This is the precise moment that Khaled’s life is wrenched from its predictable course. When officials inside the embassy open fire on the peaceful crowd outside, Khaled first hears the sound of the bullets as “a series of tears like the wind ripping sails”. And then: “It literally pressed into me and then ran through me with unremiting force, unquestionable, until it reached the centre of my brain and halted there for a moment before turning back and scorching outwards, pushing with it everything that I was, everything that I did not even know I was, to the outer limits. I was now empt and standing, my life reduced to a single unbroken line of a swirl locked inside a child’s glass marble. And there it rolled out, that marble, rolled out of me, taking everything with it,” Matar writes. The scene, a searing 13 pages that culminates in the reaction of a young hospital doctor when he sees the extent of Khaled’s injuries, is devastatingly powerful.
The embassy moment
The Libyan Embassy shooting, which is the defining event of Khaled’s life, was a real event, of course. On 17th April 1984, 11 demonstrators were wounded and a young policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, was murdered. When we meet in a pub in west London, I ask Hisham Matar about the challenge of interweaving real events with fictional characters. “I was very ambivalent about it for a while. I thought, maybe this is not the thing to do but it really just imposed itself on the narrative.” He remembers watching it on the news at the time, seeing the demonstrators on the ground, screaming. One was calling out for his mother. Matar was 13 years old and that image “never leſt me”, he says. “Years and years” later, he became friends with two people whom he later discovered had been at the demonstration and had been shot. “It was through them, without necessarily wanting to know, I’ve learnt a lot about it, even though I wasn’t there.” When Matar realised he was going to write about it in the novel, one friend was “very generous” in talking about the experience in detail.
Aſter Matar finished the novel, he invited his friend over for dinner and, full of trepidation, read the section aloud. “I was worried he would feel dispossessed of this experience, but I looked up aſter I read it and found his eyes were all red. He thanked me exactly for the thing I was worried he would be offended by. He said, ‘Thank you for taking something that happened to me and making something else of it, something different of it.’ “I think a lot of people who were there, and I suspect people who were not there—Libyans I mean—felt this strange contradiction. It was another brazen atack by the dictatorship on civilians, but it was also happening in public, the international public, and others were affected by it. I don’t think anybody knows how to
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talk about it, you know, really. And I think maybe those are the things to write about—when there isn’t a way to talk about it.”
I think maybe those are the things to write about—when there isn’t a way to talk about it
Khaled survives but his life is forever changed. Having fallen foul of Colonel Qaddafi’s government he knows that he cannot return to Libya, it is not even safe to return to his studies in Edinburgh. In the immediate aſtermath of the trauma, a Lebanese friend, Rana, saves him by leting him stay in her parents’ empt flat in London: “My ears were underwater and her voice a helicopter above”, Matar writes. Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, must live in exile, separated from their families but sustained by their—sometimes very complicated—friendship, until politics shiſt again, with revolution in Libya and the death of Qaddafi. Qaddafi is mentioned by name perhaps a handful of times, but his presence permeates the novel. Matar had been thinking about the novel since the Arab Spring in 2011—although he recently found a note from 2003 with an idea for a book about friends in exile “and the emotional country that certain deep friendships can provide”—and by 2014 he had a sense of how to proceed. He started work on My Friends, only to break off and write The Return, his 2017 Pulitzer Prize and Rathbones Folio Prize-winning memoir which documented his journey to Libya to discover what happened to his activist father, who was kidnapped and imprisoned by the Qaddafi government. Having found no trace of his father, and grieving, he made a trip to Italy to find solace in the paintings of the Sienese school, out of which came another memoir, A Month in Siena. Now, he says, “All along, everything I wrote, I felt I wrote at the expense of this book. “Books exist in time in the obvious sense, they have their own temporal structure, we read them against the clock— how many pages, how long did it take you to read this—but I think that books themselves have their own time and they oblige you, as a writer, to write them in the time they need to be writen. I couldn’t have writen this earlier… I wouldn’t have been able to write about Qaddafi back then. It was just too close.” Matar says of his first three books—the novels In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance, and the memoir The Return— that “each is very different from the other, but they are all dealing with fathers and sons and with the very simple fact that you are born into consequence, and you are an inheritor of the aſtermath of things and you have to somehow figure out how to deal with that. But this, I feel, is a book about contemporaries.”
Metadata
Imprint Viking Publication 11.01.24 Format HB (£16.99), EB (£8.99) ISBN 9780241409480/ 9780241987049 Rights sold 23 territories including the US (Random House) Editor Isabel Wall Agent Georgia Garrett, RCW
Matar’s top three
In the Country of Men Penguin, £8.99, 9780241973622 Matar’s début novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. “Masterly in its pacing, evocative, lyrical and finely observed”, TLS. 41,321 copies sold
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between Penguin, £10.99, 9780241966280 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. “A masterful memoir, a searing meditation on loss, exile, grief, guilt, belonging and, above all, family”, Sunday Times. 23,132 copies sold
A Month in Siena Penguin, £9.99, 9780241987056
“Sparkles with brilliant observations on art and architecture, friendship and loss”, Guardian. 16,838 copies sold
Data: Nielsen UK 21
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