The Return

Hisham Matar

(Viking, £14.99)

TONY Blair’s chroniclers all appear to agree that his relationship with Bernie Ecclestone, the boss of Formula One, is more deserving of consideration than his dealings with Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator. This is hardly surprising given the parochialism of the commentariat. Indeed, the few books on Blair I have on my shelves make scant mention of that fateful meeting in 2004 in the environs of Tripoli, when the people’s prime minister made “a deal in the desert’ with a man widely regarded as a monster. Apparently, their ‘friendship’ continued long after Blair left No. 10 in 2007. He visited Gaddafi at regular intervals and addressed letters to him “Dear Muammar”, the thought of which, one would like to hope, now makes his stomach churn.

Hisham Matar’s extended family was on the receiving end of the Gaddafi regime’s brutality. As an admired novelist – his debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – he has a Kafka-esque sense of the absurd and the ironic. The Return is the kind of memoir that takes the breath away, not only because of the events it relates but because of the sober, unsensational, pellucid manner in which it is written. It cannot, of course, be dispassionate, but Matar knows that his story has no need of embroidery, such is its power. It is his story and his ill-fated country’s but above all it is that of his father, Jaballa Matar, who, while living in exile in Cairo, was betrayed by the Egyptian government, kidnapped and taken to Libya where he was imprisoned in Abu Salim, a hell on earth.

Jaballa was a man of dignity, courage and culture who had learned enough poetry by heart never to run out of something to recite. His “literary memory,” writes his son, “was like a floating library”. He had served as a soldier to King Idris and in 1969, when Gaddafi seized power in a coup d’état, was based at the embassy in London’s St James’s Square. Hisham Matar had been born 14 months earlier and in The Return he tries to imagine what went through his father’s mind at that moment. What he did was run out of the embassy and race to the airport, for he was no monarchist and was eager to embrace a new age of republicanism and embrace a new era in Libya’s often blood-stained history.

His father, recalls Matar, had high hopes for what Gaddafi had initiated and even saw his initial imprisonment in an optimistic light. After five months he was released and sent to New York as a Libyan administrator to the United Nations where on his first day at work he saw a lorry collide with a cyclist. “The limbs of the cyclist were scattered across the asphalt,” writes Matar. “My father’s response was to collect the pieces of flesh and bone and respectfully place them beside the torso which, like the twisted bicycle, had landed on the pavement. I have always associated the irrevocable and violent changes my family and my country went through in the following four decades with the image of my father – a poet turned officer turned, reluctantly, diplomat – dressed in a suit and tie, far away from home, collecting the pieces of a dead man.”

This “ill omen” was the start of the Matar extended family’s nightmare. As Gaddafi’s true character emerged, Jaballa, who had amassed a fortune importing goods to the Middle East, became vocal in his opposition. In the early 1990s he was prominent among those attempting to overthrow the regime. In that regard, his disappearance into Abu Salim was inevitable: Gaddafi was not the kind of man to allow his enemies to prosper. The effect on Hisham and his elder brother Ziad was profound. On one occasion Ziad, who was attending boarding school in Switzerland, narrowly escaped capture by Gadaffi’s agents. Hisham, meanwhile, opted to go to school in the English countryside where he took an assumed name and nationality. In scenes that might have been imagined by John le Carré, he writes of his clandestine, double life where he could only be himself in the household of a teacher who knew who he really was.

It was the kind of ruptured, wandering, lonely upbringing that breeds a novelist. But as his book’s title suggests, Matar eventually, in 2012, decided to return to Libya, not without trepidation. “What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?” he ponders at the outset. He wanted to know what had happened to his father and to his country. Such answers as he found were not conclusive or comforting. Was Jaballa murdered in a massacre of prisoners? That seems to be the most likely outcome. As the narrative moves restlessly across time and place, its locus remains Libya, a country still riven by internecine, sectarian strife. In contrast to the lives of many of his relatives, Matar’s life has been that of someone free to pursue his own destiny. In London, in one of the more bizarre episodes in a book full of them, he meets Seif el-Islam, one of Gaddafi’s sons, who claims Tony Blair as a friend.

“You are the writer?” Seif asked.

“Yes,” replied Matar.

“Is that all you do?”

“I am afraid so.”

“What, you mean all you do is write?”

“Precisely.”