Fiction: Friendship is more complex than love, and often far more interesting. Two men, complete opposites, each tell the story of their long friendship in former Prix Goncourt winner Tahar Ben Jelloun's new novel, The Last Friend.
Ali is solid, sensible and sufficiently ordinary to survive in a crowd.
Mamed, is different, ugly, short, heavy-smoking and aware that in order to be noticed he will have to rely on his vicious tongue and flair for insulting people, particularly women. It seems all very low key and a bit predictable as we wait for the moment when belief and affection will die with betrayal - or do we? Central to the narrative is the expected contrasting behaviour of the pair, but also the differences, subtle and otherwise, in the way each recalls incidents and people.
Ben Jelloun is impossible to ignore - this book is not on the same level of profundity as his magnificent 2004 International Impac Dublin Literary Award winning This Blinding Absence of Light, nor is it as strong as The Last Day in Tangiers, his wryly elegant tale of an old man waiting for death, but it engages through his seductively logical voice. Ben Jelloun, who was born in Morocco in 1944, writes in French and has been shaped by the cosmopolitan yet traditional Arabic-European culture of which he is a product.
The two men, particularly the mildly sympathetic, far from perfect Ali, convince. It is Ali the romantic who attempts to offer a history of their relationship, begun as schoolboys, surviving long separations and finally ending abruptly in middle age. As boys, though, it was conducted as a great adventure. "The two of us swapped books and magazines. . . We had intense debates; our other friends felt excluded. They saw us as intellectuals, interested mainly in France." But they never talked about their friendship.
Ben Jelloun evokes the atmosphere of flux that invariably surrounds the young. Ali and Mamed are both clever, yet Ali represents the more fey side of intellectualism; Mamed's intelligence is harsher. It is the world of student life. "After the Baccalaureate, our paths were destined to diverge. . . Mamed wanted to study medicine. He dreamed about it. It was his calling. He got a scholarship and left for Nancy, in the east of France. I went to Canada for film studies." Everything changes when Mamed is arrested on return from France. Ali is warned too late and he too is arrested. In Morocco, student activists are the new enemy. Holding a leftist opinion is enough, there are no explanations.
It is interesting to see Ben Jelloun return to the theme of imprisonment he so brilliantly explored in This Blinding Absence of Light. Mamed suffers but the friends cheer each other up, Ali chokes on prison food and Mamed rescues him. "Those nineteen months of incarceration disguised as military service sealed our friendship forever." When Mamed becomes seriously ill, Ali stays with him through the night. Mamed announces the two "were linked in life and death, and that nothing and no one could ever destroy our friendship". Although the prison sequence is important - and authentic, as Ben Jelloun was also falsely imprisoned as a student - it is not the story, as it is in This Blinding Absence of Light. However the two fail to receive the necessary royal pardon - and the personal freedom remains curtailed.
But friendship, not freedom, is Ben Jelloun's theme. The friends eventually meet women, marry and settle down to very different lives. Ali becomes a teacher, Mamed moves to Sweden. There he becomes fully Moroccan. When he buys an apartment back in Morocco in a building owned by Ali's father-in-law, the tensions that have been gathering because of the resentments felt by the respective wives finally manifest themselves. Ali is confronted by his friend and accused of petty theft. For him it is death in life.
Then Ben Jelloun allows the tougher, more plain-speaking Mamed to tell his side of the story. Suddenly, it becomes a different book, the tone changes.
If Ali represents romantic compromise, Mamed is blunt practicality, yet there is another side to him - his love of his country, which in time even surpasses his belief in his friendship.
There is a twist of sorts, but only of sorts, and that ultimately provides the defining allure of this thoughtful, believable story about two men engaged in that strangely delicate, appallingly, enduringly tough emotion called friendship. Though not a major work, this study of feeling and tension within friendship and the determination to sustain a bond through time possesses layers of understanding. Sophisticated and astute, Tahar Ben Jelloun balances the Arabic and the European with a feel for the human and life itself.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Last Friend By Tahar Ben Jelloun Translated by Kevin Michel Cape and Hazel Rowley The New Press, 176pp. £11.99
