A C Grayling
CROSSROADS IN CAIRO
The Yacoubian Building
By Alaa Al Aswany (Translated by Humphrey Davies)(Fourth Estate 255pp £14.99)

In Cairo's Suleiman Basha Street, opposite the Excelsior Restaurant where Zaki Bey el Dessouki proposes to Busayna, young enough to be his daughter but who reciprocates his love, stands the Yacoubian Building. Even among the other old-fashioned European-style buildings on Suleiman Basha Street it stands out, despite its dilapidation, a monument to the Armenian millionaire who built it sixty years before: ten lofty storeys high, designed in classical style, its balconies decorated with Greek faces, all its columns, steps and corridors wrought in natural marble, and with an elevator by Schindler, it was home to the rich and fashionable before the Revolution, then to generals and senior civil servants after it, and now houses a cross-section of the hopeful, the hopeless, the cunning, the despairing, a few rich, many poor, and some on desperate paths leading to very different consummations.

The Yacoubian Building is a metaphor for a lost Cairo, a past time when the city, even more so than pre-war Shanghai and Rio, was a place of sophistication and decadence, wealth and pleasure - for the rich anyway. Once secular, exotic and alluring, where West and East mingled more sensually than dangerously, but not without a little of the latter too, Alaa Al Aswany's Cairo has become the locus of a more ambiguous and uncertain Egypt, a more sinister crossroads of rank corruption, police brutality and murderous religious zealotry, in which survivors from the past pick their way precipitously among the pitfalls.

Aswany has a beautifully wry way with his marvellous cast of characters, almost all of them occupants of the Yacoubian Building ranging from rooftop squatters to better-off occupants of its large apartments. He is a humane, perceptive, evocative story-teller, incapable of either a false note or a falsehood - which is doubtless why the novel offended several constituencies among his countrymen, displeased at its unblinking revelations of very different sides of contemporary Egypt when first published.

With an almost picaresque richness Aswany's novel follows the fortunes of the various residents, intertwining their lives in the curious ways that lives intertwine in reality: sometimes incidentally, sometimes fundamentally and life-changingly, sometimes starting close and drifting apart as time unfolds, sometimes coming unexpectedly together.

If the novel has a hero apart from the Yacoubian Building itself - but actually it does not - it is Zaki Bey, a gentle and civilised lover of women, but otherwise an ineffectual and now ageing son of a famous father. If it has a heroine it is Busayna, daughter of a poor widow who lives in the rooftop squat, who finds in her beauty a route from poverty. It has victims: one is Taha, who loved Busayna and wished to become a policeman but was rejected on the grounds that his father was merely a janitor (of the Yacoubian Building, of course), and whose deflection into fundamentalist Islam leads to tragedy. Another is Hatim Rasheed, the refined, intellectual, homosexual newspaper editor whose mother was French and who is in love with a working-class man, Abd Rabbuh, whose feelings are much divided between Hatim and his wife.

And there are the rich, corrupt politicians - Hagg Muhammed Azzam and Kamal el Fouli - and at the other end of the scale the equally scheming and manipulative but poor and one-legged Abhaskaron and his devious brother Malak, on the make and the take.

This cast enacts the large and small tragi-comedy of life, not just Cairene life but human life, in the purlieus of the Yacoubian Building and the city at whose centre it stands. It is a sexy, amusing, shocking, insightful, compelling tale. Zaki Bey is cheated by a woman who drugs him and makes off with his money. His servant Abhaskaron manages to buy, with Mala, one of the iron rooftop huts by bribing the lawyer who looks after the Yacoubian Building's affairs. When Taha is rejected by the police he goes to university and there falls in with religious-minded fellow students, who lead him first into Islamist politics and then, after he is beaten and raped by police following a demonstration, into armed terrorism. Busayna learns that she cannot support her family unless she submits to the predatory attentions of her boss at work. Azzam finds that he has to pay big bucks to have and keep his political career. Little by little the lives of the Yacoubian Building's denizens evolve remorselessly through tough educations and inevitabilities: some sink, some endure, some pay a price, some rise; but there is hope too, and tenderness, and much humour.

This is one of those novels that linger in the mind, its characters indelible and its atmosphere captivatingly distinctive. Alaa Al Aswany is a master observer of the human condition, unblinking but sympathetic, and unputdownable.