A Review of: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt by Naguib Mahfouz

In October 1994, six years after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home. The assailant was carrying out a death sentence pronounced by Umar Abd al-Rahman, a Muslim religious leader who believed that Mahfouz’s novel Awlad Haratina was blasphemous. Mahfouz survived the attack—he died in August 2006, at ninety-four—but his wounds prevented him from holding a pen for the rest of his life. Abd al-Rahman eventually left Egypt for New York, where he helped to plot the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

For the first time, Everyman’s Library has collected Mahfouz’s trilogy of novels about ancient Egypt in one volume. Compared to his better known and dustily realistic Cairo Trilogy, which portrays mid-twentieth-century Cairo in all its menace and squalor, these earlier novels seem grandiose and melodramatic, like a Cecil B. DeMille movie, complete with chariots and a cast of thousands.

The pleasure of this trilogy, like that of all good historical fiction, is in the intricate re-creation of the past. Mahfouz was a famously voracious researcher and an inveterate plotter—Nadine Gordimer, in her introduction, aptly compares him to a detective novelist—but these are also archetypal stories. Khufu’s Wisdom has the pharaoh Khufu trying to circumvent fate by killing the boy prophesied to succeed him on the throne. The irony is biblical: fate eventually wins out, despite man’s vain attempts to thwart it. Rhadopis of Nubia is a thriller of palace intrigue in which the young
pharaoh sacrifices his duty to his country for the love of Rhadopis, an ambitious prostitute as smart and scheming as any woman in Mahfouz’s fiction. Thebes at War, the bloodiest of the three novels, is the story of a people in exile, waiting to reclaim their country from foreign occupiers. It is at once a survey of class in the Nile Valley and an allegory of European colonialism in Africa. “Everything appeared to me that it would proceed according to my own desire, and I was not troubled by doubt of any kind,” says Pharaoh Khufu. Like his British contemporary Graham Greene, Mahfouz believed that desire in the absence of doubt was humanity’s tragic flaw. These are your garden-variety tales of love, war, betrayal, and death—or they would be, if it weren’t for Mahfouz’s deeply felt mistrust of unchecked wealth and power alongside his sardonic bewilderment...