The boy done good

The saga of Naim Attallah and his writing career continues. For readers who have just joined, Attallah’s short morality tale about his simple and happy childhood with his good and loving grandmother and great-aunt, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, appeared last year. It came swiftly on the heels of Jennie Erdal’s entertainting memoir, Ghosting. In this, she revealed that Attallah’s immense and impressive literary output — articles, collections of interviews, book reviews, erotic novels — had in fact been written not by him, but by her. For over 20 years, she had been his full-time ghost.

Now, in another extremely short space of time, Attallah has produced the second volume in what is planned as a quartet of memoirs. The Boy in England takes our hero from Haifa to London and traces the first ten years of his English life. There is no mention of a writing assistant, and his full oeuvre (or Jennie Erdal’s) is pointedly listed at the front as being written by him alone.

While The Old Ladies of Nazareth was a guileless tale about childhood innocence, this second volume has moved into another gear. It is pacy and eager. It is also handicapped from the start by the use of the third person — ‘the boy’ — as narrator. The boy is 18 when he lands at Genoa after a rough crossing and makes his way to Dover. Well-schooled in the European classics, he wants to like England and the English, though his image of the British is one of colonisers and ill-tempered soldiers. It is 1949 and London, still in its phase of post-war shabbiness, is cold, smoggy and deeply uncomfortable. Rationing is in force. In the rooms he rents he is lucky to find an indoor lavatory.