Ahmed Khaled Towfik, Utopia, 2009

Sometime in the mid-21st Century, Utopia exists as a large enclave of well-off Egyptians, living behind high walls on the north Egyptian coastline and protected by the US military. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has been left to descend into anarchy and barbarism. One of the sports favoured by the affluent and bored Utopian youth is to venture outside Utopia’s walls and return with a trophy – usually a body part of some semi-feral non-Utopian – and when one such venture goes wrong the antagonists are on the receiving end of an unexpectedly beneficial turn of events. You could reasonably expect Utopia to be a rather brutal bildungsroman, but the life lessons taught to the selfish Utopians are not learned, in fact they’re rejected in favour of a restatement of their born superiority. This is a well-written and rather chilling book, as might be expected of the Arab world’s leading writer of horror and fantasy, and is one that I cautiously recommend. Towfik spares no polite sensibilities the reader may have – no characters are particularly likeable or even admirable, and they are all put through their own versions of hell. Utopia was first published in Arabic in 2009 more than a year before the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, yet in a brief note at the beginning Towfik states he believes a place like Utopia will certainly exist in Egypt in the near future. Such is the depth of cynicism on display here that I doubt any of that sentiment will have changed.  PY

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Latifa Zayyat, The Owner of the House, 1994

Samia’s husband Mohamed is a fugitive political prisoner on the run from the Egyptian police, and as she joins him in hiding, with all the necessary games to conceal identities, her struggle becomes an internal as well as an external one, leaving her with the possibility of being doubly enslaved. This is a novel of metaphor, mostly concerning the parallels of her situation with an individual’s relationship to the state. The narrative occasionally becomes a little disconnected whenever Samia looks inward, giving us, in effect, two stories that have blurred boundaries. It’s a successful novel in getting across its message of escape from both mental and physical oppressions – relevant still to what happened to Egypt in 2011 – but perhaps less successful in terms of narrative, indeed I found myself having to re-read previous paragraphs to recap what appeared to be minor points that were in fact major ones. The Owner of the House requires some close reading to be best understood, and the long introduction is also necessary to ground the story in context, which is partly that of Zayyat’s own life.  PY

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Naguib Mahfouz, The Day the Leader was Killed, 1985

Goings-on in a middle class Cairo family in the months before the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981. The book has three narrators: Randa, constantly at the receiving end of her bad decisions, her indecisive fiancé Elwan, and his mischievous, sloganeering grandfather Muhtashimi; this triad of viewpoints each reflect the national despair at Sadat’s open-door economic policy which wreaked havoc in the everyday lives of Egyptians. There’s a great deal of irony to be found in their self-confessed impotence even though there are millions more far worse off than themselves, and their preoccupation with their own small problems and desires comes to an unexpected head for Elwan in a way that simultaneously reflects the emergency situation facing the nation. The Day the Leader was Killed has ironic political undercurrents but at its heart is soap opera, enjoyable nonetheless.   PY

Naguib Mahfouz, Voices from the Other World, 2004

Five little-known short stories that Mahfouz wrote between 1936 and 1945, centred around his explorations of ancient Egyptian history. They’re actually quite good fun (especially ‘Evil Adored’), told straight but always with a biting undercurrent that is either political or allegorical, bringing the time of the Pharaohs and their belief in the afterlife right up against the equally strange twentieth century.   PY