The Haj by Leon Uris
I was recommended to read this book by my friend when I asked him, in a conversation about politics and current affairs, what made the Middle East a particular hotspot for violence - at the time, the news broadcasts were showing images of Hamas bombings and grieving shrouded women in Israel. I wasn't very far into the novel when I realised why this book was recommended - it seems to have all the answers to my questions about the conflict in that area, which I'd heard so much about but never really understood what the motives were. We hear about the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but the war there is never really explained on the news, and I guess people of my generation who haven't grown up with that conflict in the centre of foreign affairs just don't have a good grasp on it, unless we research it for ourselves. This was my situation before reading The Haj and though I know it's a fictional novel, it gives a pretty good springboard into the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even the events that I'm more familiar with, like 9/11 and the resurgence of Islam.
The narrator in the novel is Ishmael, the son of Haj Ibrahim who is the main character and around whom most of the action takes place, though there are fair chunks of the novel where the narration is third-person and Ishmael is not present (makes for some confusing reading every now and then when Ishmael pops up again to speak through the fourth wall). The narrative follows Haj Ibrahim's life from his promotion to muktar of his village of Tabah, through the beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the wake of the World Wars, to his eventual demise as an Arab refugee, disenfranchised by his people and his culture. It's a very bleak story, reinforced only by the musings on Islamic culture which locks Haj Ibrahim into a situation that he is desperate to escape and that does nothing for the advancement of his people in the face of the Jewish opposition. Every now and then there is a glimmer of hope that certain characters would wake up to themselves and take the opportunities given to them to better their lives, but those hopes are always doused by things like honour and duty that seems to form the basis of the Arabic and Islamic way of life. The main female character - in as much as she is a "main" character - goes some way to breaking the shackles of her downtrodden life as a woman in the Arab world, but what seems to be the natural order of things catches up to her as well and I hate to think - but know it happens - that her story is one echoed throughout the Middle East, and even in the Western World where I think most of us would assume this sort of thing doesn't happen (perhaps not as publicly, which is a real shame because it continues the violence rather than condones it).
The read itself is not bad, apart from the frequent shifts in narrator - the plot is easy to follow and most of the characters are easily identifiable, though at times the subject matter becomes very dark and can be a struggle to get through, especially the rapes and the killings. My biggest gripe with the novel from a stylistic perspective is the very end of the novel, where the narrator Ishmael, consumed by grief and guilt about how his life has turned out, becomes delusional and his narration wanders off into barely connected, bland gibberish for about three pages, and then the novel ends. After the 500 pages that precede it, the ending is very weak and is almost a cop out, in many ways, almost as if the author couldn't decide what to do next and simply decided to let the story taper off to nothing. I though it was a pretty disappointing conclusion to what was an interesting novel; I think it would have been better if we'd seen Ishmael in the epilogue speaking to us from his living room as he dictates his memoir or from a mental institution if one wanted to keep the theme of insanity - the lackluster end is made even more disappointing by the nothingness that Ishmael ultimately becomes.
Despite the poor ending and the sometimes brutal scenes involving the female characters, I would recommend the book and I'm glad to have read it, though I would like to read others like it before saying whether or not it's a must-read about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or even an insight into Arab/Islamic culture.
Out of Five:
3 out of 5 stars
