Books: Chicago

"PRAISE THE LORD WHO CREATED beauty in a hundred ways!" a character cries out in Alaa Al Aswany's sprawling novel. Perhaps that's the novelist's own credo too, for he gives us a narrator who is ever alert to all the other characters' quirks and particularities, equally fascinated by men and women, and aware of the tinkle of class and race in human commerce.

CHICAGO

by Alaa Al Aswany

Fourth Estate, 352pp, 14.99

Sensitive to both the consolations and the deceptions of religion, and interested, above all, in the question of the human body and its agitations, the narrator of an Aswany story seems to flutter above the world of his creation, hearing, noting and sometimes whispering.

Aswany's novel achieves something surprising, which is to turn a great American city into a little Egypt. It begins, unconventionally, with a short history of Chicago, and suddenly dives into the lives of a set of Egyptian doctoral students and emigrants there, some freshly arrived, others naturalised Americans. In Aswany's previous novel, The Yacoubian Building, an apartment block served as a microcosm of Egyptian society; here, that crucible is Chicago, home to a set who have eagerly left home for better prospects, yet who carry that home in their hearts.

Are Koranic injunctions even more compelling in this new godless world, or are they refuted by its licentiousness? Does freedom of speech propel them to question its absence in the motherland? Should they aim for academic and scientific success in Chicago or wait until they return home? Can races really meet on an equal footing? These are the questions Aswany's protagonists – a devout, veil-wearing woman from a peasant background, an arrogant student fixated on outperforming his colleagues, a political radical who thinks of himself as a poet, a professor who has rejected everything Egyptian and goes to baseball games "wearing his cap backward", and a Christian Copt hounded out of Egypt – ask of themselves and each other.

Indeed, there are at least three levels of conversation in Aswany's work. The simplest one is that between the characters, who feel a deep need to talk, and are roused and animated by their mother tongue. They debate politics and religion, banter till they find they have fallen in love, quarrel and fall silent, long for or dread the sound of another's voice. But they also talk a great deal to themselves, and Aswany reports these justifications, interpretations, changes of heart and arcs of argument almost as speech: "Who did she think she was? He said to himself: This peasant girl wants to humiliate me? What a farce. So, she doesn't know who Tariq Haseeb is. My dignity is more important than my life."

Lastly, there is a kind of implied conversation between the narrator and the reader, a way in which we feel as if we are being taken into confidence, being asked to close the door behind us and come in. A man is described in detail and then the narrator stops to ask, "Have we learned everything about Safwat Shakir?" Or, "Does that mean Tariq Haseeb does not have any fun? Not true." We feel as if we are being allowed to hold the reins of narration a little. If Aswany's world seems so capacious, it is because we feel involved in recording it.

Aswany's storytelling is also marked by its sensuality. From the self-denying student who allows himself an hour of recreation to watch wrestling and pornography to the lapsed poet whose voice and wholeness of self is restored by sex, everywhere we see the animal self lurking beneath the trained, dressed and tutored body-in-the-world, aching to unsheath itself. If Aswany's women sometimes seem implausibly beautiful and lush, they at least have more selfhood and agency than Salman Rushdie's sex goddesses; his warm-blooded, sometimes voyeuristic narration is clearly a man's work, but it has a kind of Chaucerian love of human foible that redeems its faults.

Some of the twists and reversals in Chicago, as well as its circling focus, encourage agreement with the character who feels "as if he were watching an Egyptian soap opera". Aswany's rolling cast of characters and panoramic vision tell us that he wants to investigate the human condition on the largest scale, and as in soap operas, he wants to make the spectator feel like part of the family. His book resides firmly within the mainstream of Egyptian fiction, but it is also an unusual and striking post-9/11 American novel.