My Friends intertwines a story of friendship with large-scale political events and trauma. Its narrator is Khaled, a Libyan exile who has lived all his adult life in London. Khaled is seeing his close friend, Hosam off at the station after a visit. Hosam is heading towards a new life in the United States. The visit has stirred up strong emotions and as Khaled walks back home through London, he detours to several key locations in his story, and recalls the key events of his past.
Khaled grows up the son of a respected headmaster in Benghazi, who skirts the narrow line between thinking critically and never publicly criticising the regime. He instils in Khaled a love of literature and ideas. In 1983 Khaled gets a scholarship to study literature at the University of Edinburgh.
Even here, he knows he will be under surveillance from his fellow Libyan students but quickly forms a friendship with one of them, Mustafa. They decide to travel to London to a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy. For them, it is an adventure. They sleep in a hostel and plan to visit a Chinese restaurant – a new experience for both of them – after the demonstration.
At the demonstration, Khaled and his friend are among several people shot from inside the embassy and injured. Later, he sees the photos in the papers of Yvonne Fletcher, the police officer killed in the attack, and recalls seeing her in the crowd.
While they are in hospital, under armed guard and given pseudonyms for their own protection, Khaled realises that his life as he knows it is over. He cannot return to Edinburgh or to his family in Libya. So begins his life in London. Over the years, he builds a life for himself, but somehow it always feels provisional, as if he is waiting for the life he had before he was shot to begin.
Khaled’s friendship with Mustafa continues and deepens. Mustafa is quite different from Khaled, more gregarious, restless, attracted by wealth and status, but their shared experience outweighs their differences.
Hosam’s is a name Khaled knew only as a Libyan writer of stories which provide solace while he is in the hospital. Later Khaled and Hosam meet and their experience of exile and shared love of literature leads to a different kind of friendship.
At first Khaled keeps the two friends, like the two sides of his character, separate. Later they come together, but there is tension in the triangle. Mustafa becomes possessive of Khaled, as if he wants the friendship to be monogamous. As the Qaddafi regime becomes increasingly unstable in the years after the Arab Spring, and they weigh up whether to return and fight, it is Khaled who comes to feel excluded.
Khaled’s reminiscences don’t follow a strict geographical or chronological order. His mind roves around the central narrative, back to his childhood in Benghazi, forward to the present. This frame is interesting because the mature Khaled can look back and offer insights, make connections. But it also means we can’t be sure what he remembers is what actually happened. Small details of the hours before the demonstration are freighted with significance. He has a sense of foreboding. Was that really how he felt or are these impressions coloured by hindsight?
At times the mature reflection of the narrative voice can be too understated. Perhaps it was my inattention but I had forgotten that Khaled only 18 at the time of the shooting, until it’s mentioned in passing. While the trauma of the shooting, and the profound dislocation of having to leave his life behind, in a city and country he doesn’t know, are powerfully rendered, his youth and inexperience add an extra layer to the cruelty.
However the disparate memories and observations weave together into a compelling and moving account of how a cruel regime exacts power beyond pure physical violence. It infects all close relationships. Khaled is constantly withholding himself from those he loves. It isn’t only about trust, it is also about protecting them.
On one occasion, as he is on a call to his parents, he hears a cough on the line from a listener. He is sure this isn’t an accident. They want him to know they are listening, to ensure that he is constantly surveilling himself. He is doing their work for them.
There are many other wonderful elements to this book. Khaled’s thoughts on his reading (I kept pausing to look up the books and authors he mentions), the delicate portrayal of his family, whose lives are also on hold, waiting for him to come home, not understanding why he won’t. It is also notable how smoothly and quickly he receives his refugee status compared with asylum seekers today (although there are suggestions that Thatcher’s guilt at allowing the shooters to leave the UK under cover of diplomatic immunity may have been a factor).
My Friends contains so many layers. It is a political novel, a coming-of-age story, and a beautiful study of friendship. Khaled and his friends share a trust and intimacy which even their romantic partners and family cannot. Their experience of exile both unites and fractures them.
I received a copy of My Friends from the publisher via NetGalley.
View My Friends on Goodreads
Kate Vane 