This year's Booker shortlist may well linger in the memory longer than most if only because the judges achieved such a wide geographical sweep - with novels from Ireland, England, Scotland, South Africa, India and Egypt - and, in the process, also arrived at almost as balanced a gender-spread, with four men and two women. One of those two women, Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif, has written the most politically ambitious and, in terms of history and gender, possibly the most important of the nominated books, but, as a novel, The Map of Love (certainly the longest of the six), often makes heavy going of a creaking plot which is more likely to ensure that the reader sheds tears of laughter rather than sympathy.
Fiction has often been confronted with the debate of the good versus the important and many novelists, whether by intention or not, have elevated ordinary stories and average writing to higher relevance by virture of enlisting history and its many injustices. By now there must be in existence almost as many Holocaust novels as there are pieces of the True Cross. Trying to balance the good and the important frequently means that characterisation, dialogue, plot, language, technical skill - the essential elements of the art of fiction - are frequently overshadowed by weighty messages. In the case of The Map of Love, a highly-wrought and admittedly disappointing successor to Soueif's equally ambitious and superior third novel In the Eye of the Storm (1991), colonial injustices and gender politics overpower what is a weak romance. This is a contrived, old-fashioned, unatmospheric melodrama with so many narrative seams showing as to be scarred.
In attempting to span a century of Egyptian history, Soueif uses two contrasting love stories, both involving Western women with Egyptian men and an array of cultural differences, as the central linking device. Isabel, the besotted young American girl of today, endeavours to find the answers to her problems - mainly that of her unrequited love for the handsome, brooding, possibly solitary and clearly reluctant Omar - by way of investigating the world of her daring English ancestor, Lady Anna Winterbourne. Anna, of course, is one of those light-years-ahead-of-her-time types who, having been widowed by a wimpish husband (who expires possibly from guilt at the damage colonialising men such as himself have caused in Egypt), decides to visit the place herself. Naturally she finds love with a politically committed man who opposes the colonial class to which she belongs.
It does no disservice to Soueif to confess that even before her late-Victorian, irrepressibly perky heroine had dressed up in male riding clothes, it seemed pretty obvious that she would be doing so. Anna is also unusually, and helpfully, very interested in politics and so provides quite a detailed reading of the history of the time. All very helpful, but then this is a story which depends heavily - too heavily - upon Dickensian coincidence.
Everything we learn of Lady Anna comes down to us through letters and the pages of a journal which time and a fair deal of luck have kept preserved. There are other useful aides as well, including a diary of sorts kept by Layla, the sister of Sharif, the handsome, brooding, mysterious and solitary Egyptian nationalist who falls in love with Anna - and she with him. All of this material has been kept, along with other symbolic items, in a trunk which was forgotten for years but now proves vital. In fact, without it there is no story. Isabel seeks answers from Amal, Omar's kindly divorced younger sister and part-narrator. "You like telling stories", Isabel remarks to Amal, who replies: "I suppose I do. I like piecing things together."
THE women become friends; the contrasts are obvious - the philosophical Amal is conscious of having grown children and of faint hope for new love. She had also married outside her culture and so has retreated back into it. Isabel, although herself divorced after a brief marriage, is young and apparently indestructible. She is also self absorbed and incapable of taking no for an answer. She wants the Westernised Omar, a world-weary international conductor, and he keeps insisting he is old enough to be her father. This refrain takes on some seriousness, the implications of which are handled with an understanding which borders on the casual. Isabel's determined march through the narrative is one of the major weaknesses - she appears to act as a clumsy metaphor of sorts for the New World and all its rawness. It is a device Henry James could have got away with, but Soueif, alas, is no Henry James.
While it is interesting seeing the way in which Soueif - an Egyptian who was educated in Egypt and in England, where she now lives - presents Egyptian history, particularly in a colonial context (Anna, when writing back to her kindly father-in-law, refers to the Irish situation and the aftermath of the death of Parnell), the weight of the history is swamped by the stagey romances. " `When was it?' Anna asks. `When did you know? When did you fall in love with me?' It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting, but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved. . . And so they sit, and touch, and talk, and breathe, and so they string their moments into a glorious chain, and throw it round each other's necks. . . Invisible to all others, it shines for them, a beacon across a crowded room, across an ocean, across time."
About midway through the novel - which, for all its length, is written in short chapters and is uncomfortably fragmented by Soueif's composite narrative methods - she quotes Matthew Arnold "Wandering between two worlds. . . one dead/The other powerless to be born", and it is as if she is summing up the difficulties of writing this book. The two lines encapsulate its dilemma, and could be its epitaph. By attempting to evoke two worlds divided by 100 years, she fails to capture either. Anna's letters and journals do not read as missives from the past.
Another problem is the fact that most of the characters, be they Victorian or contemporary, sound, with the exception of Isabel, the same - all equally stiff and formal. Soueif approaches story-telling with a wide, generous canvas and an obvious knowledge of her native Egyptian culture and a grasp of Anglo-Egyptian politics, but as fiction the narrative - which is more Amal's story than anyone else's - never rises beyond the earnestly uninspired. Importance does not automatically confer quality.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
