I shall consider these novels by Naguib Mahfouz in the order not of their publication but of my reading of them, which, it seems to me, is also the ascending order of their interest. It needs to be emphasised that what is being discussed is the novels as they appear in English translation.

The thief of The Thief and the Dogs (1961) is Said Mahran, released after four years in prison, and determined to take revenge on those who (he believes) betrayed him, notably Ilish Sidra and Nabawiyya, his former wife, now married to Ilish. Nabawiyya prompts one of the overflowings of stream-of-consciousness which crop up throughout: “How I wish our eyes could meet, so I might behold one of the secrets of hell! Oh for the axe and the sledgehammer!” Better it might have been had Said stuck to the axe or the sledgehammer, but someone provides him with a gun. It used to be said that “he was Death Incarnate, that his shot never missed,” but twice he contrives to kill some unfortunate bystander in mistake for his targets, consoling himself ingeniously with the thought, “As for your gun, it's obvious that it will kill only the innocent. You'll be its last victim.”

“Using theft to relieve the exploiters of some of their guilt,” an erstwhile friend once told Said, “is absolutely legitimate.” To what extent his burglaries were ever motivated or extenuated by social or political considerations is obscure. Some cryptic but clearly unworldly wisdom derives from a Sufi sheikh with whom he takes refuge—“Weak are the seeker and the sought,” “God's slave is owned by God alone”—but whose sayings have less effect on Said than they may have on the Western reader, likely to welcome a touch of exotic metaphysics.

“A world without morals is like a universe without gravity”: it is by killing his enemies that he will restore the world and enable himself “to die a death that has some meaning to it.” Said remains a blurred, grubby mixture of Robin Hood and Raskolnikov. His delusion that millions of people are on his side, all of them except “the real robbers,” his vision of himself as a kind of redeemer, as “good principles, consolation, the tears that recall the weeper to humility,” bear no relation to what we know of his actions. The claim in the introduction that the reader gains deep and authentic impressions of the values of Egyptian society in the wake of the revolution of 1952 is hard to trust, since everything is seen through Said's bloodshot eyes; and similarly the accompanying implication that society has corrupted him carries little weight. We have no intimation of Said uncorrupted. His ineptness arouses some sympathy in us, but severely curtailed, for he is a “case” rather than a character, and it comes as a relief, even a merciful release, when police dogs corner this mad one.

Wedding Song (1981) is more complex, more animated; somewhat in the manner of Akutagawa's “In a Grove,” the short story which inspired the film Rashomon, four characters give their own versions of the same events. The central figure, Abbas Younis, is the son of a once loving but now hating couple (to say of them, as the man does, that they have “become like two bare trees,” is exceptionally mild) who make a living by running a kind of brothel and gambling den frequented by actors and actresses. Abbas, an idealistic—or priggish—young man, believes that “Good will triumph”; his father opines that he is “sick with the disease of virtue,” a disease which is far from epidemic in the neighbourhood.

Abbas marries Tahiya, an actress with a past; she dies, and so does their child. He then writes a play, based on truth but riskily representing himself as the murderer of wife and child. What he has imagined—he contends—is theatrically stronger than what actually happened. “Inwardly, art is a means of expurgation, outwardly a means of battle, incumbent on men born and reared in sin and determined to rebel against it.” The play is enormously, if somewhat implausibly, successful; and it seems odd that Abbas isn't called on to help the police with their inquiries.

The company's leading actress observes jocularly, “We're living in times when sex has become a national pursuit.” Along with opium and alcohol, sex is certainly rife, though never “explicit.” Happiness shows itself only in fleeting memories of the past. Virtually everybody hates, fears or despises everybody else; and, not for the only time when reading these English versions, one is inclined to suggest that since Arabic and English are so different as modes of discourse, the reader should perhaps divide by two or three what looks much like histrionics, hyperbole, and rant. If Mahfouz's people really meant what they utter, they would have wiped one another out before the story began. His characters are larger than life, and yet debarred from much of it.

The metaphors are intriguing rather than illuminating. Believing that Abbas has killed himself, his mother remarks, “Evil is playing flute music for Abbas.” The fairly loathsome actor, Tariq Ramadan, muses that the loss of his mistress, Tahiya, has robbed him of his confidence and his trust in life: “What replaced them was madness—in the shape of love, which broke out of the dark corner of its lair, shook off the lethargy of long hibernation, and went to seek the food it had been missing.” Sinisterly high-flown language which has little to do with our apprehension of the man. What, one wonders, is the purport and the effect of the original Arabic? Like a woman, or so the saying goes, you cannot expect a translation to be both beautiful and faithful; but it can be both literal and untrue.

Finally, having left a suicide note, Abbas is preserved by some strange, indeterminate ecstasy. “Let its strength remain unfathomably in its mystery! Lo, its life-giving force marches forward, bearing with it the fragrance of triumph!” Conceivably, as Mursi Saad El Din proposes in his introduction, this sense of triumph is by no means illusory, and Abbas's power of transformation derives from his creative power as an artist. Had we seen more of his artistic creativity, we might not find it equally conceivable that grief and suffering have deranged him. At this point, and despite the faith that through the mediation of literature nothing is alien to us, we may suspect that a sizeable cultural divide precludes us from full understanding and sympathy.

