is it that while it might “bring to mind Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy” (Kirkus Reviews’ words, not mine), Leila Aboulela’s novel is also about a thousand pages shorter (Lyric‘s 308 vs. Cairo’s 1368). In these three hundred pages, Lyrics Alley follows five principle characters through the Sudan of the 1950’s. Each one is, in some manifestation or other, struggling against tradition and toward modernity. For example, Soraya wants to be a doctor, but her father won’t even let her wear glasses, and Nabilah wants to live in Egypt, but her husband loves backwards Sudan. The others – Nur, Mahmoud, Ustaz – are related in ways you would need the chart at the beginning of the book to get. I won’t take the time to disentangle all their aspirations and connections (at least one cousin-on-cousin relationship is mixed up in there). Suffice it to say that the complexity of this “family epic” makes for much recapitulation, abridgment, and summary in the short treatment Aboulela gives her story.
Take, at random, a scene where Mahmoud and Nabilah entertain a British couple, surnamed the Harrisons:
“[The Harrisons] got up to dance, clearly in love, clearly happy. It made Nabilah envious but also confused. She was not sure what she was longing for, what it was she wanted and didn’t want.”
Forget scene, description, objective correlative, interpretation, proximity of bodies, heat, touch, all that. Why bother with messy details? Aboulela has it figured out: as the proprietor of her characters’ emotions, as the god at the center of her fictive universe, she tell us exactly how they’re feeling and save her time-pressed readers some space. Hence Nabilah feels “envious but also confused,” Mahmoud feels “heavy with the responsibility of the risk,” Ustaz Badr feels “queasy and angry” – none of these emotions carrying any outward manifestations, all relying on telling, none on showing.
Her tendency to relate what’s happening, rather than show it, makes for some strangely bloodless scenes. At one point, the police arrest the annoyingly stupid and holy Ustaz Badr for a crime he (surprise!) didn’t commit. Aboulela writes:
“The policemen barked at the neighbours who were crowding the doorway. They fell back, and Badr was pushed out in to the street under their gaze. He continued to shout out his innocence. It was his cousin Shukry who had stolen the jewellery and hidden it in Badr’s house! He, Badr, had had nothing to do with it. Ask the owner of the stolen gold, he pleaded, ask Mahmoud Bey.”
This could have been a genuinely moving scene. Badr, the upright, the eminently status-concerned, disgraced in front of his wife, neighbors, and children, pushed into the dust, manhandled by cops. Instead, its emotion hinges on an exclamation point: “it was his cousin…!” Aboulela shouts, abstracting Badr’s words. He doesn’t get lines until the next paragraph, and then they are completely isolated from tone, gesture, or even response. “‘I would never take what doesn’t belong to me,'” he blandly “repeats” (though it’s the first time we’ve heard him say it on the page), then shores it up with another exclamation point.
Yet perhaps it’s just as well we are spared empathizing with Badr here, because after some sophomoric meditations on Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, his cousin is arrested, his name is cleared, and Badr continues his blessed life unaffected: “The miserable night he had spent in custody had not dented his reputation nor jeopardized his employment,” Aboulela writes.
Which is a pity. Personally, I would rather he had stayed in jail, where he might have actually undergone the valley of the shadow of doubt and come out the other end a more fully human character. But this is Aboulela writing. Her novel harbors no Thomases, no turmoil, no gritty hate that has marked the Sudan for the past nine years; all five plot stands resolve with the concord of a Victorian novel, in a happily-ever-after that doesn’t exist. Another reviewer has made that point better than I can. The only question I am left with concerns the cover blurb, placed under the title: how any critical imagination could have applied the adjective “visceral” to this rosy, abbreviated book.
(p)eau symposium 