Hisham Matar’s novel My Friends, winner of the 2024 Orwell Prize for political fiction, is not a typical immigrant tale in which the protagonist ultimately finds a semblance of security, stability and peace in the bosom of their adoptive home. Here, rather, fear is a pervasive, palpable feature for exiled Libyan writers and dissenters.  Each character lives under the constant threat of Muammar Gaddafi’s vindictive dictatorship, which has no scruples in silencing critics on the streets of London in broad daylight as evinced by the assassination of a BBC Arabic journalist at Regent’s Park mosque. Another brazen, real life assault that appears in the book is the 1984 shooting of protesters at the Libyan Embassy, when a gunman sprayed the crowd with machine gun fire from inside the Libyan embassy. (The embassy was later relocated from St James’s Square to Knightsbridge, where the pavement is “too narrow to host a demonstration”.)  

That harrowing event serves as the inciting incident that plunges 18 year-old Khaled and his two friends, Mustafa and Hosam, into the belly of the beast. Just as the so-called invisible hand of the capital market directs the laws of demand and supply, the invisible yet ever-constant threat of discovery looms over conversations with family back in Libya and their own lives in England. Neither the fact they had concealed their faces at the demonstration, nor the presence of the police at the hospital where Khaled and Mustafa receive treatment for bullet wounds, nor their asylum status quells this threat. In fact, Khaled and his friends are certain that they are not only persona non grata with their government, but also a danger to their family in Libya, where Hosam’s father has denounced him on national television for criticising the dictatorship in his collection of short stories.

Fearing the worst, with regime moles being planted among university students, Khaled and Mustafa abandon their studies at Edinburgh University—and their government scholarships—and relocate to London as exiles. For years, Khaled avoids telling his family about his participation in the embassy protest, as the regime monitors citizens through tapped phone lines and intercepted letters. He refuses to travel to Libya, despite his family’s pleas, and it isn’t until several years later, when the Libyan government lifts travel restrictions and Britain begins issuing visas to Libyans again, that he reconnects with his family in London.

My Friends resembles a puzzle, in the sense that one already knows from the start how the final assembled piece will look or, in the case of the novel, how the narrative ends. For instance, we know Gaddafi’s regime eventually crumbles; we know that both Hosam and Mustafa return and participate in Libya’s liberation; we also know that Mustafa remains in Libya and that Khaled’s family relocate to Tripoli after their home along with the rest of Benghazi is razed to the ground by warring militias in the aftermath of the revolution. The task at hand, then, is figuring out how each piece fits, or rather what chains of events led to these outcomes.

Told through Khaled’s point of view, the story opens with him bidding Hosam goodbye at St. Pancras station before walking back home to Shepherd’s Bush, reminiscing about his life and friendships stretching from Margaret Thatcher’s rule in the 1980s to the Arab Spring of the 2010s. Indeed, most of the narrative dwells on the push and pull of his friendships, their guiding light and the cushion-like quality they offer amid the hardening uncertainty and chaos of a life in exile. 

Khaled heeds his father's criteria for choosing true friends, finding a few who bring him pleasure and whom he trusts. He finds the commonality of a shared nationality isn’t a guarantee of amity and can be a source of stress and distrust. Case in point, when Khaled runs into Hosam, who at time is working as a hotel receptionist in Paris, the later suspects he’s a government spy on the prowl, and it’s only when Hosam secretly verifies the information gathered during their conversation that he relaxes and learns to trust Khaled. In turn, when Hosam confesses his suspicions it needles his friend, despite his own general distrust of his fellow Libyans.

Yet, despite living the unsettled lives of political exiles, far away from the love of family and the familiar landscapes of their homeland, Khaled, Mustafa and Hosam manage to find various friends and lovers who provide a kind of anchor to a life rendered restless and rootless: Mustafa, now a real estate agent with dreams of toppling Gaddafi’s government, falls in with a group of revolutionary minded Libyans, in spite of Khaled’s reservations; Hosam, roaming Europe in search of an elusive peace, discovers something akin to a home with his on-and-off Irish girlfriend; while Khaled’s friendships with a professor and students from his former university soften the otherwise sharp edges of life. Indeed, friends are the silver lining of dark, foreboding clouds. 

As Khaled says to a friend he supported during her hospitalisation: ‘Thank you for asking me to come. It’s the greatest compliment anyone has ever paid me’.

In addition to its preoccupations with friendship and the grief of political exile, My Friends brims with untrammelled appreciation for Arabic, African and English literature, revelling in literary references and honourable mentions of past poets and novelists that run the gamut from Virginia Woolf to Tayeb Salib to Nizar Qabbani. In one scene, Hosam and Khaled trace the London homes of Joseph Conrad and other writers on foot, including the spot where Dambudzo Marechera squatted in Shepherd’s Bush. But even as the novel flies its undoubtedly bookish colours (all three friends share a love for books), Matar’s delightfully lively and pithy prose keeps the reader engaged “like a bird alighting on a branch, turned vivid,” to borrow from Khaled’s description of a friend’s voice. Every allusion to language and literature is well appointed, revelatory and expansive to the plot and characters. 

On Hosam’s oral storytelling prowess, Khaled notes that unlike his “gaunt” prose, “here the language was languid and the stories followed an elaborate route, taking several digressions. He loved the performance itself, a chance to display his authority over the Arabic language, wielding its majestic formalism and irreverence in ways that excited my longing and regret at having allowed it to wither in me… Sometimes, I wondered whether he was telling me these stories and recollections because he wanted me to locate him within some wider geography.”

At the heart of My Friends, perhaps, is the question of what role writers should take in the affairs of the state, whether they have an obligation to speak truth to power, and whether it is always prudent to do so. And if so, at what cost?  

For Mustafa, Hosam’s decision to bury his gift after the publication of his story collection is a cowardly one. But for Khaled, the reason is more nuanced.

 A version of this review originally appeared on The Johannesburg Review of Books.

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