After saying goodbye to an old friend at a London station, Khaled does not leave. He has said he is expected at dinner. Instead, he stands a little way off and continues watching Hosam, who believes their farewell is over.
Why invent the dinner? Khaled is not entirely sure. He knows this man well, notices his smallest movements, and thinks he may be seeing something in him with unusual clarity. Yet he cannot fully explain his own behavior a few moments earlier.
That small discrepancy is a beautiful invitation into Hisham Matar’s My Friends. Knowing someone for years does not make them transparent. It does not even make us transparent to ourselves. Affection can sharpen attention without supplying a final account of what we see.
It is 2016. Khaled begins walking home through London, and the walk opens onto more than three decades: a childhood in Libya, university in Britain, a shooting, and the friendships that have helped give his later life its shape. The evening route is finite. The time it contains is not.
The authorized opening published by the Booker Prizes makes this promise without hurrying to explain the whole relationship. Someone has gone away; a familiar street now has a different feel. You do not need to know Libyan history to recognize that disturbance. The history will make the feeling more particular, not replace it with a lesson.
Before the friendship, a voice on the radio
As a boy in Benghazi, Khaled hears a short story broadcast on the radio with his family. A cat is eating a man. The strangeness of it stays with him, as does the writer’s name: Hosam Zowa.
Long before Hosam becomes an actual friend, he is the person who has made this unsettling thing in language. That sequence matters. A writer first enters Khaled’s life at a distance, through an experience of reading—or, here, listening. Meeting him later cannot simply erase the earlier relationship with his work.
Many readers will recognize a milder version of that imbalance. We encounter a book before encountering its author. We arrive at the meeting carrying a history the other person does not share. Friendship, if it develops, has to make room for the ordinary individual alongside the voice we first admired.
For Khaled, literature also belongs to a politically dangerous world. Growing up under Muammar Gaddafi, he cannot treat the question of what may be said as a purely literary matter. A story can delight or disturb while approaching things other kinds of public speech must avoid.
He eventually goes to Edinburgh to study and befriends another Libyan student, Mustafa. Study abroad initially looks like a passage in a life, not a permanent break with everything that preceded it. There should be a degree to finish and a home to return to.
On April 17, 1984, the two attend a protest outside the Libyan embassy in London. Shots are fired from the embassy, and both are wounded. The novel builds this early turning point around a real event. Suddenly a journey within Britain changes what return to Libya might mean.
Their injuries are only part of the danger. Being identified, endangering relatives, and explaining an absence become problems that extend beyond the day of the shooting. Khaled needs to work out how to live somewhere else while being unable to tell his parents plainly why he cannot come home.
Here exile becomes something more specific than a word for loss. A call to the family can bring comfort and require concealment at once. The people with the strongest claim to hear what happened may be the people it is most dangerous to tell.
The friend who understands may still want something else
Mustafa shares an experience with Khaled that few others can fully enter. But surviving the same violence does not mean wanting the same future. A shared past gives two people knowledge of each other; it does not issue identical instructions for the years ahead.
Hosam brings a different form of closeness. The admired writer becomes someone with whom Khaled can spend unremarkable hours. There are walks and conversations, habits and temperaments to learn. The person who once existed primarily through his words begins to exist in the pauses around them too.
This is one reason the novel’s friendships are promising subjects in their own right, not merely consolation inserted between episodes of political suffering. Friends help make a city habitable. Living with their expectations, differences, and changing desires is also part of the work of inhabiting it.
The opening recalls literary disagreements between Khaled and Hosam that carry something beyond their apparent subject. An argument about writing can become a safer place to conduct an argument about life. The participants may be close enough to hear the other dispute even when neither names it.
In his conversation with Bilal Qureshi for NPR, Matar considers how friendship differs from relationships surrounded by more established expectations. We choose our friends, but rarely draw up a clear account of what that choice obliges us to do.
How much may a friend ask? How much should be offered before being asked? If someone takes a direction we cannot follow, what authority does our shared history give us over the decision?
The 2011 revolution in Libya gives such questions a new urgency. Return and political action become possibilities to consider again, not merely memories to discuss from afar. What appears to one person as an opening can strike another as a danger. Their responses belong to the novel’s unfolding story.
The difficulty is not just deciding whether a friend is right. Sometimes it is accepting that understanding where someone comes from does not mean knowing where they must go. Intimacy can make that acceptance harder: surely I, of all people, should know what matters to you.
Matar’s premise leaves room for a less possessive kind of attention. A friendship may contain a disagreement it cannot resolve. The years together are not made worthless by that disagreement, but neither can they automatically decide the future.
A city keeps the years
A walk makes an unusually good frame for these relationships because movement through a city and movement through memory happen at different speeds. Khaled can pass a corner in seconds while returning, in thought, to a conversation that still occupies years.
London is therefore more than the place in which he waits to resume his real life. It has acquired names, habits, and people. Its streets have kept time for him. Some of that time cannot be transported back to the country he left.
This need not turn attachment to London into a betrayal of Libya. A person can miss a place and still build something real elsewhere. The life made in exile is not rendered provisional simply because the loss that helped produce it remains unresolved.
In a Booker interview, Matar describes coming to understand the book itself as a walk. He also speaks about wanting the language to grow more familiar as the reader proceeds, like an intimacy slowly developing.
The opening gives a small taste of that ambition. Khaled looks, revises his impression, admits uncertainty, and looks again. The voice asks for attention without insisting that attention will deliver certainty. Its thoughtfulness is persuasive partly because it does not pretend to have finished thinking.
Literature becomes part of the friends’ map of the city as well. Shayera Dark’s review for The Johannesburg Review of Books draws out the encounters among Arabic, African, and English-language writing, and the friends’ interest in writers’ traces around London.
Those references need not be treated as a reading test. Books are among the things these people use to reach each other. A line of writing, a disagreement, or a remembered address can become part of how they explain a life they struggle to state more directly.
What kind of patience it asks for
My Friends has a violent political turning point, but its invitation is not chiefly the promise of one dangerous event after another. It asks the reader to remain inside recollection, conversation, and the gradual recognition of a feeling.
The opening supplies a quieter form of suspense. How did these men become important enough to each other that a gesture at a station carries this weight? Why does the narrator continue watching when he has already claimed to be leaving? We want the past because the present has made its pressure felt.
For someone unfamiliar with the historical setting, a few threads are enough to begin: study brings Khaled and Mustafa together; the shooting transforms their relationship to home; Hosam first reaches Khaled through literature and later through friendship. More detailed knowledge can gather as the people become familiar.
It is also worth resisting a single verdict on what exile does to a person. In Lili Stern’s PEN America interview, Matar explicitly distinguishes Hosam’s experience from a universal law. Some writers can work fruitfully away from home; others feel that a source has been severed. The same departure does not make the same life.
That qualification fits the most attractive thing about this introduction to Khaled’s world. These friends are not contestants trying to prove which response to displacement is authentic. Their differences matter because their lives matter separately, even when those lives have become deeply entangled.
Khaled is still on his way home. He said he had another engagement. What accompanies him now is the long company of people he has known, loved, and not quite finished understanding.