After I read James Woods’ review, I knew I wanted to read this book. Then in Wikipedia I learned that Muammar Quaddafi had overturned the government of Libya in 1969 and was both an authoritarian dictator and responsible for improving the status of women there significantly. It’s useful to read James Woods’ New Yorker review to learn about the author.
The narrator Khaled is the son of an academic who carefully avoided any notice from the regime. Khaled left Libya in 1983 to study in Edinburgh. When he and his friend Mustafa went to London for a weekend visit, Mustafa suggested they briefly join the protest at the Libyan Embassy. That event actually occurred; shortly after it began, gunmen inside the embassy shot into the crowd, injuring eleven protestors and killing a British policewoman. The two fictional friends were injured and thus began their secretive life in London.
Some of the students in their school in Edinburgh were known to spy for the regime and Khaled assumed he would be returned to Libya. When he was able, he wrote to a friend in school, Rana, to let her know how he was. Rana later helped him to begin a new life in London. A man who had known Khaled’s father brought money, clothes, and other items for those who had been injured. Amnesty International was successful in helping them receive asylum. While he was still in the hospital, he began translating a book of stories by Hosam Zowa, one of which he had heard read on the radio when he was still in Benghazi.
When Khaled recovered and left the hospital, he began corresponding again with his family, pretending that he was still in school in Edinburgh. He had been very close to his family, missed them terribly, but had to remain distant to protect them and himself from the regime. London became his home, or as he says, “London, the city I have been trying to make home for the past three decades….London is a city of shadows, a city made for shadows, for people like me who can be here a lifetime yet remain as invisible as ghosts.” He did go to school, taught school, and made friends. His two friends were Mustafa and later Hosam.
Years later when he was helping his friend Rana through an operation in Paris, he happened on a Libyan man who worked in his hotel. He turned out to be the writer Hosam, who had fled Libya many years before. The two suspected each other of being part of the regime who would abduct them until they realized both of them had been at the demonstration. When Hosam later moved to London, Khaled was overjoyed. “It amazed me how none of the features of my life changed and yet everything was made different by Hosam becoming my neighbor.”
Both his dear friends returned to Libya to fight against the regime after the 17 February Revolution and the two became prominent rebels and worked together. Khaled was never able to return. To explain he said, “…though Benghazi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to. The life I have made for myself here is held together by a delicate balance. I must hold on to it with both hands. It is the only life I have now. I would have to abandon it to go back, and, although I wish to abandon it, I fear I might not be able to reconstitute a new life, even if that would be in the folds of the old one.”
Several times Khaled refers to people, like his father, who lived among “unreasonable compatriots,” and were resigned to the fact that any change may come after they are gone. Though my country at this time is far from the murderous authoritarian regime that Libya was, I am struggling to adjust to living among people who chose to vote as they did. It changes everything for me.
This will be one of my favorite books of the year; it feels very intense, true to life, and relevant.
Hisham Matar, My Friends, Random House, 2024, 398 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.