SULEIMAN IS NINE YEARS old and his universe holds a mother, a father, a best friend, a school and a neighbourhood, the community of a new-built suburban street in Tripoli.

Through his half-comprehending eyes we witness the arrest of his friend’s father by agents of the Government, called members of the Revolutionary Committee. Then they come for his father too, terror takes over his existence, confusion is his only refuge and the simplest boyhood action is loaded with fatal implications.

There is no aural junk on an iPod to comfort Suleiman in his distress, no mind-numbing tedium from reality television. Instead, TV entertainment consists of the spectacle of his friend’s father’s interrogation, then his public hanging in the basketball stadium, acclaimed by thousands of roaring spectators. When the torturers step forward, the screen is filled with a test card of pink flowers, unless the audience is traumatised. On the radio, every station relays the chanting of the mob.

Hisham Matar, born in New York to Libyan parents, grew up in Tripoli and was the same age as his protagonist when his family moved to Cairo. In a text glowing with emotional truth, he constructs his young narrator’s perspective to evoke the nameless and overwhelming feelings of childhood and an adult understanding of the events in which the family is enmeshed.

In this wonderfully focused childsight, details such as the feel of an old man’s kiss or the taste of mulberries loom large in the foreground, leaving the adult reader, increasingly gripped by fear of what may befall the child, to pick out the significant facts that shape the drama from the background.

Binding the entire narrative together is the boy’s oceanic love for his mother, exquisitely realised while her own story of personal oppression within political repression is told. A woman of 24, the victim of a forced marriage and wedding-night rape, she endures her days with the help of black-market vodka bought from the baker.

In whispered conversations with her son, she reviles the archetype of Scheherazade, contemptuously calling her a slave who only deluded herself that she could escape execution by telling her killers the tales of the thousand-and-one nights. When tragedy hits, her despair turns to a kind of heroism and she acts to save her family.

In the last half of the 20th century, what Hollywood calls the maturation story — and literary theorists term the Bildungsroman — become a vehicle for shallow teen angst. From The Catcher in the Rye to Vernon God Little, the voice of youth spoke in a cynical whine that articulated only the hormonal conflicts of the overprivileged.

In Hisham Matar’s extraordinary first novel it becomes again what it was in David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, the universal cry of an innocent victim of institutional sadism.

It is no surprise to learn that before its publication, In the Company of Men has been hailed internationally as one of the most brilliant literary debuts of recent years.

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