Hill Musk evokes Catherine Earnshaw and the all too familiar world of Wuthering Heights. It evokes Amina and the all too familiar world of Palace Walk. In it the two are joined by Mariam, the literary scholar and novelist Sahar El-Mougy's fictional creation, a 57-year-old physician who, bearing the burden of her own unresolved past, following a mental breakdown and suicidal urges, provides a home for these two literary characters, the trio thus creating an environment of female bonding in the heart of the Cairo of 2010. A most implausible scenario, El-Mougy uses it to give her readers a real Witch's Brew, a concoction of fictional and metafictional characters against a collage of European landscapes, Cairene mannerisms, street songs, religious ritual, all in the shadow of incipient vulgarity and violence. The narrative is as much a rendering of palpable surroundings as an exposure of the nascent demons of the subconscious. Catherine and Amina, still firmly rooted in their literary landscapes, have been reincarnated as creatures of the present, seemingly to continue with the unfinished business of living. They play unexpected and bizarre roles, fighting many-sided battles against alienation and aloneness in a final bid to understand an elusive past and an incomprehensible present. The anachronistic inhabitants of historical Cairo, they have become bread-winners in 21st-century terms, suitably equipped with the indispensable gear of modernity, computers and mobile phones. Thus the reclusive and silenced Amina has come out of her shell and turned writer, translator and healer. In her turn, Catherine Earnshaw has become a teacher, contending with the frustrating incongruities of the Egyptian educational system. In this densely populated novel, there are other literary walk-ins: Ophelia, the Lady of Shallot, Virginia Woolf. The narrative resonates with other voices from East and West, from Latifa El-Zayat to Lady Macbeth, and with frequent visits not only to other forms of Arabic and English literature, but also much further afield, onto the German, Russian and Japanese literary maps. Overlapping voices and narratives are girded with feminist underpinnings, Sahar El-Mougy's cup of tea. Iconic female characters inhabit a variety of geographical spaces: rivers, lakes, forests, alongside the alleys of Cairo, collapsing boundaries of every hue and colour, of time, of geography, of language, culture and class. Spaces and enclosures are always shifting, mythical caverns simultaneously fading into fairytale castles and run-down Cairo buildings. Images of galloping stallions in bucolic landscapes intersect with Cairo cabs on dusty and noisy streets. The novel embraces a variety of voices: the jargon of the European Enlightenment, lengthy literary quotations, classical Egyptian music, doggerel, mixed in with time-honoured survival clichés. Despite its academic and abstract quality, this narrative is also a manifesto, charting all the changes that have come over the Egyptian scene in the last century: political, economic and sociological, especially sociological. A novel of laboured and impossible interlinks, it reflects the almost surreal reality of modern Egyptian life — in all its minutiae and trivia. The contemporary idiom is overflowing with jarring affiliations, it is a cacophony of voices, an uttered clash of civilisations: high-flown and populist, reflecting a reality where disharmony is the name of the game. Hill Musk has little to do with a timeline or chronology and even less with coherence. It is an enquiry into the abstractions of time, time past and time present but above all, it is an inquiry into the timeless. Character and reader are constantly navigating the forbidding and uncharted territory of the subconscious. If this narrative is a cerebral, dark and morbid tale, it also embraces several healing metaphors, mainly revolving around the power of words and of the senses. With characters who literally and figuratively live inside and outside books, there are profound connections made between living and storytelling, writing and therapy, or writing as therapy, a strong testimony to the healing power of words. The senses — revolving around scents and food — play a more mundane but equally inflected role. Aroma is an air-thin and diffused medicine, not just in the obvious literary allusion of the title, but also in the very widespread and popular Egyptian custom of incense burning, with its quasi-religious overtones. Healing is further underscored by food. Culinary details become an expression of rites which create an everyday, familiar form of human warmth and interaction. This novel is a Shakespearean cauldron of the phantasmagorical, a mix of realities, dreams and hallucinations. It is a knot of dates, hours, days and months which mirror centuries of unanswered questions, basically those murky questions about human accountability and human destiny, questions which transcend time and place. This kaleidoscope of the real and the imagined also addresses the thin lines which divide fiction and fact, living and dying, reality and truth. It brings home the complex and intractable anatomy of the human psyche. Written in extremely lucid but very elegant Arabic, Hill Musk is a writer's-writer novel which casts its net over that vast area of the human activity traditionally known as literature. In its subject matter, this narrative is the familiar terrain of the writer, and yet also of the mythical sirens' demand for attention. Reviewed by Nazek Fahmy
