In the Country of Men: Political Novel That Maybe Isn't on Target

There's a bit of confusion in the news today about who is/will be the Prime Minister of Libya.  The BBC reports that Ahmed Maitig was sworn in, but apparently did not have the 121 votes necessary to win the job. The vote by parlementarians had been disrupted last week when gunmen surged into the assembly chamber, and the next vote was not recorded properly.  Nevertheless CNN reports that Maitig has been confirmed as prime minister.

The kerfuffle is symptomatic of the fall-out from the Arab Spring and the overthrowal of Libya's dictator Omar Qaddafi.  The struggle to found a democratic state  has been tortuous, but at least it seems to be less filled with torture than was the long dark period that preceded it.  How difficult it was has been on my mind, as my book groups have discussed  Hashim Matar's novel In the Country .  In it a small boy betrays his father who is taken by the dictatorship and tortured terribly.  The child does not understand what he has done, and when he is spirited out of the country, never to see his father again, he returns  in memory to what happened.

The book has been an international success, in large part, I think, because of the supposedly inside look it gives to a country weighed down by a revolution gone wrong.  The story is affecting--the boy is his mother's confidant, he admires his father greatly, he does not understand the evil that is afoot--but, according to some of my bookies, fatally flawed.

In the first discussion I led, two women were furious about the fact that the boy is portrayed as innocently giving away the secret of his father's political activism.  That doesn't happen in political families in countries like Libya, both said.  One came from Iran, the other's parents were part of the Haitian diaspora.  Both insisted that the first thing a child in such a family learns is never, ever to mention anything about what is said about politics inside the home.

"The boy was a fool, or his parents were," the Haitian woman said.

"We never knew who else was against the Shah until after he fell," the Iranian one added.  She said she was astounded to learn that one of her friends also was from a dissident family--and that an aunt by marriage had been an informer.  Talking about what you really think was just too dangerous to do around people that you weren't absolutely sure of.

The other members of my groups didn't see this until it was pointed out to them, as, I suspect, was the case for most readers in freer countries. The book can be read in many other ways--in another group, one of the members thought it was about child abuse since the mother can be seen as seducing her son.  Others thought it was about the thin line that separates courage and betrayal and sadism, and the ease with which it can be crossed.

Nowhere in the interviews I've read does Matar talk about the boy's role in his father's fate.  Is this a major fault?  I'm inclined to think it is.