After reading “Al-Feel al-Azraq” (The Blue Elephant, 2012) by Egyptian author Ahmed Mourad last year, I was pretty shaken and snippets of the book kept resurfacing in my head for weeks after.
In an interview with Al-Shorouk newspaper last year, Mourad said that he intended to “exhaust” his readers, each to his own truth.
In February, Mourad's 385-page sci-fi thriller, published by Dar al-Shorouk, was shortlisted for the eighth edition of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), which should lead to it getting translated into English.
The events of the book are built around the main character, Yehia, a psychologist who returns to his practice after five years of chosen isolation, a feeble attempt to heal from a loss. He returns to Abbassiya Psychiatric Hospital an indolent human being hooked on poker and scotch on the rocks. He is assigned “8 West,” a special department for mental patients who are also criminals. His return coincides with the arrival of Sherif, a patient accused of killing his wife. Sherif is also the older brother of Lobna, Yehia's first love.
8 West disrupts Yehia's trivial and monotonous existence and hurls him into a sea of hallucinations, magic spells, numbers and demons, swirling around a tattoo parlor and a blue pill.
A friend gives Yehia a DMT pill (Dimethyltryptamine is a chemical simulation of a natural substance the body creates before death, known for creating out-of-body experiences). It bears the print of a six-legged elephant. Having taken it, our antihero can travel through the layers of time to unravel the darkness of a demon, Nayel, that comes to life through a tattoo drawn on the thighs of a barren woman before invading the body of her partner during intercourse. It’s a plague that slowly drives the targeted couple to doom.
The novel is heavy and engaging: Mourad's love for detail is almost mesmerizing. The reader is instantly sucked in through the meticulousness of his descriptive writing, his portrayal of every sentiment. The clarity and sharpness of the smallest detail sends a chill through your spine and leaves you literally breathless with eyes as wide as two teacups casting glances at imaginary shadows around the room.
“I approached the stone gate to see the corpse of a hanged woman, her hands were tied and a thick robe was wrapped around her neck; her tongue stuck out and her eyes were decomposed, half her head was shaved and her purple feet dangled lifelessly in the air,” Yehia narrates. “When I got to the gate I noticed thousands of human teeth planted into the wood.”
“The Blue Elephant” also shows that Mourad has mastered research. It’s a fictional work that is solidly backed by some ingenious investigative work into psychology, body language, history, and a bourgeois social circle that no other author has managed to portray justly.
“She took out of her medium sized designer bag a bottle I knew well, La Fee Verte — Absinthe, the green genie, 68-percent alcohol,” Mourad writes, in a line that is typical of the little notes he uses to describe his characters.
“The Blue Elephant” thus takes a mundane, used-and-abused theme and transforms it into a solid and coherent masterpiece.
Mourad, 35, is not only a writer but a photographer and graphic designer who studied cinematography. He was reportedly one of former President Hosni Mubarak's personal photographers. His first novel, “Vertigo,” about a crime involving high-ranking officials, was published by Merit in 2007, became a bestseller, and was translated to three languages before being adapted for a TV series in Ramadan 2012. His second novel was another suspenseful mystery, titled “Turab al-Mas” (Diamond Dust, 2010).
In one of his blue trips down the path of darkness, Yehia delves into the stony alley of Cairo in the eleventh and twelfth centuries with its beggars and dancing monkeys. (Short skits starring a small monkey in a dress dancing and smoking were apparently a kind of street art and entertainment at that time.) He passes under Al-Metwally gate where the hanged woman dangles, and notes the filthy children, mummified animals hung in doorways, and camels carrying goatskins full of water. It’s a free ride to the past in which the possessed tattooed woman is tortured and sentenced to be drowned in the Nile — a spectacular scene where men and women gather to slay the bearer of evil.
Another science fiction novel is also shortlisted for the IPAF this year: “Frankenstein in Baghdad” by Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi. It’s described by critics as mix of magical realism, horror and sci- fi. The other four nominations are largely historical and psychological fiction.
Opinions vary about “The Blue Elephant” and its IPAF nomination.
Writers Helmi al-Namnam, the author of several books about the Muslim Brotherhood and its founder, and Mekkawi Saeed, a prolific novelist whose most recent was “Moqtanayat Wust al-Balad” (Downtown Collection), welcomed the book’s nomination.
But Mourad's bestsellers have been described as shallow by many.
Sally Noor, a reader in her twenties, wrote on online book club Goodreads that with “The Blue Elephant” Mourad built a dramatically perfect novel that has no message. Others said the abundance of detail was tedious and came at the expense of the ending.
Some reviewers loved the beginning of the book but found the open-ended finale weird, disturbing and rushed. I disagree with this: in my view, Mourad deliberately kept it open to give his readers a space to create their own ending.
Novelist Mohamed al-Aown, author of revolution-themed novel “Tahrir Night,” said in an interview last week with Vetto Gate Website that there are other Egyptian novels more worthy of the nomination. He described “The Blue Elephant” as simply entertaining, and said thrillers should not make it onto such awards lists.
In an interview with newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm earlier this month, Mourad responded that the controversy around his nomination is relative.
“Linking ranking and popularity to shallowness is naïve,” he added.
The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction will be announced on April 29, in Abu Dhabi, on the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.
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