[In the following positive review, Mesic praises Children of the Alley as a skillful and fresh combination of allegory, historical fiction, and myth.]

Out of a timeless oral tradition, of stories so old history and myth are braided into one, comes a rich tapestry of tales, each complete in itself, that interlock as do the stories of the Arabian Nights. Each chapter of Children of the Alley encapsulates a life, presenting the whole trajectory of a character's development, actions and their consequences. The alley of the title is peopled by petty merchants and the poor—snake charmers, jam sellers, shepherds and carpenters, murderers and the pure of heart—but all claim descent from one noble household, from which their tribe was long ago evicted.

Naguib Mahfouz is absolutely specific in showing the details of these lives. Small cucumbers roll in the dust when young hooligans upset the cart of humble Adham, the first, exiled son of the noble house to be forced to earn his living by labor. And Mahfouz catches the buttery sheen of the slippers of soft yellow leather worn by the shy bridegroom Rifaa, who marries an impure woman to save her from a vengeful crowd. But the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author is deliberately cloudy about time and place. The town, somewhere on the desert's edge, and the country, somewhere in the Middle East, are nameless. The time is that year in which one brother, envying the other, does him violence; a visionary is scorned by his fellow citizens but honored in a new place; and a child of the poor and disenfranchised, raised by a wealthy mother, in maturity becomes the leader of his people. In other words, this is the time of Cain and Abel, Mohammed, Moses—and it is also the present day.

Mahfouz has set himself the task of retelling moral history as if the whole world were but a village and every man born a new Adam, discovering the sorrow of his sin and recalling the idle joy of a lost garden. The Bible, the Koran, are not merely “relevant”—full of lessons of a past age to teach by rote to this one—but present and prophetic, not in any mystical way but in the simple fact of our unchanging natures.

Yet all this is done so skillfully, and with such freshness, that it takes the reader many pages to awake to the familiarity of the story of Adham, the dutiful son, and Idris his brother, the tempter, the spoiler, the sarcastic, infuriating liar. Both are children of a powerful father, Gabalawi, stern and angry, just but swift to take revenge. Their house, set in a vast garden, is put under the stewardship of Adham, which inflames the envy of his elder brother. For his rebellion, Idris is expelled into the dusty alley beyond the estate's walls.

A drunken good-for-nothing who blames Adham for his misfortune, Idris tempts the virtuous brother, via his ambitious wife, to peep into the record books his father Gabalawi has locked away. Caught in the act, Adham, too, is driven out. Though Milton's version of this tale is more sonorous, Mahfouz's version has a homely probability, an easy vernacular quality that is purely delightful.

The unknowable workings of Gabalawi's mansion recall the frustrations of Kafka's castle, where an applicant paces and hammers at doors and questions in vain, never knowing if he is getting nearer or farther from a final answer, the seat of power, divinity itself. But because these people are humble, they take their exclusion from the divine estate not as a paradox or mystery but in some ways as normal to their condition, for they are excluded from so many privileges in their ordinary world as well.

But Mahfouz's allegory extends beyond the personal. The children of the alley live in unchanging poverty of goods and spirit. “Feet that were still bare left their deep prints in the dirt. Flies still lingered in garbage and on people's eyes. Faces were still tired and haggard, clothes were ragged, obscenities were exchanged like greetings and ears were numb with lies.” Without naming the abstraction “poverty,” Mahfouz builds up its image with instances—bare feet, flies, ragged clothes—that are themselves its distillation and proof.

What perpetuates this state is not simply the people's own weakness but the gangsters who exploit it for gain. Each neighborhood has a strongman who struggles to dominate a neighborhood by force. When an idle dreamer manufactures a new weapon, a bottle that explodes with a percussive bang, injuring many at a single blow, it takes the first gangster to see its possibilities, which leaves the reader suddenly aware that the issue is not simply of a neighborhood but of nations, jostling for military superiority.

Reflecting actual human history, there are moments of tranquility and justice. Early in the narrative, for example, a fierce but fair leader named Gabal vigorously opposes the neighborhood gangsters, arouses the shoemaker, the jam seller and the poet to band together in brave opposition, and seizes power and distributes resources equally among everyone. When one of his own followers blinds another man in a quarrel, Gabal himself propounds the doctrine of an eye for an eye and metes out the terrible punishment. This is a clear dividing line in human history, when justice at last takes precedence over tribal ties or social allegiances:

“Before Gabal had been a beloved leader; his people thought of him as a gangster who did not want the title or outward trappings of gangs. Now he was feared and dreaded … but there were always others to remind them of the other side of his cruelty; his compassion for those who had been injured, and his genuine desire to establish an order that would safeguard the law. And everyone jealously guarded the order he had set up and abided by it.”

To read this is like being present for the formulation of the code of Hammurabi, and to sense the excitement of seeing human behavior regulated by an ideal of fair conduct.

The story of Gabal concludes, however: “Good examples would not be wasted on our alley were it not afflicted with forgetfulness. But forgetfulness is the plague of our alley.”

In the next chapter, the previous evils are restored without explanation because no explanation is needed. Bad ages follow good as if to show contempt for the very notion of enlightened progress. Gabal's discovery of justice has made no permanent change in human nature.

Thus Mahfouz reminds his readers that good must be chosen again and again, and that choosing it is as prosaic a thing as making and remaking a bed that is slept in every night. Folding together past and present, Christian and Islamic tradition, has resulted not in the blurring of lines and ideas, but in a crystalline sharpness, as if he has wiped away what is merely incidental to reveal a pattern beneath.

The reader can sense this novelist's absolute faith in the power of story as a means for human beings to understand themselves. In Children of the Alley the boundary between this world and the next, the practical and the spiritual, has been erased. Paradise is in the garden at the foot of the street, evil itself lies in the anger of losing at cards and an angel of enlightenment, announcing God's will, can be an old woman with a long face. Tolerant but unsentimental in spirit, immensely entertaining and deeply serious, Children of the Alley, for all its Middle Eastern origins, can be summed up in a Hindu proverb: “All life is a spiritual journey. Happy is the person who knows this is so, and acts on the belief.”