Models of the Masculine

The regional prizes for Europe and South Asia section of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize have been announced, and both have been taken by boyhood tales.

Naeem Murr has won the best book award for The Perfect Man, while the first book award has gone to Hisham Matar for In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Angela Smith, the chair of judges says that the titles of these two books:

... refer ironically to patriarchal ideals. ... Both novels are set in the recent past and question the models of what it means to be masculine that are offered to boys in different and sometimes overlapping cultures.

The Perfect Man is about a 12-year-old Anglo-Indian boy who is abandoned to the care of relatives in London and then his father's mistress in a small American town, written by an author who knows what it it to live between cultures - Murr is of Lebanese and Irish parentage, was born in London and lives in the US. (Read more about him on his website.)

Hisham Matar's book, which I highly recommend, is set in Tripoli in the 1970's. The story is told through the eyes of Sulaiman a nine year old boy who struggles to make sense of what is going on around him after his father is arrested.

Hisham Matar was born in New York and spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo before moving back to Britain. He knows only too well the nightmare scanrio he is writing about - his father, a Libyan dissident living in Cairo - was kidnapped, taken back to Tripoli and imprisoned and tortured.

The results for Canada and the Caribbean have also been announced with two books by Canadians taking the prizes. The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards won Best Book and Vandal Love by D.Y. Bechard, Best First Book.

The results for Africa and South-East Asia/South Pacific, will be announced next week.

The regional winners then enter the final stages of the prize which will be announced on May 27th.

Terror - Libyan Style

I don't feel that I so much read Hisham Matar's Booker shortlisted In the Country of Men as watched it.

The movie in my head was one of those moody art-house things full of meaningful glances which hinted at unspoken words, secrets whispered in corners, and long poignant silences. It was shot in black and white, and the scenes alternating between the claustrophobic dark of interiors and the searing brilliance of the sunlight which bleaches everything of its colour.

I felt so opressed by the weight of fear in this nailbitingly tense novel that I had to put it down for two whole days (although I had gobbled down the first half of it on the AirAsia flight back from Bali.)

It's set in Libya. It didn't have to be. It could be set in any police state where there is the inevitable anticiption of the knock on the door and the possibility of torture, imprisonment. And worse. One of the most disturbing scenes in the book is an account of the public hanging of a gentle art historian shown on state TV.

The story is told through the eyes of Sulaiman a nine year old boy who struggles to make sense of what is going on around him. His father, Baba, is one of the liberal intelligensia fighting for democratic reform. He is frequently absent from home, ostensibly on business trips but in reality on attempts to foment social change and a push for democracy among the student population.

His wife and son, meanwhile, are vulnerable and afraid at home. Suleiman's mother takes refuge in alcholol, procured illegally from the local baker. She tells Suleiman that it is her "medicine", and spends the evenings relating 1001 Nights and her own story of domestic tyranny - both tales in which women are treated as mere chattels. She was at 14 forced into marriage against her will because she had spoken to a boy in public.

The strain of witnessing so much that he does not understand carries Suleiman to breaking point.

He longs for an initiation into the world of men, principally so that he can protect his mother, whom he loves almost incestuously. But childhood innocence is lost as he discovers the power of siding with the enemy and bullying those weaker than himself. Violence and betrayal suck him in.

The Bookseller reports that the novel :

... is already characterised in book trade shorthand as "the Libyan Kite Runner" ...

but I found this novel very much stronger, and a great deal more disturbing, without The Kite Runner's easy answers and the blare of Hollywood sentimentality.

Like Hosseini's novel, In the Country of Men contains strong autobiographical elements. Matar fled with his family from Libya to Egypt where he attended English boarding school.

Would I recommend the novel? Yes. The writing is sensual, the storytelling compelling and powerful. It asks difficult questions about how relationships survive in an atmosphere of oppression and fear and I feel that it fully deserved its place on the Booker shortlist - I'm just glad that I wasn't one of the judges on that committee.

Read the first chapter of the novel here.