Review: Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

As much as Gravel Heart is a novel about power and cultural displacement, those themes are wrapped up in the story of a personal tragedy that splinters a family and changes the course of their lives. Beginning in Zanzibar in the 1970s, it’s told by Salim, who is seven years old when his father walks out on him and his mother, cutting himself off from his family – except, curiously, for allowing his wife to come round daily with a basket of lunch.

Years pass. Salim’s mother, Saida, is now discreetly seeing an important official named Hakim, and they have a daughter together. Saida accepts an offer from her brother, the flashy and conceited diplomat Amir, to fly Salim to London, where he will live with Amir and his family and be enrolled in a Business Studies course. It’s a great opportunity for the boy, whose prospects have not, until now, been good.

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Abdulrazak Gurnah came to Britain when he was around the same age as Salim, and his account of the young man’s gradual acclimatisation to the strange new city of London is as vivid as his depiction of the tension and instability of revolutionary Zanzibar, rooted in real experience and keen observation. Salim learns not to be afraid of the wide, busy streets, and his expectation of being surrounded by white people is confounded by his discovery of a community of young men from Africa. For much of his stay in Britain, though, Salim feels as though he exists in a stateless limbo, lacking both a country and a family.

When he is banished from his uncle’s home after failing his exams – ostensibly for his “ingratitude”, but really because he expressed too much curiosity about his mother’s past – he’s forced to fend for himself, flitting between dismal flats while working towards a degree in the English Literature that’s inspired him since his childhood.

Hailing from a former British protectorate, the book-loving Salim has had a lifelong ambivalence towards the literature of the land that treated his countrymen so dismissively. “That was how you and I came to know so much of the world, reading about it from people who despised us,” he tells his father at one point. Throughout, the abuse of power is a recurring theme, whether exerted by officials in Zanzibar, Uncle Amir, the matriarch of his girlfriend Billie’s family or the cultural weight of the canon of English Literature. The realisation that he’s becoming more British with the passing years is, therefore, not one Salim completely welcomes.

It’s only in the closing stages that he breaks free of his inertia and books a trip back to Zanzibar to learn the secret that drove his father from the family home. The rough backstory, if not the details, will come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading attentively, but that doesn’t make this poignant, understated and frequently moving novel any less compelling, or the truth, when it comes, any easier to bear.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT