‘The Republic of False Truths’ by Alaa Al Aswany

At the start of this year there were quite a few ‘Ten Years On’ -type programs looking back at the Arab Spring that swept across different Middle Eastern countries, reaching its high point with the fall of Muburak in Egypt in 2011. To be honest, I’m no longer clear in my own mind about what happened when and where and why. That’s where fiction, or a well-chosen journalistic non-fiction piece can come in, by humanizing and locating, at a small scale, those huge crowds that seem indistinguishable from each other on the nightly news.

Alaa Al Aswany makes no secret of his politics in this fictionalized account of the January 2011 uprising. He was there himself, and he was one of the organizers of the Enough! group that is mentioned in this book. He presents a group of alternating characters who represent different groups in Egyptian society who participated in different degrees to the uprising or its suppression. There is the devout General Alwany whose morning ritual is prayer, sex with his wife, then off to the office for some torture of political prisoners. His defiant daughter Danya is drawn into the protests and witnesses her friend Khaled shot by the military at point-blank range. Ashraf Wiffa is a dope-smoking failed actor who pursues an affair with his maid, only to find himself falling in love with her and increasingly involved with the protestors, to the disgust of his estranged wife Magda. The love affair of Asmaa, a teacher at a corrupt school, and Mazen, the son of a political prisoner and union organizer at a cement factory, is carried out mainly through letters. Nourhan is a television presenter who becomes the mouthpiece of the military forces, accruing more and more power as she uses her contacts to force a divorce from her former lover Essam, the manager at the aforementioned cement factory.

The narrative cycles between these different characters and different segments of Egyptian society: army, media, business, university. I often find that with a revolving cast of characters like this, I get confused between who is who and what they are up to. However, Al Aswany stayed with them long enough, particularly at the start of the book, to embed them in the reader’s consciousness as individual characters. However, as the book went on, the episodes became shorter. I use the word ‘episodes’ deliberately, because this is what they felt like: episodes in an afternoon soap-opera, with a cliff-hanger at the end before launching off into the next character. For me, this soap-opera feeling detracted from the novel and made it feel ‘junkier’ than it otherwise would have. I can’t help feeling that the characters were stereotyped (the army general, the maid, the idealistic young female student), with an almost Philip Roth-like emphasis on male sex.

I haven’t read any other books about the Arab Spring, and indeed this book is still banned in Egypt – a fact that speaks to its authenticity, I would say. However, there is a sameness about books about revolutions – I’m thinking of several South American books I have read, books set in the French Revolution, Nino Haratischvili The Eighth Life (for Brika) – as idealism gets swallowed up into betrayal, the torture becomes more vindictive and untrammeled, and the army and police embed themselves more deeply. This inexorable cycle is why books like this are important: to remind us that within the bigger historical forces, there are people who love, who wrestle with their consciences, who make decisions and live and die with the consequences.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library