-Musiqa al-mall (Mall Music), Mahmoud El-Wardani, Cairo: al-Hilal Novels, 2005. pp188 -Ashiq al-hay (Lover of the County), Youssef Abu Raya, Cairo: al-Hilal Novels, 2005. pp191 Why is it that contemporary Egyptian fiction, characterised for decades by various types of realism, is increasingly resorting to metaphor? Perhaps the answer to this question is two-fold: while realism has been beating a retreat in the face of the social transformations of the last two or three decades, it is precisely this changing reality that has caused many writers of fiction to seek new techniques more capable of expressing it. Yet, even if this answer is not the correct one few would deny that Egyptian fiction has entered a phase very distant from the writings of Naguib Mahfouz and his students and followers. These two recent novels by Egyptian authors Mahmoud El-Wardani and Youssef Abu Raya are representative of this combination of social transformation on the one hand and the transformations of literary modes of expression on the other. Both depart from the tradition of realism associated with Mahfouz in order to establish a distinct character for themselves and to open up possibilities for an alternative literary identity. While El-Wardani has always attempted to imbue and enrich the present with a documentary dimension, whether from the near or distant past, Abu Raya has concentrated throughout his work on the metaphor of belatedness, seeking to contrast a degraded present with aspects of the past. Together, they have ushered voices into the novel that are characteristic of the present age, being ones that question an Egyptian reality that seems to be on the verge of disintegration. In doing so, their writings have expressed a form of anxiety common to many recent Egyptian novels. In his novel Musiqa al-mall (Mall Music), for example, El-Wardani continues to toy with elements familiar from his previous work: Egypt and its disintegrating present, references to the Thousand and One Nights (the Arabian Nights), and documentary hints at national treasures that have, and are continuing to be, lost. Such elements are given voice through a first-person narrator who can see through this chaos, though the presence of historical documents in the novel seems also to be necessary to shed light on the disintegrating reality. It is as if these documentary fragments, woven into the novel, are there to express or to enhance the complexity of a reality that cannot be fully grasped without them. Furthermore, the author seems to be saying, reality can only usefully be approached through metaphor. Thus, at the beginning of the novel the narrator, frightened and impoverished like many characters in El-Wardani's fiction, is in a shopping mall, all bright lights and glittering rows of commodities, as if to suggest the nature of the social world he faces. By the end of the novel, a corpse is brought in, alluding to a murderer and to a victim both of whom remain unidentified. Indeed, everything in the novel is ambiguous and defined by its ambiguity: relationships are drowned out amidst light and noise, and there is a series of unfortunate coincidences that end in the domain of the nightmarish par excellence. This nightmare the novel attempts to confront through allusions to the Thousand and One Nights, which contrast sharply with the bleakness of the reality depicted. It is perhaps this confrontation between contemporary and historical elements that most distinguishes El-Wardani's work and that gives him his distinctive voice amongst contemporary Egyptian writers. The tension between the events described in the novel and the view of the world advanced by the novelist defines, and simultaneously exposes, the reality depicted in the novel. However, there is something in this rigid structure that impoverishes the work overall. El-Wardani's protagonist starts off in the street, goes to the mall, finds himself in a night-club, encounters a corpse, goes to jail and finally finds a window that looks out onto the street again. This sequence limits the significance that the novel has sought to express, and may lead the reader to interpretations that are not those the author has wished to convey. While El-Wardani's aim is to try to express ambiguity in his writing, Youssef Abu Raya's distinctive voice in his novel Ashiq al-hay (Lover of the County) stems from his experimenting with writing a novel within a novel and one that links Egypt's present to its ancient past. Abu Raya uses a refashioned metaphor, that of stolen love, in order to do so, and in its three sections the novel presents an Egypt that is moving uneasily between life and death. Indeed, the novel explores this in-between state, asking whether there is something in Egypt's past that is holding the present captive and making the dead the masters of the living. Like El-Wardani's work, Abu Raya's writings are full of contemporary allusions to the Gulf War, to Palestine and to the impact of labour migration to the oil-rich Arab Gulf States, all of which combine to enhance the sense that what is wanted is absent and what is present is a source of corruption. Thus, the novel's first section, entitled "Absent in the Dust," revives the myth of the Ancient Egyptian cat-goddess Bastet, who is resurrected to wander freely in a poor and poverty-stricken Egypt, and thus serves as a metaphor for an entire society that has, as it were, been invaded by the deceased. The journey of the protagonist, an ordinary Egyptian husband trying to find his wife who has been snatched up by the cat-goddess, is presented in a pathetic fashion and one that verges on the ridiculous. This cat, worshipped by the Ancient Egyptians, has been transformed here into the kind of ordinary cat that can be found on any Cairo street. Everything in the present world seems to be deteriorating. Except for a feeling of human solidarity, the human population of this novel seems to be gasping for life. The second section of the novel, "Absent in Sand," refers to the deserts of the oil-rich Gulf States, which are contrasted with the dust of Misr al-Mahroussa, Egypt itself. This Egyptian dust, however, is described as having been scattered to the four corners of the globe, and this section of the novel performs multiple functions. It sheds light on the first section, showing the relationship between the present world and an ancient myth, and it underlines the insignificance of the cat-goddess and the Ancient Egyptian past from which she comes. Desert sands have engulfed this ancient past, and its gods and goddesses have been sacrificed to present needs. Much of the interest of the novel comes from the parallels it contains between sand and dust, and these accentuate the contrast in it between the absence of the real and its false presence. In the novel's first section a mythical cat kidnaps and runs away with a beautiful wife, while in the second the cat has become a contemporary animal emerging from the deserts of the Gulf, which are associated both with oil and with labour-migration. In this second part, the ordinary husband of the first has become an Egyptian worker in an oil-rich Gulf state, while his beautiful wife is presented as a lower middle-class Egyptian woman, who combines greed with false religiousity. If the first section of the novel is ridiculous, then the second is only sad. In both sections, however, absence is the only solid factor. This is a Janus-faced, closed story, characterised by black humour on the one hand and a painful need to write on the other. It shows the present as uniformly bleak, trampling on what remains of a betrayed love. The novel's last section, "Absent in Absence", shows Abu Raya attempting to draw optimistic conclusions from the previous two sections, rejecting the real, the sands of the past, and the sense of time altogether in doing so. However, this seems to be a willful attempt on his part to suggest that though we are unable to change reality, we can at least still express the pain and beauty of telling stories about it. And while this is a complex novel, telling both of the possibilities to be found in narrative fiction and the contrasting poverty of reality, its three sections are largely detached from each other, the black humour of the first hardly leading into the tragedy of the second, or, despite the author's best intentions, contributing much to the would-be synthetic vision of the third. Finally, both El-Wardani's Musiqa al-mall and Abu Raya's Ashiq al-hay are obsessed with the idea of desperate isolation, something which drives the alienated narrator of the first novel to madness and weighs heavily on the narrator-writer of the second. Both works are characterised by the use of narrators who are also writers, and by narrators who are exhausted by the desolation of the present while being haunted by the echoes of an ancient and distant past. By Faisal Darraj
