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In the Country of Men

Love in the land of Gaddafi

Hisham Matar
Viking, 245pp, £12.99,

Jonathan Keates

Thursday, 7th September 2006

Childhood is God’s gift to the novelist. Fiction thrives, not just on the obvious juxtaposition of innocence and experience, but on the pleasurable exercise of trying to establish an appropriate voice for the narrator. How to register feelings for which, perhaps, the child still has no name? How, on the other hand, to convince grown-ups of a disagreeable truth, that children understand far more than we judge to be good for them regarding the adult world. The very title of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew issues a sardonic warning not to confuse infant ignorance with unawareness, especially where little girls are concerned.

In the Country of Men retains the subtlety of this Jamesian perception while inhabiting another planet stylistically. Though there are occasional indications that English is Hisham Matar’s second language, the seeming artlessness in his narrative mode is of that classic kind which conceals art. The viewpoint of his nine-year-old hero Suleiman remains plausible because the mature voice seeking to recapture it preserves its clarity and directness of engagement.

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