My Friends
Reading my way through the Booker longlist, pt 1
I’ve not been quite sure what to do with this Substack – I set it up as a place to put things I wanted to write that didn’t fit elsewhere, but with the election, most of the thoughts I have had that I have wanted to write about have been about politics (perhaps my inner life a little less rich than I have sometimes professed), and have as such gone elsewhere.1 Anyway, the burden of this is that I have decided to read my way through the Booker Prize longlist and use this dormant-ish substack to write about it. I did a decent chunk of the list in 2018, thanks to a display of the books in the university library, and have since then been very firmly of the view that The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner was robbed.
Some literary housekeeping, now that I’ve decided to turn this into a broadcast list goodreads for my thoughts on well-regarded literary fiction: I’m quite a lazy and not particularly high brow reader, and don’t put much stock in my own literary taste. Previously I was a serial non-finished of books, a habit I have mostly kicked this year after becoming annoyed at myself for sinking so many hours into JG Farrell’s Troubles (doesn’t really go anywhere does it lads?) before not finishing it that I swore myself to greater commitment in future. Booker wise, I liked Prophet Song, but there is a slightly cheap appeal of reading books set in places you’re familiar with – in this instance Dublin, where I’m from – and when I think about it in retrospect a lot of what I think is, wow, I know exactly where that passport office is! which is not exactly literary merit in itself. Before that the last winner I read was Girl, Woman, Other which I liked enormously, and led me to read The Emperor’s Babe, Evaristo’s 2001 work in verse. I never thought I would like a book in verse (see above: lazy reader) but it had such incredible verve. I just thought it was great, and pacey, and like nothing else I’ve read.
Fiction wise, I have recently read DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, which I liked although not as much as some people seem to, Houllebeqc’s Atomised, which is a book for perverts (I’m told they’re all like that) and Muriel Spark’s Robinson, which I think is a lesser Spark work, but that’s still a pretty good thing to be. I love the novels of Muriel Spark and go back and forth between Loitering with Intent, Far Cry from Kensington and Girls of Slender Means as my favourite. Anyway, that’s a quick look through my recent reads for a sense of how I think about novels.
The first of the Booker list I read was Hisham Matar’s My Friends, which is about Libyan exiles in the UK. The narrator, Khaled, arrives in the UK to attend university, but after being injured at the shooting at the Libyan embassy in 1984 finds himself in exile, living in London and thinking of Libya, most often alongside his friends Hosam (a writer from a prominent family) and Mustafa (a student alongside Khaled, and the most hot headed of the three). Hosam and Mustafa both go back to Libya to join the fighting against the regime in 2011, while our narrator watches them from abroad, via social media.
As a novel, I recommend it; its prose has a kind of clearness and simplicity that’s deceptively engaging, and its portrayal of friendship amongst adults, particularly adult men – closeness and routine and loyalty, but also distance and discomfort and demand – is extremely well drawn and also, I think, quite rare. However, I first came across the book when it won the Orwell Prize for political fiction a few months back, and as such I think it’s fair to make a political as well as an artistic assessment of the book.
My Friends portrays exile and feelings of being drawn inevitably backwards; it shows lives lives elsewhere (mostly London) as being half lives, and one of its central assumptions is that this is simply and inexorably true. I don’t think it is, or rather, I think we should all probably try quite hard to make it not so. It’s true that people who are from where you are from will understand you and things about you that others won’t, but that doesn’t mean that relationships with people from other places will always be incomplete, and believing that to be the case – taking it as a fixed truth, as the book seems to – is a bad way to think about the world and all the people you might come to know in it, and one with ultimately quite troubling implications.
This issue, of living half lives, most comes across in the characters’ romantic relationships. Khaled has a girlfriend who is seemingly on permanent retainer (she eventually marries someone else, but still comes back to him) while Hosam leaves his Irish partner of many years to return to Libya, where he promptly marries his younger cousin, in a match he says feels destined. Unromantically – or, perhaps, romantically – I feel that very little in our romantic lives is destined. Our romantic lives, as our social lives more broadly, are instead about choice and commitment and effort, and to pin abandonment on destiny and on the assumed inborn superiority of compatibility that comes from shared background seems wrong to me.
Good fiction shouldn’t castigate its characters, of course, but it should impute onto them more agency in making choices (and thus more responsibility in their consequences for others) than this book does. As such, if political fiction is more than simply fiction about politics, but is rather fiction about people trying to work out how to live good lives, I am not sure My Friends entirely works. Much of it seems to be about abdication of one form or another (from relationships, from settling in a different place), with the author presenting choices – complicated choices, made infinitely more difficult by political circumstance – as irresistible compulsions. The narrator, for example, has a steady job as a teacher, and yet chooses, for decades, to rent the same small flat he took when he first came to London. As with his on-standby girlfriend, this seems to evince a desire to linger at the doorframe of life in London, feeling always pulled back to Libya. The book never really interrogates whether this lingering is the right way to approach life, or even suggests that other ways of living away from one’s home are possible. Perhaps I’m just mardy on behalf of Hosam’s spurned Irish gf (she goes back to Dublin), but for all the book’s many qualities I found it a somewhat frustrating read.