The writing on the wall | 20 August 2015

‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and death.’ She covered the 18-day cataclysm and stayed on in Cairo for another 18 months to report its aftermath, filing for the New Yorker among other outlets. The title refers of course to Tahrir Square, the heart of the conflict, a place ‘shaped like a giant teardrop with a traffic circle in the centre’.

Steavenson’s previous books include The Weight of a Mustard Seed, a portrait of a Ba’athist general in Saddam’s Iraq; she also reported on the fall of the Soviet Union. In Circling the Square she artfully arranges her material over a series of short chapters, each a ‘story’, as the subtitle suggests. This creates, successfully, a spontaneous and impressionistic tone; the book reads almost like a diary.

She writes with descriptive flair. One civic building is ‘a grey toady hulk’, while an interlocutor has ‘one if those eternally beautiful Egyptian faces, cast several millennia ago from reddish Nile mud’. Throughout this engaging book Steavenson conjures the thick leaves of the ficus trees on the Zamalek Corniche; the whiff of a McDonald’s picnic on the sofa as she watches Muslim Brotherhood deputies taking their parliamentary seats on television after that party won the post-revolution election; a moon rising in a ‘lavender sky’.

With the journalist’s instinct for quotes, she allows Egyptians to speak for themselves. ‘At least we tried,’ says one middle-class young man; ‘not like our parents, who have done nothing for 30 years and watched Egypt stagnate into this mess.’ Steavenson is good at the lightening character sketch. Here’s one of a female lawyer: ‘After 20 years of handling internecine property disputes, Akila Mohammed had ceased to be shocked by the nefarious.