Speaking to Rania Khallaf, novelist Mahmoud El-Wardani reveals the unexpected rhythms informing his latest contribution to the contemporary novel Reading Mahmoud El-Wardani's latest novel, Mousiqa Al-Maul (Mall Music), a 186-page volume published last month by Miret, is a fast-paced, surprisingly light experience. A clear departure from anything he has written since his debut novel, , Nawbat Rujou' (A Fit of Returning, 1990), the book is characterized by a wholly contemporary (Generation- of-the-Nineties) theme and simple, engagingly vernacular language to match. "I don't draw up a scheme for characters or events before I sit down to write. I had actually published the first chapter of the novel as a short story in the daily Al-Ahram when I realised it could be extended into a novel -- and it's a novel I believe to be different from my previous work. For the first time political concerns are relegated to the background. I think I managed to liberate myself from the typical Seventies Generation paradigm of a man whose political aspirations were frustrated." The novel is the story of a man in a maze. Fleeing his ex-wife, he asks his employer to transfer him to another branch of the company. In the coastal city where he eventually arrives, he walks into the shopping mall to kill a few hours before it is time to report at the new office, only to end up imprisoned within -- he is held hostage by some indistinct gang who prevent him from exiting -- roaming the corridors, spending time in the Two Cats Nightclub and providing El-Wardani with plenty of opportunity not only to critique the rising consumerism of Egyptian culture and society but, through the quasi- detective circumstance of his imprisonment, to openly insult a government that is "not as keen on the rights of the poor as it is on American policy and those of foreigners". But it is the novel's "vagueness" that forms its principal focal point, El-Wardani insists -- not "the political message" it conveys. "In fact all the incidents are somewhat confusing, you are never very sure whether something happened or not, and it is this that, in part, that helps maintain the reader's interest. But it's a confusion that consumes our own lives. We have organisations, they are disorganised; we have a parliament, but elections are invariably doctored. And yes, we do have satellite channels of our own, but all they broadcast is garbage." Incorporating excerpts from the Thousand and One Nights (El-Wardani has done this before, inserting Orabi Uprising documents into Al-Rawd Al-Atir, for example), El- Wardani adds yet another dimension to the confusion. "Like me, the narrator is fond of Alf Laila, a copy of which he always keeps in his bag; there are similarities between the logic of that classic and the more realistic events of my hero's story, too. But I think the passages have been inserted at the right places." In the same way as he allows the insertions to slow down the pace of the novel -- "Pace is no object in itself, for I didn't set out to write a detective novel reliant on suspense" --El- Wardani does not emphasise the importance of the mall as a symbol. "It wasn't until I went to Dubai a couple of years ago that I became interested in the idea of commercialism as it is embodied in the shopping mall -- a disturbing thing, the shopping mania, the fake life that it sustains. Realising that the same principle held in Cairo, on however smaller a scale, I decided to explore malls, which turned out to be a meeting point for adolescents who look so alike you think they're mass produced... And I started thinking how malls in Egypt also highlight the difference between those who can buy anything and those who can only roam the corridors, watching helplessly." Humour and the constant reminder that the hero is late, that he must submit his papers at the office before a certain hour if he is not to be fired, are both essential strategies. In one scene the hero, watching a swimsuit shop window, is dragged inside and forced, by an alluringly half-naked woman, to buy a pair of children's sunglasses. Executed in bold brush strokes, as it were, the characters are a bizarre plethora of moods and actions that sarcastically reflects a socialist perspective. Among those imprisoned with the hero -- a university student distributing political leaflets, a foreigner who trades in antiquities and a man who introduces himself as the General -- the wife of the former Muslim Brothers activist, though always in niqab, ends up having a fling with the hero. "I was advised against including the repetitive phrase about the hero's tardiness," El- Wardani says of the second strategy, "but I felt that the atmosphere I was presenting to the reader was two vague to be assimilated without some coherent framework. There are too many unanswered questions: is there a prison on the mall? does the hero come across his ex-wife there? how and when does he manage to kill the man in the toilet?" Halfway into the novel the mall switches from being a panorama of consumerism to a more or less straightforward maze -- how will the hero manage to get out -- a development that seems to cut the novel down the middle, as it were. "My aim was to follow through the vagueness generated in the first half of the book," El-Wardani explains, "to keep up with the characters' inner rhythms. And I think the vagueness is sustained to the very end. I wouldn't distinguish the mall's commercial role from its role as an institution of oppression. I think it's only normal for a mall to turn into a prison. Russian belly dancers, impossibly expensive foreign food chains, a frivolous bourgeoisie whose principal purpose is to shop: all are mechanisms of oppression." The search for an exit creates a network of relations among the characters, which, during their imprisonment produces a kind of Lord of the Flies scenario in which, together with the university student, the hero attempts to decipher the mystery of the foreigner after he disappears, leaving behind a diary, while the General, in his overeagerness to exert control, manages to disappear after killing the university student. "I spent years in prison," El-Wardani, who contributed to the 1970s so called Student Movement, explains, "and this experience added much to my personality, though it hampered my writing. I felt that political and social burdens would remain my destiny..." When he manages to escape with Azza -- a look-alike of his ex-wife bearing a look- alike of their dead baby -- the hero finds the city devastated. Fire is devouring everything, bullets fly in every direction. Black police vans stuffed with black-clad soldiers bearing black arms are scattered about the streets. Holding onto each other, the hero and Azza run away from the fire. And the book ends as ambiguously as it begins.
