Sonallah Ibrahim | Review of The Committee
24. January 2013 16:46
The Committee begins with the narrator facing 'the Committee'. He goes willingly -- eagerly, even: the Committee wields great power, and so this is a great opportunity for him -- even though he doesn't know quite for what.
The narrator has spent the entire last year preparing for this audience, but he still doesn't know quite what to expect, and once things get started the ways of the Committee continue to prove to be mysterious. Their questions are ambiguous, their demands often seem arbitrary and pointless -- except, of course, that he knows there must be meaning to everything, and he racks his brains to try to figure it out.
The setting of this 1981 novel is apparently Egypt in the late 1970s (Carter is still president, and most of the references are to then-contemporary Egypt), but there's also a universality to the Committee: it represents more than just a national body. So, for example, the working language of the Committee is not Arabic.....
After the interview in front of the Committee the narrator waits to hear back from them, and after several months receives a telegram stating:
We await a study on the greatest contemporary Arab luminary.
These aren't the usual ways of the Committee -- as far as the narrator knows. Historically, there has always only been the one audience, and then a decision. But he's eager to grab this chance they seem to be giving him, and sets out to fulfill this demand.
There's no additional guidance, so his first problem is trying to determine who he should present the study on. Eventually he decides on a shadowy but important figure known as 'the Doctor', a man who seems to have been involved in all sorts of political and business dealings. Trying to find information about this figure also proves difficult, as the records are sparse -- or impossible to gain access to. Still, the narrator does find out a lot -- all the way to a grand conspiracy involving what is presented as the ultimate capitalist symbol, Coca Cola.
The narrator's choice leads to a different sort of confrontation with the still dissatisfied Committee, and ultimately to a decisive act on his part when the shadowing of the Committee comes too close.
Unlike Kafka with his heroes, Ibrahim lets his act against the powers that be. It is an almost futile swipe, but does hit the Committee at at least part of its core. But the narrator must pay, too, the sentence for his act an appropriately Kafkaesque one (and nicely done).
The Committee is a sort of allegory, with some very effective touches. There's a sense of too many targets, however: Kafka, too, worked with vague, undefinable menace, but Ibrahim offers up too much of this (and sometimes its not quite vague enough) to be as powerful. Still, an effective short novel, with very good parts to it.
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