My Friends: a story of three exiles

Hisham Matar’s third novel is, among its many other virtues, a paean to reading widely; to imagining literature as not, in the narrator Khaled’s words, “a field of demarcations,” but as a great river that connects and animates “the entire human event.” Reading is how Khaled — exiled from Libya when his part in the anti-Gaddafi demonstration at the country’s embassy in St. James’s Square in April 1984 made a return to Benghazi impossible — lays the foundations beneath his precarious life in London. Carrying with him his father’s copy of Abual Ala al Ma’arri’s The Epistle of Forgiveness, an eleventh century precursor to Dante’s Divine Comedy, he ponders the links between Stendhal and Mahfouz, Borges and Conrad. In the land of the imaginary, he finds something more concrete and sustaining than the tattered reality he is now forced to navigate.

Khaled has been deprived of his identity. Treated in hospital for the gunshot wounds inflicted on him by an unseen force at the demonstration, he is renamed Fred to preserve his anonymity and, over the subsequent years, he becomes adept at conjuring up stories to assuage the fears and disappointments of his parents and sister — and the silent presence of the government eavesdropper — during painful phone calls home. It is the extent to which he is a fugitive from himself as well as a repressive and vengeful regime that dramatizes this insistently and powerfully understated novel, which nestles its metaphysical enquiries between the folds of stark and brutal political and social upheavals.

The novel’s title indicates Khaled’s desire for self-effacement. It is November 2016, and he is on a meandering walk home after having seen his friend Hosam on to the Eurostar to Paris, eventually bound for a new life in “the ever, ever after” of San Francisco. Khaled’s memories of their long association take us back to 1980, when he heard Hosam’s short story about a man being gradually eaten alive by his cat read on the World Service in place of a news bulletin (for which final insult to the regime the newsreader is later assassinated at the Regent’s Park mosque), and consequently through Libya’s painful journey towards its turn in the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

His other friend, Mustafa, whom he meets at Edinburgh University — a nod to another writer hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, in whose work Khaled finds “the honest and vital momentum of nature” — is very different from the elusive, diffident Hosam. It is Mustafa who prompts Khaled’s attendance at the demonstration, but also Mustafa who, understanding the value of material success, not least for the way it provides a good cover story for London life, works his way up the ranks of an estate agency. (There is an excellent sub-novel in My Friends, an almost nostalgic portrait of a capital city in which an impoverished émigré might create a tolerably secure life by dint of renting a shabby flat, courtesy of an indolent but benign landlord. Like Khaled’s memories of drinking in Soho watering holes, eating cheaply and frequenting public libraries, it is a loving, but nonetheless elegiac, blast from the past.)

In their different ways, Hosam and Mustafa are both exiles who move forward, and we come to realize that their restlessness will gradually lead to a convergence. But Khaled is more problematically held fast by his exile. Matar’s brilliance here — demonstrated previously in his fiction and in his 2017 memoir The Return, in which he wrote about his father’s disappearance at the hands of the Libyan authorities — is to convey how individual character and traumatic events become so intractably welded together that they may make a person a witness to their own life rather than a participant in it. Behind each of his principal characters stands a father, waiting for his son to come home; none will be able to find the same route back. Remembering Conrad burning his father’s letters when he got to England, Khaled remarks to Hosam:

It’s an accomplishment, I think, a genuine achievement, to forget one’s father. I would like to do that. To wake up one morning and commence life without giving him a thought.

Like Conrad’s The Secret Agent, this is a frightening novel. Amid its philosophical explorations, the violence of exile and the terror of pursuit and discovery are never downplayed. Neither are the realities of suddenly severed personal lives; the sense of families separated over years, births and deaths occurring in absentia, is palpably wrenching. “It is dependence that a sane mind should seek; to depend on others and be in turn dependable,” Khaled thinks, as he places another compromised phone call home, and it is this that has been taken away from him, and from all those whose lives are so comprehensively determined by others. This is a novel that aims, in part, to give voice to their enforced silences, and does so admirably.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.