My Friends by Hisham Matar: The challenges of exile and humankind’s ability to adapt

“‘To be from countries such as ours,’ Rana told him, ‘is to continually feel obliged to explain them.’” This insight into the immigrant experience, both profound and quotidian, is typical of the writing of Hisham Matar. His novels, including the Booker-shortlisted In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, along with his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Return, offer compassionate and clear-eyed accounts of the turmoil of being separated, by necessity or choice, from one’s place of birth.

Matar’s characters are outsiders, thinkers, observers, people who notice not just the challenges of exile but also the strange blessings and comforts to be found in humankind’s ability to adapt, to make new homes in order to survive. In his latest novel, the need for refuge is once more to the fore with the story of two 18-year-old Libyan students in Edinburgh, Khaled and Mustafa, who find themselves exiled from their homeland after travelling to London in April 1984 to protest against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime outside the Libyan embassy.

This real-life protest resulted in the death of a young English policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, and the wounding of 11 Libyan students, when government officials inside the embassy opened fire on protesters. Matar’s imagining of the lives of two of these students unfolds as a vivid, finely crafted story about home and exile, family and friendship, loss and rebirth. The old adage that fiction is truer than fact comes to mind: Matar gets us extraordinarily close to his characters, Khaled in particular, whose reckless but eminently relatable decision to accompany Mustafa to London will have unimaginable consequences for the rest of his life.

After this extraordinary event, the magnitude and impact of which are reminiscent of the opening of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Khaled and Mustafa spend the remainder of the narrative trying to find a way back to their country, their families and most essentially to themselves. They are joined, in subsequent years, by a third friend, the writer Hosam, who has been publicly denounced as a traitor by his family. All three friends resemble, to some degree, the characters in Hosam’s short stories, “who were unmoored and who, like the man eaten by the cat, were at once innocent and implicated in their fate”.

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This element of metanarrative allows Matar to further expound on his themes but it also points to a wider political backdrop where anyone seen to criticise the regime is either exiled, imprisoned or murdered. Such is the case with the BBC radio presenter who reads Hosam’s story on air. In rendering the oppressions of dictatorial rule, there is a skilful mix of broader political detail – “Eventually, an entire people’s press was transplanted abroad, until the overwhelming majority of Arab newspapers and magazines then were written, edited and printed in London” – with stunning personal accounts: “I remembered my teacher’s face when I was nine. The hard heels coming up the corridor. Two men burst into the classroom. They slapped and kicked him. It was not till they took him away, his back whitened by the chalk on the blackboard, that some of us began to cry.”

In London, recuperating after the shooting, Khaled finds himself not only living in exile but unable to tell his beloved family what has happened for fear of putting them in danger. This terrible bind gives the narrative its tension, as days, months, years go by and the young man – again similarly to The Goldfinch – tries to bear all the loss on his own. There is nobility and bravery in Khaled’s attempts to do this, along with striking moments of tenderness as his parents reach out to him through stilted letters and elliptical calls. “The impossibility of his task,” Khaled notes of his father, “to look after me from across the distance.”

Once the past catches up with the present in My Friends, at about the novel’s three-quarter mark, there is, as often happens in literary fiction, a dip in pace, even as the Arab Spring of 2011 and the ensuing revolution in Libya offer plenty of action on the face of it. There is a tad too much philosophising, and many of these later events are related through correspondence, which holds the reader somewhat at a remove.

But these are minor notes in an engaging, symphonic novel of overlapping lives and loyalties. The friendships Khaled makes in exile help to sustain him, to anchor him to his new reality. There is no going back to who he was before. His homeland Libya, both literally and inside his own head, can no longer be reached, recalling Virgil’s irreparabile tempus, or irretrievable time. It’s the hard-earned knowledge, as Khaled himself puts it, “That what I want to return to I cannot return to because the place and I have changed.”