A quibble about The Golden Scales

I'd guessed that The Golden Scales, by Parker Bilal (nom de plume of Jamal Mahjoub), had been translated from Arabic and that tin-eared rendering was responsible for some of the clunky prose in the book's prologue. But I can find no translator's credits, and online biographies say Mahjoub was born in London, brought up in Khartoum, educated in Wales and Sheffield, and lives in Barcelona. Given that background, I now assume that he writes in English.

Whatever the original language, sentences like the following do nothing but get in the way:

“Liz Markham reared back, completely stalled by the human mass that confronted her.”

What's the difference between stalled and completely stalled? What does completely add? What does it do except slow down what the author clearly intends as a heart-pounding opening?

“Behind her she heard someone make a remark that she couldn’t understand.”

Why the extra words? Why not “she heard a remark” or “someone made a remark”?

“Glancing back, certain that someone was behind her, she moved away from the hotel, pushing impatiently through the crowd of tourists and tea boys...”

Pushing impatiently? How else would one push through a crowd? Yet again Bilal tells rather than shows and uses too many boring words doing it. That's apt to try a reader's patience, especially in an action scene.

My first guess was apparently wrong, but I'll try another: Mahjoub, described by some sources as an acclaimed author of “literary” novels, can't write action. I hope either that I'm wrong or that he chooses methods other than action scenes to tell his story, because I'm curious about what this writer of Arabic and African background can do with the Western crime-fiction tradition, a la Yasmina Khadra or Naguib Mahfouz.

Here's part of a blurb for the novel:

“Makana, a former Sudanese police inspector forced to flee to Cairo, is now struggling to make ends meet as a private detective. In need of money, he takes a case from the notoriously corrupt mogul Saad Hanafi, owner of a Cairo soccer team, whose star player, Adil Romario, has gone missing ..."

P.S. An author chooses Parker Bilal as a pseudonym for his first venture into crime fiction. What are the odds that he had Richard Stark or Robert B. Parker in mind?

P.P.S. Read my 2008 post on “Who will be the next Samir Spade? ... (Crime fiction in the Arab world)”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Egyptian noir, and by a Nobel Prize-winner no less

A back-cover blurb to The Thief and the Dogs calls Naguib Mahfouz "not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romains." He was a Jim Thompson and a David Goodis, too, in this 1961 tale of a wronged man released from jail, bent on revenge, and bound for destruction.

Parts of the story will be familiar to fans of American hard-boiled and noir; Said Mahran's beloved wife has left him while he was in prison, for example, and married one of his old criminal colleagues. But other aspects must have resonated especially with Egyptian readers, helping explain, perhaps, why the brave and admirable Mahfouz ran afoul both of the Egyptian government and of Islamic fundamentalists during his long career.

One target of Mahran's widening circle of revenge and obsession, for example, is a one-time preacher of theft from the rich as a political act who has now himself become rich. At the time of the novel's writing, Egypt was still under the rule of a youngish colonel who was turning strongly toward socialism. A revolutionary-turned-fat cat may well have struck a chord with readers, the protagonist's impotent rage and humiliation at such a figure even more so.

God, too, plays a strong supporting role, a presence unthinkable in most American crime writing. Mahran seeks shelter and food in the home of a sheikh to whom his father had taken him when Mahran was a boy. The sheikh is merciful, but God is a haunting and all-pervasive presence in every answer he offers to the increasingly desperate Mahran. I don't know what Mahfouz's own religious beliefs were, but he took God seriously in his fiction.

(A tip of the tarboosh to Adrian McKinty for pointing me toward this book.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008