Beirutus: madinatun tahtal-ard (Beirutus: Underground City), Rabie Jabir, Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2005. pp239; Ma'bad yanjah fi Baghdad (Ma'bad Makes it in Baghdad), Rasid al-Daeif, Beirut: Dar Riyad al-Rais, 2005. pp224 The Lebanese writer Rabie Jabir is among the youngest, most prolific novelists working in the Arab world today. Remarkably, his books are also among the most widely read. And the secret of such vitality has as much to do with accessibility as talent. Jabir is probably unique among his high-brow contemporaries in his ability to employ the oldest, most fail- proof formulae, without giving up too much in the way of aesthetic interest or creative depth. And it is in this sense -- and this sense alone -- that one readily links him with Rashid al-Daeif, another Lebanese writer, perhaps contemporary Arabic literature's leading humourist. Rather than striving after verisimilitude and polyphony (Elias Khoury, another compatriot, will go to great lengths in terms of both research and technical innovation to achieve just these things), both authors are content with telling a story. Which is not to say that they balk at the prospect of research: in Beirut madinatul- alam (Beirut: World City), Jabir, for one, produced a striking fictional history of the city that was largely research-based. And al-Daeif, in the present book if in no other, has spent much time and effort in studying Arabic literature. Rather, it is as if they are too aware of the limitations of language to ask too much of it. Jabir's characters, for example, want to be neither full-bodied human beings nor social-political types, but rather credible enough agents of narrative construction. His settings, though often recognisably real, are reduced to the three proverbial walls within which a drama can be effectively staged. And his sense of language, though always in dynamic contact with the multiple registers of present-day Arabic, rarely admits of verbal ambiguity or repartee. Likewise al-Daeif: with an ironic awareness of the two canonical authors to whom he has now turned for inspiration, perhaps driven by the recent turmoil in the Middle East, Al-Asfahani and Al-Masoudi, Ma'bad yanjah fi Baghdad (Ma'bad Makes it in Baghdad) is the novelist's own, emphatically fictional and wildly irreverent take on Abbasid history. In al-Daeif's account, the novel constitutes a kind of turning point in his sense of the connection between reality and fiction, placing the former in the service of the latter, rather than, as is more usual among novelists, vice versa. "In the novel," he told Dalia Farouk on Arabs Online, "writers are forever seeking out the conditions for reality and mind in one and the same breath, and conceiving of every event as a link in an all-round causal chain. I wanted to be liberated of such rationality, to not have to seek out conditions. And I found the answer in Al-Asfahani... Al-Asfahani placed the event in the service of the [compositional] unit, and placed that in the service of entertainment and the pleasant company [of the written page]. I took most of the events of my novel out of [Al-Asfahani's] Al-Aghani (The Songs), but I made frequent omissions and additions to make them more amenable to the context..." Such purposeful derivation makes for an immediate complexity that is neither aesthetic nor intellectual, per se. Instead, it turns the novelistic plane into an arena for various elements of history, socio-political reality and the author's own impulses, in order to fight a gripping battle aimed, first and foremost, at amusing the reader. "I have always asked myself why there exists no reader of the Arabic novel in the way there is one among foreigners. And the answer revolved around illiteracy, publishing opportunities, censorship and cultural awareness. But is it not also the responsibility of the writer? My response was that most Arab writers are strict to the point of religiosity, almost, making writing a kind of religious practice and further undermining the perception of the novel as an entertaining art." In Jabir, though the same stress is placed on the entertainment value of what is being written, one could say that the complexity arises rather more organically out of the content. Content which, in its most general outlines, tends to be free of intellectual complications. The notion of a city underground, for example, is not a particularly sophisticated premise. And notwithstanding its many high-brow precedents (from Jules Verne to the contemporary Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat's Harith al-miyah ), it remains within the confines of the popular, rather more than less prone to sensationalism and frothy oversimplification. Yet, in approaching this form afresh, Beirutus: madinatun tahtal-ard (Beirutus: Underground City) sustains a sobriety that can only be described as commendable. The story of a movie theatre security guard who, following a strange figure through the empty lot behind the premises, slips and falls, losing consciousness only