Editor's Note: This episode of Bookclub is available to listen online or for download.
When this month’s group of readers met Hisham Matar to discuss his book In the Country of Men, we talked about Gaddafi’s Libya, where the story is set, and what it’s like to be young in a world of secrets that you can’t unravel. The book is a picture of what it’s like to live in a closed society, with fear on the doorstep. But we also spoke about writing. Hisham, whose book brought him worldwide attention and was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, wanted to explain how he went about constructing a novel, and where he discovered the limits of the author’s control.
‘It might not sound genuine but I guarantee you I feel this - that the edges of my knowledge are the edges of my book. I don’t know anything else before or afterwards and I’m also firm in my belief that the book belongs more to you as a reader, you can access doors in it I can never access.’
He went on to say that he never wanted a novel to tell him everything. It was more like a space in which the imagination could take wing. ‘Once I’ve written a book I realise that you’re in a very different place as a reader. [As a writer] you’re the mechanic in the belly of the ship, your concerns are very different from the concerns of the reader, and so I can never read my book.’
The story is one that does encourage the reader to imagine. For a start, the narrator is only nine years old, the boy Suleiman, and so we have to adapt to the childlike understanding of a world that is difficult and dark. And that world would put us all in a position of innocence or bewilderment, because it doesn’t seem to make sense. There’s violence, and a sense of secrets everywhere. Suleiman’s father is eventually arrested by the authorities with whom he’d once collaborated. His experience is an emblem of a revolution gone wrong, and through the portrait of his family a reader can understand what it’s like to live under the influence of forces that are beyond your control but press in on you.
Hisham told us that he was less interested in writing about politics than in about what happens to individuals when a society goes through changes. He remembers the cinemas and the bookshops being closed, everything turning in on itself. ‘It was an intense moment in the young and turbulent history of Libya.’
That intensity is expressed in the relationship between Suleiman and his mother, and with the house where he grows up. It was an upbringing like his own - looked after by women until they discovered he was no longer a boy and handed him over to the men.
The book, he said, was really about memory. About the business of growing up and, above all the country itself. He spoke about its magical characteristics - the light, for example - and about his own experience in being confronted with evidence of violence and a regime that wanted to take away the freedom to think. But at no stage in this quite short book do you feel that you reading a political tract with a few characters given speaking parts: Suleiman is the point, not the events swirling around him.
He’s a revealing character, not least because he doesn’t always behave well and engages in his fair share of betrayal, and when he was describing how the story evolved, Hisham gave us an insight into his own motivation.
There’s a scene, about forty pages into the story, in which Suleiman eats mulberries for the first time. It’s a moment of intensity and discovery. And Hisham wrote the passage before he’d thought about how the novel might begin. ‘I thought I was writing a poem about nature - a fairly classical subject - but in the way Suleiman describes things, I read in it clues for who he might be.’ That’s why In the Country of Men is a story that draws you in.
And Hisham explained: ‘For me writing is like walking into a room you’ve never been in before, in the dark, and dancing with a complete stranger when you’re figuring out what might be the next move.’ A journey of exploration, without knowing where it will end.
I do hope you enjoy listening to Hisham Matar. Next month on 7 June a change of style as we move to non-fiction. We’ll talk to Henry Marsh about his bestselling account of his career as a brain surgeon: Do No Harm.
Happy reading
Jim
Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4
