Some of the other tales are less satisfactory; two or three are even tedious. However, the author’s faultlessly judged climax is a triumph. The Egyptian President, with his entourage of grovelling placemen and vicious thugs, is to visit the Centre, and an Egyptian doctor, admired and loved by his colleagues, is asked to deliver a speech of welcome. Having never been involved in political protest, despite his distaste for the regime, he is now persuaded to deliver an attack instead of his planned encomium. But when he mounts the rostrum, his nerve fails him.
The author’s view of his characters tends to be either disdainful or hostile. Dentist that he still is, he sets to work with the high-powered drill of an exceptional talent to reveal the abscess at the root of Egyptian society. In the case of the head of Egyptian State Security and the smarmy informant employed by him to report on a possibly rebellious student body, the excoriation is so ferocious that it verges on caricature.
At his best al-Aswani resembles Somerset Maugham in being both a wonderful storyteller and a cynically astute observer of human folly and frailty. Unfortunately, like Maugham, he is also a writer with a truffle-hound’s nose for a cliché. His undistinguished style receives little burnish from his translator Farouk Abdel Wahab — perhaps significantly a professor of Arabic at Chicago University, not English. A single quotation will indicate the problem:
As for her figure it was luscious and curvaceous, filled with vitality and sending off lustful vibrations in the air that made Tariq lose his concentration.
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