Book review: Catalytic converter

Published on Friday 20 June 2008 19:59

The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab Hamish Hamilton, 368pp, £16.99

THIS IS A VERY AMBITIOUS FIRST novel, written with verve, imagination and intelligence. It nearly measures up to its ambition. If, for all its merits, it doesn't quite do that, it's because the author has packed in too much, spread himself too widely, and, having not yet developed a sense of structure, doesn't know when a scene has made its point and should be brought to an end. A good editor would have cut it by at least 50 pages.

It begins in Damascus, but only the first chapter is set there, apart from some flashbacks – it is really a novel about contemporary London. The central character, Sami, has been hanging round the university for some ten years, trying to write a thesis and making false start after false start. He has gone to Damascus – his parents were Syrian – in search of inspiration, rather than his roots. Visiting cousins, he meets an uncle who spent 22 years in the prisons of the Ba'athist regime, and has never recovered from the tortures inflicted. Sami's father, Mustafa, a political exile, rejected religion and Sami sided with him. "Religion was the long childhood of a people. If an ancient people still had the habit, it was no longer childishness but senility. When that people lived in London, among the healthy, among the sane, religion was a humiliation."

But religion is all around him. His mother, Nur, turned back to it, puling away from her husband. Now his wife, Muntaha, is going the same way; she has decided to wear the headscarf. It makes her feel that she is what she is: a Muslim woman. Her younger brother, who used to be into hip-hop, is now a religious zealot and talks of jihad. Sami can't understand it, and hates it.

Yet he himself is no great advertisement for secularism or the western way of life. He drinks too much, smokes too much and snorts cocaine. He can't get down to work. He has got through most of the money his father left him and is living off his wife's earnings as a teacher. He's running hard, but falling behind in every way. In short, he's a mess.

The theme of the novel is Sami's moral re-education. He hits bottom and has to confront his reality. Will this bring him back to Islam? Or will he be led down a blind alley by acquaintances who preach global revolution? The passages dealing with them are the least convincing parts of the novel, unpersuasive and boring. Deep cuts are needed here.

On the other hand, some of the most interesting and important parts are the debates within Sami's mind and within Islam itself. Sami has been reared to believe in secular humanism, but this has "collapsed ... it was a late 19th-century hiccup", he thinks. As for Islam, this isn't just the anger of his brother-in-law; it's also the calm, contemplative faith of his mother and his wife.

Inevitably we have 9/11, and the family watching the horror unfold on television. (I say "inevitably" because, though it is already in danger of becoming a clichd scene in fiction, given the themes of his novel, it's one Robin Yassin-Kassab couldn't avoid.) The brother-in-law is exultant, Sami divided. Muntaha, who hopes it wasn't Arabs, speaks in the voice of decency, humane and Muslim: "Jihad? Islamic rules say you can't kill women and children. You can't kill civilians. You have to fight on the battlefield, not in the middle of the city."

Finally, when reconciled to both wife and mother, Sami asks the question that has been nagging at him: was it his father who betrayed his uncle to the Ba'athist police? His mother speaks of "an excess of loyalty" and adds, "Betrayal of one thing is usually loyalty to something else," which is wise and true.

In short, this is a novel that deals seriously and sympathetically with today's world, one which doesn't shrink from asking difficult questions. It's a good novel and, as a first effort, a remarkable one. It renders the turbulence of modern London vividly and, if many of the characters are stereotypes, and a couple of the non-Muslim ones never convince at all, the central characters and the relations between Sami and Muntaha are very well done. It will be interesting to see what Yassin-Kassab does next. I hope he comes to realise that less is sometimes more.

• Robin Yassin-Kassab is at the Edinburgh book festival on 12 August.