THE END OF INNOCENCE
by Moni Mohsin
Fig Tree £16.99 pp353

The steely hand of Colonel Gadaffi casts a menacing shadow over Hisham Matar’s commanding first novel, a powerful portrait of a family convulsed by the tyrannies and upheavals of benighted 1970s Libya. We view this domestic discord and the extinguishing of public freedoms through the perplexed eyes of nine-year-old Suleiman, who lives in Tripoli with his doting yet emotionally brittle Mama, and his distant businessman father, Baba. The bewilderment the child feels at the tensions in his parents’ marriage is no less baffling than the disturbing scenes he observes in the world at large. How is it that his troubled Mama’s “illness” requires her to buy her “medicine” furtively from the baker? What is the reason for a scholarly neighbour being man-handled into a car, and why are the same men barging into his home in pursuit of his father?

With its quivering ambiguities and meticulous delineation of childhood’s disastrously misjudged attempts to decode the adult world, Matar’s novel shares themes with Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Michael Frayn’s Spies, and can hold its head high in such singular company. Suleiman’s escalating confusion is convincingly mapped, and his response to seeing Mama frantically burning all Baba’s books proves as innocent as it is potentially lethal. Rescuing a volume called Democracy Now, he hides it under his bed, where it becomes a trip wire for a betrayal.

Matar’s Libya emerges as an Orwellian nightmare in which Gadaffi assumes the Big Brother-like moniker of “the Guide” and the clockwork machinery of totalitarianism manifests itself in televised executions of “traitors”, and sinister government men who, as Suleiman observes, are “able to put people behind the sun”. While the novel’s title emphasises male hegemony, the author subtly undercuts and challenges its assumption of supremacy. Nowhere is masculine power more ruinous than in the haunting account of how a teenage date led Mama to being manacled to an unhappy marriage and allaying the pain of her crushed ambitions with alcohol. By way of counterpoint, however, the intense bond between mother and son is shown to be more courageous and enduring than the punitive cruelties of patriarchy. “If love starts somewhere, if it is a hidden force that is brought out by a person, like light off a mirror, for me that person was her,” says Suleiman tenderly. As we follow the hero’s poignant journey towards exile and self-knowledge it is this filial wonderment that triumphs over unsparing inhumanity.

Moni Mohsin’s fictional debut also features a young protagonist trying, and fatally failing, to comprehend enigmas beyond her years. Unlike Matar’s book, though, there is no clammy immediacy or propulsive sense of urgency, and the narrative feels less compelling as a result. Set against the backdrop of Pakistan’s imminent war with India during the early 1970s, the drama chronicles the friendship between eight-year-old Laila, the pampered child of a well-heeled family, and her teenage companion Rani, the granddaughter of one of its retainers. While the former is still acting out Enid Blyton jinks, Rani’s nascent desires are fixed on a boy soldier, an illicit passion that is marked for tragedy from the first skipped heartbeat.

In her eagerness to be part of what she wrongly perceives to be a romantic adventure, Laila becomes a guileless agent of Rani’s destruction, as her kin exact bloody retribution for her sullied reputation. Mohsin starkly illuminates the almost Forster-like failure to connect the progressiveness of Laila’s liberal father, who demands the due process of justice for the victim, and the entrenched values of his formidable mother, who unequivocally endorses the honour killing. While the author marshals her small but carefully drawn cast of characters with skill, the glacial plotting never allows the dramatic tension effectively to accrue or achieve a satisfactory catharsis.

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices of £11.69 (Matar) and £15.29 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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