Beer in the Snooker Club.

When I read My Uncle Napoleon back in March, longtime reader John Liotta suggested in a comment that I check out Waguih Ghali’s one novel, Beer in the Snooker Club, which he said was an analogous work set in Egypt rather than Iran. It is similar, for sure, perhaps less overtly funny and more satirical, replacing the slapstick of the Iranian novel with a more biting take on the Egyptian independence movement’s failure to provide its people with freedom.

Ram, the novel’s protagonist, and his friend-but-occasional-nemesis Font find themselves in a social and political purgatory in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which overthrew King Farouk but replaced him with a military dictatorship that implemented its own repressive policies. The withdrawal of the English colonial presence has upended the social order and put Egyptian Copts in an uncertain position where the ruling Muslim authorities threaten their safety while the formerly open English borders have closed. In this context, Ram and Font recall their previous times in London, Ram’s wealthy aunt ‘donates’ her land to the poor while actually selling it to fellaheen (the farmer class), and Ram finds his affections torn between the wealthy Jewish woman Edna (off limits due to her background and class) and the also wealthy but less interesting Egyptian girl Didi.

There’s something overtly feckless and desultory about the entire novel, focused on Ram’s own aimlessness but infecting the entire setting, as if Ghali took the existentialism of Camus or Sartre and married it with the biting parody of Heller or Bulgakov. Ram’s slow realization that la plus ça change leads him to a state of ambition catatonia; he’s stuck, regardless of what he does, and if anything his prospects are worsening because of circumstances entirely beyond his control. He can stay in Egypt, but he’ll be in a religious, ethnic, and political minority (he, like Ghali, is a small-c communist, although Ram’s commitment to its principles is tenuous) at home, yet can no longer move freely to England in the wake of the change of government and the English actions at the time in the Suez. (Egypt’s president after the coup, Gamel Abdul Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, leading Israel to invade the Gaza and the Sinai with support from England and France in a failed effort to reclaim the Canal from Egypt.) Ghali combines the ennui of Camus’ protagonists with the absurdity of political satires of that era, although in this case he’s sending up the Egyptian upper class more than the government itself, which he depicts in the background in a same-as-the-old-boss way.

Ram’s character is the one that Ghali develops over the course of the book beyond the arc of his story, as we see how he went from a somewhat idealistic youth, protected from many of the harsher aspects of life under the autocracy of the king, to a cynical adult who realizes that Nasser’s rule merely switched one set of inequalities for another, establishing a new ruling class to replace the one it upended – a situation that leaves Ram worse off than he was before. It’s bleak, yet not quite hopeless, although the bleakness may have won out in the end for Ghali, as he killed himself in 1969 after more than a decade of living in exile.

Next up: I just finished Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.