My Friends by Hisham Matar [9/10]

I have only sketchy memories of the April 1984 nightly news images from London of Libyan diplomats opening fire on demonstrating students, which is the initiating event for this stately, probing novel of exile and revolutionary freedom fighting and, yes indeed, friendship, written by Hisham Matar. He imagines two Libyan student friends wounded in the fray, who then become what might end up as permanent exiles from their homeland ruled despotically by Quaddafi. The terrors of that day knit them together and then later, a third, older, ex-author exile joins them. My Friends gently, but forensically, unfolds the next three decades or so until a people’s revolution deposes the dictator, during which the protagonist pursues an unassuming life as a London teacher, forever balancing regrets against the security of certainty. The author provides a filigreed dissection of the many pleasures and hidden grumbles of the trio’s friendships. Matar writes undulating, intelligent prose that could, in most authors’ hands, drag, but here retains solid muscularity. Overall, My Friends is a whispering, deep novel plucked from recent times, one that illuminates as it caresses.