While intensely miserable, The Beginning and the End (1949) is marginally more sober in utterance, in the tradition of “realism,” although nothing is left to the imagination where emotions are concerned, and the epithets still settle like a flock of raucous birds. In one sentence revolt is “boiling,” bitterness is “poisonous,” despair is “fatal,” a feeling of loneliness is “tortured.” On the death of the father, a minor official in the Ministry of Education, a Cairene family in the 1930s is reduced to poverty—relatively speaking a genteel poverty, but all the more painful in the loss of face and the humiliations it entails. The eldest son, Hassan Kamel Ali, is a work-shy ne'er-do-well and then a criminal; the younger boys, Hussein and Hassanein, find respectable jobs, the one as a school clerk, the other as an Army officer, but the need to keep up appearances consumes most of their earnings. The daughter, Nefisa, sinks into dress-making (as a hobby it was acceptable, but not as paid work: and here the metaphor is pointed—“Misery pierces our flesh as a needle pierces a piece of cloth”) and then into discreetly conveyed prostitution.

Rare flashes of humour break through the gloom, as when Hassan gorges himself at a wedding party (“He was at his greatest when he swallowed an entire pigeon, bones and all”), and also moments of shared happiness, arising from family affection and the kindly acts of neighbours. “Occupation! Independence!” exclaims the stalwart mother, obliged to sell most of their furniture. “I don't see the difference between them.” Political matters feature as quaintly as prostitution. “We must all be rich,” Hassanein says; to which Hussein replies, “And if this is impossible?” “Then we must all be poor.” “And if this is impossible, too?” “In that case,” Hassanein tells him, “we must revolt, murder, and steal.” Hussein concludes this basic account of human endeavour by remarking that mankind has been doing exactly that for thousands of years.

Mahfouz is an admirer of Thomas Mann, and this novel bears an obvious surface resemblance to Buddenbrooks, another story of “the Decline of a Family.” It is a far less sophisticated work, or, one should rather say, a much narrower one, for all its documentary merit. The Kamel Ali family are trapped; self-sacrifice cannot save them, any more than selfishness could be held responsible for their ruin; they trust in God, but are subject, it would appear, to Hardy's President of the Immortals. Nefisa's degradation will be the final straw: obsessed with his dignity, Lieutenant Hassanein advises her to drown herself, and then follows suit.

The struggles we witness are patently futile, the end will be at one with the beginning: which is why the nefarious antics of Hassan and the other denizens of the underworld actually bring some respite, if only because we don't have to feel pity for them. “Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor”: but to endure pity over 400 pages, however worthy its objects, is asking a lot.

How did Naguib Mahfouz come to be awarded the Nobel Prize? Palace Walk (1956), the first volume of his Cairo Trilogy, answers the question. It can hardly be a better, more restrained translation alone that makes this novel shine out so. At 500 pages, and barely covering the years 1917–19, it is Victorianly dense; and if perhaps the author dwells on things rather too long and minutely for Western sensibilities, leaving rather too little unsaid, it is credible, engrossing, even exciting. It is here, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, that Mahfouz displays “an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind,” and displays that art richly.

Al-Sayyid Ahmad is a prosperous grocer and a strict paterfamilias, whose word is absolute law over his wife Amina and their three sons and two daughters. At home he is all “prudence, dignity, and gravity,” dreaded and feared in his own family. But only there. At nights, away from home, he is an exuberant boon companion, singer, story-teller, wit, fount of wisdom, drinker, womaniser, and universal favourite. He sees no great need to reconcile these disparate personalities; nobody is hurt by his behaviour, he reasons, and since he is more than usually devout in other, more essential respects, surely God will not hold his peccadilloes against him? “God is beautiful and loves beauty,” he murmurs, after feasting his eyes on the “prodigious bottom” of a female singer. He has elevated lust “to its purest and most delicate form”; and when he proposes to her that, by way of an overture, they should recite the opening prayer of the Qur'an, he is reasonably confident that God will pardon any hint of blasphemy. It was God who made men what they are—manly.

In which thought his wife, truly wifely, concurs: manliness involves tyranny, arrogance, and staying out late at nights. Amina is docile, long-suffering, affectionate—it was how God made women—and immensely proud of her brilliant husband. Her loving nature embraces infidels; she prays to God to watch over all people, “Muslims and Christians, even the English, my Lord,” though she would like the English to be driven out of the land as a favour to her son Fahmy, who isn't very fond of them.