to awaken in an uncharted underground maze city where sentries are referred to as fishermen and people think twice before leaving their neighbourhood for fear of losing their way, Beirutus is, equally, an allegory of the unconscious and, through the occasional, apparently passing reference to the effects of political strife on the guard's life and the 15-year civil war, perhaps also a reflection of the internal rift such events will inevitably exercise on a people. There is depth, plenty of it, in fact, but it is not the kind of depth that is likely to alienate. It remains unobtrusive. This is so, too, in al-Daeif's biography of Ma'bad Ibn Rabbah -- a kind of conglomerate of characters based on the singers on whom Al-Asfahani reports in his benchmark tome, and one that benefits most clearly from the real-life Umayyad singer Ma'bad Ibn Wahb, whom the author carefully differentiates from his character in an introductory note. Born a slave, Ma'bad manages to gain his freedom as a result of his artistic gifts and sets out for Baghdad in search of fame and fortune, only to find the city torn by conflict between the brother caliphs Al-Amin and Al-Ma'moun. Gradually he learns to play the political game, enough to further his own cause to an impressive degree. In transposing an Umayyad character into an Abbasid setting al-Daeif makes an implicit point about the problems of inter-Arab relations, notably the penchant for bloodshed. In so doing, in turn, he also benefits from the more unequivocally historical of his two canonical sources, Al-Masoudi, whose account of the Battle of Baghdad al-Daeif draws on extensively when he describes the circumstances surrounding Ma'bad's arrival in the city. In the aforementioned interview, al-Daeif speaks of "the fecundity felt by Al-Masoudi as he wrote," referring to the same episode. More significantly for an informed reading of the novel, he also stresses the fact that "the truth," whether in his work or in that of Al-Masoudi and Al-Asfahani, is to be sought in artistic accomplishment rather than in factual verisimilitude. And the truth of his history-making is as entertaining as it is profound: with unfailing attention to the ironic potential of the language of heritage, he makes use of many terms, explaining them as he goes along, not only to give a sense of his setting but also to induce laughter -- Al-Daeif is among a handful of Arab authors who can make you laugh out loud -- and add a sense of integrity to an otherwise disjointed narrative, based as it is on the compositional unit even as it proceeds within generally chronological outlines. However, throughout he never loses sight of the gossipy, the unbecoming, the absurd; and with paradoxical power he manages to maintain a sense of sympathy with Ma'bad even as he satirises him and, through his picaresque exploits, the caliphate in which he has made his name and its more recent echoes. Lying prostrate for the longer part of his stay, on the other hand, Jabir's guard conducts an affair with Yasmina (the white- clad figure he was following in the first place, as it turns out), makes the acquaintance of an "historian" and a "geographer," among others, and, thanks largely to the hospitality of his hosts (Yasmina's bosom friend Rahil, who has nursed him chastely for months and offers a last-minute sexual favour in the hope of being transported to Beirut), subsists on the standard diet of "blind fish" and dried roots. On the instructions of the geographer, when he has recuperated sufficiently and regained a fraction of his former weight, he finally sets out on the journey back through dark, mammoth corridors, treacherous caverns and stormy waters and arrives home, an emaciated, stunned shadow of himself. Jabir manages to weave a drama of broken love and flight into the fabric of what remains, by and large, an adventure story in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson, investing the whole with a whodunit sense of suspense and a taste for the exotic (references are constantly made to the "Neighbourhood of the Blind and the Mud People"). Here as elsewhere, Jabir preserves the age-old device of a reliable voice to which the reader can relate throughout the experience of the book being read. Though he gives a brief description of the protagonist at the beginning, a few pages on, Rabie Jabir, identified as a novelist and a journalist on the newspaper Al-Hayat, steps off the podium to let Boutros, a former security guard at Al-Hayat among other institutions, tell his own tale. Initially Boutros's unaffected voice, undifferentiated as it remains from Jabir's own, and aside from being a readily available anchor for the reader, provides an insight into Jabir's view of himself as a writer and his perception of the practice of reading -- an awareness from which al-Daeif's voice -- savvy, sarcastic, conversational -- never strays too far. So much so that its impact is personal. This is literature in the most sophisticated sense of the term, even as it eschews presenting itself as such. By Youssef Rakha
