Matar’s novel is framed by two events, one where the narrator, Khaled, is a participant, the other where he is not. The first is the shooting at the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, where the narrator is one of the protestors who is shot and nearly dies. The other is the killing of Gadafi, where the narrator’s two friends, Mustafa and Hosam, are present but he is not. After being shot, Khaled never returns to Libya. The novel fills in the intervening 27 years of his life, which is predicated around his friendships with the two other men. Compressing 27 years into 450 pages inevitably makes for a discursive, piecemeal read. The novel is composed of short chapters which sometimes leap across the decades. With Mustafa, the common link is that they were both shot and are both survivors. With Hosam the link is literature, as Hosam is a writer who Khaled admires, even though Hosam’s literary flame burned out long ago. Khaled teaches English literature, and this connection permits the novel to go off on the occasional tangent, such as when Hosam decides to research writers who lived close to Shepherd’s Bush, where Khaled (and briefly Hosam) are holed up. However, Hosam also investigates Near or Middle Eastern acts of political terrorism that have occurred in London. The book drops names merrily: Edward Said, Salim Lozi, Dambuzo Marechera. It feels as though there’s sufficient material for half a dozen novels, as the reader gradually realises that this will be a meandering read, drifting towards the great sea of Gadafi and the Arab Spring. Khaled himself is an insistently passive figure. His family flit in and out of the novel, making a solitary visit to London once (although Khaled himself travels to Europe on several occasions). Khaled’s reclusiveness doesn’t stop him from hanging out in Holland Park and Soho: he remains a sociable character, with an on-off lover, but he is also an empty figure, denuded of his homeland, cauterised by fear.
My reading took in a couple of personal reactions. Khaled’s home town, for which he feels a steady nostalgia, is Benghazi. When the Arab Spring happens, he could return, as do his friends, but he chooses not to. I recall in 2011, the early days of Twitter, following the uprising in Benghazi, marvelling at the courage of Mo Nabbous, a civilian journalist who was shot dead by the regime. Whilst My Friends references and uses the Arab Spring as a touchstone, the secondhand rendition of events (mostly through emails sent by Hosam to Khaled) doesn’t quite seem to do justice to the bravery shown by ordinary citizens who were willing to lay down their lives to overthrow dictatorial regimes. Likewise, although the novel was published in 2024, and Khaled notes that parts of Benghazi have been destroyed by the militia wars that came in the wake of the uprising, it feels as though this is all glossed over. There is one passage in the novel which talks of the beauty of Derna, Khaled’s mother’s home town. Looking it up, I learned that the city had been virtually wiped out and thousands were killed when a dam burst flooded the town. Despite all the detail of the novel (and recognising that this event occurred outside the novel’s timeframe), Khaled’s curious relationship to Libya colours the book. It is a Libyan novel where Libya feels almost entirely absent. The narrator’s traumatic reaction to his shooting reflects the book’s traumatic relationship with his country.
