Lalami’s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel. Set in Lalami’s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that cliché ‘Write about what you know’, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef. He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that his father had died in an accident. But he finds out fairly soon in the book that his father is alive and wealthy in another part of town with a wife and a daughter who’s studying in America. Youssef makes contact with this father, Nabil Amrani, at a moment when Nabil is disillusioned with the daughter who seems to have left her family and roots behind, and taken up with an American boy friend. Nabil takes the boy up, installs him in his spare apartment and finds him a job in his company. At that point, his daughter, Amal, returns and reclaims her father’s attention. From that point on, events for Youssef take a much darker, tragic turn.
At first, the novel seems be centred on the two men, and a cast of other males who are portrayed as either dissolute or dangerous, or both. The need for a father/son bond is rendered in a slightly clichéd way, initially centripetal but later centrifugal. But the characters of both son and father are believably depicted. Later, the characters of the women in the book, the mother, Rachida, Nabil’s wife and daughter, Amal, move more into focus, and that is subtly and powerfully done, particularly Nabil’s wife whom we don’t actually meet.
There is a nod to post-modernism in this book when two of the central interviews, between father and son, and Rachida and Amal are repeated from the point of view of each of the protagonists. Perhaps a more confident novelist would not have needed this; the differences between the two versions seem, to my way of thinking, fairly minimal. However, the atmosphere of poverty and riches in contemporary Casablanca is very strong. And the final quarter of the book where the politics of the book become more focused in the surface of the writing is genuinely gripping; Lalami has made Youssef a rounded and engaging character whose fate the reader genuinely cares about.
Ian Pople