Yasin, al-Sayyid Ahmad's son by a previous wife, aspires to emulate his father's flamboyant way of life, but lacks the style, nerve and gallantry of that “Lord of Laughter.” He shows little finesse in his love-making, falling on his inamorata “like a bull elephant crushing a gazelle.” He marries a girl with Turkish blood in her, who is used to more freedom than she can hope for in her new family. The marriage turns sour; Yasin is caught in the act with a black maidservant—not only a servant but black and over forty!—and divorce ensues. The peculiar humiliation is that Yasin isn't divorcing his wife but his wife is divorcing him. “There was nothing strange about a man casting out a pair of shoes, but shoes were not supposed to throw away their owner.” It is in such light asides that Mahfouz lets slip his personal views on manners and morals.

The year is 1919, and Fahmy, the second son, a law student, has joined the freedom movement. Al-Sayyid Ahmad, a temperate patriot himself but too grand to engage in political plotting, isn't spared indignity; while returning from an assignation one night, he is picked up by British soldiers and made to help in filling in a large trench dug across the road by youthful demonstrators. Disobeying his father's prohibition—al-Sayyid Ahmad's children “were meant to be a breed apart, outside the framework of history,” their particular history prescribed by him—Fahmy is killed during a peaceful demonstration.

What effect these chastening events will have on the family and its head remains to be told. It should be said that much of the book is happy, albeit a domestic crisis arises when Amina, who had barely left the house since her marriage at thirteen years of age, twenty-five years before, takes the opportunity to visit a shrine while her husband is away on business. Pious as the outing is, and covered though she is from head to foot, she pays the price; she is knocked down by a car and fractures a collar-bone, the escapade comes to light, and al-Sayyid Ahmad turns her out of the house, temporarily. It stands to reason that a libertine will feel an inordinate concern for the females of his own family, and he even dislikes hearing the names of his daughters spoken outside the confines of the house. In this case it is a question of pride, of preserving total authority, but he knows what a good woman and wife Amina is. In one of Mahfouz's vivid metaphors—another has al-Sayyid Ahmad's eyes running over a woman's body “as quickly and greedily as a mouse on a sack of rice looking for a place to get in”—Amina visualises her husband with typical indulgence as “a mother cat which appears to be devouring her kittens when she is actually carrying them.”

The children want for nothing, except a degree of independence; their lives are constricted, but they are far removed from the unrelenting and predictable doom bearing down on the characters in the other books mentioned here. They quarrel and then make up, transient sorrows yield to passing joys, just as “in Cairo, during the winter, the sky can be gloomy with clouds and it even drizzles, but in an hour or less the clouds will have scattered to reveal a pure blue sky and a laughing sun.”

There are many incidental pleasures for the reader, as when a sheikh famous for his healing prayers, candour and wit upbraids al-Sayyid Ahmad for his lustfulness and, dangerously out of place in a merchant, excessive generosity. Discomposed by the first of these accusations, against which his repartee has for once proved ineffective, the grocer sees a chance to get his own back: if generosity is a fault, should he not reclaim the customary gift of rice, coffee and soap that he has just given the sheikh? “The gift to me is not excessive. Begin somewhere else, you son of Abd al-Jawad,” the sheikh replies. And when Fahmy announces that nationalist leaders plan to travel to London to lobby for independence, his mother is astonished. The English have been there so long, long before Fahmy was born, that they have come to be neighbours. How can the leaders go to the land of the English to ask them to get out of Egypt? “This is in very bad taste. How could you visit me in my house if you're wanting to throw me out of yours?” Amina's grasp of chronology is not too firm, and to mollify her son she grants that perhaps all will be well if they speak nicely to the great queen—she remembers her father talking about her—for after all she is a woman and no doubt bears a sensitive heart in her chest.

Mahfouz has a loving and intimate gift for portraying women, and the greatest, most refined pleasure stems from the females of the household: Amina (in whom docility doesn't rule out character), the beautiful golden-haired Aisha, and the big-nosed, sharp-tongued Khadija, edgy on the subject of her marital prospects, of whom Yasin observes that in communal life she resembles salt: it doesn't taste good by itself, but food has no taste without it.

The prize charmer is the small boy, Kamal—affectionate, puzzled, inquisitive, both comical and perceptive in his reflections on domestic and public affairs. He dotes on his sisters, why must they marry and go away? And why is it that their bellies swell up soon after? He thinks the British soldiers have handsome faces (“They look like Aisha!”) and enjoys playing with them in their camp. They treat him to chocolate and cups of tea, he listens respectfully to their singing and, being (like his father) no mean singer himself, entertains them in return. More conscious than his father of contrarieties and the need to reconcile them, he dreams of an Egyptian victory, followed by an honourable armistice which his foreign friends and Fahmy's friends will celebrate together with songs and sweetmeats. Fortunately he is still young enough to be regarded as an honorary woman, and therefore not accountable for his political naivety. God willing, he should grow into a fine man, just as long as manliness doesn't overcome him, with dimensions of intelligence and sensibility unknown to his father and brothers.

Kamal alone, though conscientiously one should throw in the history of Egypt too, is sufficient reason for us to look forward to the translation of the two remaining parts of Mahfouz's trilogy, which carry the narrative up to the end of World War II.