An elegant writer avoids the pitfalls of his own tale
The Age
Saturday March 5, 2011
Anatomy of a DisappearanceBy Hisham MatarViking, $32.95REVIEW JAMES LEYANATOMY of a Disappearance is a novel whose reception is likely to be shadowed by its author's dramatic family history. Hisham Matar's father was a Libyan diplomat who fell out of favour with the Gaddafi regime in the early 1980s and was forced to flee the country. In 1990, he was abducted from his home in Cairo and returned to Tripoli, where he was imprisoned. His family had heard nothing from him since 1995, and feared he might have been killed in a massacre of prisoners that took place in 1996. Last year, Matar revealed that he had only recently discovered that his father might still be alive.Given this context, one can hardly fail to notice that the defining incident in Anatomy of a Disappearance is the abduction of the young narrator's father, or that it is set against the sinister and murky backdrop of North African politics. But the novel is no mere roman a clef, and not only because the action predates Matar's story by almost two decades. Works of art are not ultimately valuable for what may have inspired them, but for the quality of their inventions and the skill with which they are rendered. And Anatomy of a Disappearance is an expertly crafted work of fiction whose lines of interconnection and implication are manifold.Though there is a dash of political thriller about the scenario, the fact the narrator, Nuri, is in his early adolescence when his father is kidnapped from his mistress's apartment in Geneva renders the political context somewhat remote. Nuri spends most of the book in a state of unknowing. He comes to understand that he is not only ignorant of his father's fate, but of the nature of his private and professional life as well. In the middle of the novel, when someone asks him what his father does, he realises that he has only the vaguest idea.One of the most artfully realised aspects of Anatomy of a Disappearance is the way in which this immature perspective is shown to evolve into adulthood as Nuri makes belated attempts to comprehend his now absent father.But the novel is not a straightforward coming-of-age story. At its psychological core is a complex Oedipal tangle. The disappearance of Nuri's father is preceded by the death of his mother, although Nuri has never been told the cause of her death. His father's remarriage to an attractive young Englishwoman called Mona leads to a delicately balanced relationship between Nuri and his stepmother, a relationship whose dynamic shifts uneasily between a sibling-like camaraderie, maternal comfort, sexual frisson, rivalry and estrangement.Nuri's longing for maternal solace defines the novel no less than his father fixation, and it is a credit to Matar's abilities as a novelist that he handles what might appear to be rather cumbersome Freudian motifs with deftness and restraint, not only rendering them credible but successfully drawing the book's various threads together in a final revelation that is genuinely surprising.Matar is an elegant and economical writer whose refinements of style occasionally stray into preciousness, but he is also a particularly astute observer of body language, who can describe the simplest of gestures in such a way that it conveys a great deal about a character's state of mind. It requires only a few sentences, for example, for him to make it clear that Mona is not simply an attractive woman, but someone who is conscious of her beauty, someone who is used to having her every movement scrutinised.Such observational acuity is the sign of a true fiction writer, as is the adroit way in which Matar manages his narrative. He received high praise for his first novel, In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006; Anatomy of a Disappearance confirms that he is indeed a novelist of substance.
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