The chilling facts of the matter are soon told: on 10 July 1971, an armed uprising against King Hassan II of Morocco was swiftly suppressed; the soldiers ordered to attack his palace were arrested and convicted; 58 young men were then kept imprisoned in total darkness, in tiny underground cells, for the next 20 years. In the face of such self-evident cruelty, This Blinding Absence of Light, a fictionalised description of the experiences of one survivor, renamed Salim, manages to add little impact to this simple summary. Indeed, it may prove to take something away. The fact that one man’s real life has become another man’s literature — tragedy redrafted as a Tragedy — inevitably makes us consider the style of the author as separate from the substance of the account, which immediately feels less essential as a result. Salim is no Papillon, or Ivan Denisovich, in that sense.

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