216;Guide8217;, Mama and Moosa, their closest friend, burn all Baba8217;s books.

The device of the child narrator is widely used; where debutant novelist Hisham Matar8212;Libyan by birth, his own father 8220;disappeared8221; when he was 20 8212; scores is in limiting the canvas to just a handful of characters, each tied to the other by bonds that evolve, morph and crystallise to dictate the contours of their lives. Love, then, is the undercurrent of this layered novel of betrayal, guilt, sacrifice and forgiveness; love is the reason, Suleiman imagines, why the angels stole mulberries from heaven to plant on earth, why all mothers go straight to Paradise.

In an exquisitely longdrawn chapter, this private world collides with the larger realities of a paranoid regime, as Suleiman, Mama and Moosa watch the televised execution of a neighbour, now branded a traitor to El Fatah, the revolution of the masses. It8217;s the final sign that the madness will soon engulf their own little family and, when Baba returns, battered but alive, the only solution appears to be exile.

But Egypt is not the escape that often offers an easy way out for the damaged 8220;Arab8221; protagonist The Kite Runner, House of Sand and Fog; in fact, Matar seems to thrive on the grey areas of defeated dissidence, strident conformism, disowned guilt. For a first, slim novel, In the Land of Men is a remarkably complex work. It8217;s in the Booker longlist, but not too many hearts will be broken if it doesn8217;t make it to October 10: Matar will have many more shots at the prize.