The Automobile Club of Egypt by Alaa al-Aswany review – a country on the brink of violent change

In the days before Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in February 2011, Alaa al-Aswany, dentist, novelist and founder member of the democratic movement Kefaya (“Enough”), was one of the most influential voices of the leaderless revolution. His 2002 debut novel, The Yacoubian Building, sold more than a million copies, laying bare the political corruption, degrading poverty and rising religious fervour that drove thousands to occupy Tahrir Square.

Since then, Egypt has experienced the military overthrow of its first democratically elected leader; the massacre of the deposed president’s Muslim supporters; and the rise of a new regime under Abdel Fatah al‑Sisi, which Aswany claims to have brought “freedom of expression to its lowest point, worse than the days of Mubarak”. Now Aswany’s criticism of the government has become headline news. On 11 December it was revealed that he had been forced by the authorities to shut down one of his regular public seminars, while his political columns and media appearances have been suspended.

All this means that the English translation of Aswany’s most recent novel, first published in Arabic as The Automobile Club in 2013, could hardly be more urgent, not least because he once again takes the example of Egypt’s fairly recent history to illustrate a country on the brink of violent, irreversible change.

As with his first novel, Aswany presents a top-to-bottom critique of Egyptian society by cutting a cross-section through an iconic building. The Automobile Club, like the Yacoubian building (where Aswany established his first dental clinic) actually exists, in the same shabby, downtown neighbourhood of Cairo’s former European quarter. Aswany imagines the club in its heyday, between the end of the second world war and the officers’ coup of 1952, when it functioned as a louche haven for moneyed foreigners and a favourite bolthole of the King – who is not named in the book, but is clearly a portrait of the sybaritic Farouk I, a man famed for eating 60 oysters in one sitting and acquiring the 94-carat Star of the East diamond without paying for it.

Then there are the servants, subject to a brutal reign of terror exercised by the King’s sadistic personal valet, Alku, who causes the elderly Abd el-Aziz Gaafar, a former rural landowner fallen on hard times, to literally die of humiliation. As in The Yacoubian Building, the cast of characters is vast and not always easy to keep track of, but the principal narrative follows the affairs of Gaafar’s family, in particular his exemplary son Kamel, who combines doorkeeping duties at the Automobile Club with studying for a law degree. He forms a taboo relationship with his boss’s daughter, a self-willed English girl who espouses an EM Forsterish desire to experience “real life with real Egyptians”.

The Yacoubian Building features a plotline in which a law-abiding young Muslim becomes radicalised having been subject to police brutality. Kamel likewise falls into a resistance group of democratic sympathisers led by a renegade prince who worries that “the king’s love of gambling has turned the Automobile Club into the seat of Egypt’s government”. Kamel is ultimately fated to suffer the worst indignities that the security forces can inflict on him.

So why is it that the novel seems so bereft of the narrative drive and slightly scurrilous whiff of scandal that made The Yacoubian Building teem with life? One reason is the strange succession of false starts. Aswany indulges in a curious metafictional prelude in which “a well-known Egyptian novelist” receives a visitation from some of his own characters, who urge him to abort the book and start again (which leads you to wonder if they may have had a point). There then follows, for no very apparent reason, a series of chapters devoted to Karl Benz’s development of the motor carriage in late 19th-century Germany.

When the narrative finally does get going, Russell Harris’s deathly translation does its best to smother it. The novel is full of characters who either brook no delay or go full-steam ahead, flinging caution to the wind as if there were no tomorrow. Sometimes the cliches are strung together to almost parodic effect: ‘“She may have led other lovers by the nose, but I’m a different kettle of fish”; “The servants’ joy was boundless at having their former life back … They had put up with the hard times, bent with the wind and, in the end, came out on top.”

I’m not in a position to make a judgment on the Arabic, but it is hard to believe that Aswany actually writes like this. There is a telling comparison with Humphrey Davies’s much sprightlier translation of The Yacoubian Building, in which a young wife, having successfully pleasured her much older husband, “rubbed her nose against his and whispered, ‘It’s the old chickens that’ve got the fat!’”. It is a slightly incongruous phrase but nonetheless conveys the impression of an unfamiliar idiom. Harris inevitably has the dastardly Alku puffing on a cigar “like the cat who had got the cream”.

It is, of course, both deplorable and deeply worrying that Aswany’s journalism and media activity has been proscribed. And buried somewhere within this long, surprisingly standoffish novel is a historical analogue to the insurrectionary fervour that erupted in 2011 and may be fomenting again. Aswany is undoubtedly one of Egypt’s most valuable writers, though the latest product of the Arab world’s best-known literary dentist feels disappointingly toothless.

• To order The Automobile Club of Egypt for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only.