Reviewed by Mireille A. L. Djenno
If, as one of the central characters surmises near the outset of The Last Friend, “friendship begins with sharing secrets”, then the novel’s corollary lesson is quite likely that friendship also ends with sharing secrets.
Morocco-born author Tahar Ben Jelloun’s brisk tale, (translated from the French original Le dernier ami), plots the course of an exceptionally close and enduring friendship between two Moroccan men that is both strengthened and weakened by secrets. Ben Jelloun was born in Fez in 1944 and sets the early part of his novel in Tangier in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where he, like his main characters, spent his adolescence.
Although little descriptive effort is made to physically distinguish Tangier from the generic image of a dusty hookah-hazed North African metropolis, the overriding consciousness in The Last Friend is distinctly Moroccan, with local sensibilities and preoccupations deliberately delineated.
The particularity of the novel is all the more striking owing largely to Ben Jelloun’s skillful use of the novel’s setting as the personification of enigmatic secrecy: “Tangier was like an ambiguous encounter, a clandestine affair hiding other affairs, a confession that doesn’t reveal the full truth.”
The book’s logic simply put: “In friendship, as in love, everyone needs an element of mystery.” A letter, skeletally described in the prologue and later revealed in its entirety, addressed to Ali, by his last friend Mamed (Mohammed), is the nugget of mystery around which the story is formed. The secretive ambience created by this central cipher (and placed in interesting juxtaposition with the candor of the characters’ narration) is suggestive generally speaking of the intimacy of long-standing friendships and more specifically of a societal wariness of transparency of any kind.
The increasing brutality of the war between Algeria and its lingering colonial occupier, France (1954-1962), in which a newly-independent Morocco found itself cast in the role of regional broker in a conflict increasingly construed as (among other things) an ideological rift between East and West, tradition and modernity, etc., provides the backdrop to the pervasive malaise in which the characters’ lives are situated: “Everybody lived in wariness and fear. A diffuse fear, without name or shape.”
The youthful disillusionment of the main characters Ali, originally from Fez, and Mamed the brash, outwardly confident but inwardly tormented Tangier native, begins with their arrest and lengthy detainment at a disciplinary camp under suspicion of organizing a student protest against an increasingly repressive regime, yet another parallel with Ben Jelloun’s own life. Through relationships, professional triumphs, and personal failures however, their friendship remains strong, only to come under serious threat when life’s early challenges would seem to be behind them.
Although the novel traces the friendship of Ali and Mamed over many years, the story inhabits a very specific historical moment, one in which influences ranging from Frantz Fanon to Allen Ginsberg to Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Taylor converge to create characters with an emergent post-colonial, cosmopolitan awareness of themselves and of the world.
Both characters spend time abroad, Ali in Canada and Mamed in Sweden, which provides a larger context for their continuing reflection about their personal relationship and the shared cultural matrix in which it is embedded as well as paving the way for some of Ben Jelloun’s most pointedly humorous observations: “…bacteria aren’t stupid. They don’t want to be cured in a Moroccan hospital.”
Despite their privileged observation post, Ben Jelloun is careful to keep the characters emotionally vulnerable, particularly to jealousy, a recurrent sentiment between them: “Jealousy has a wide scope.”
Within Ben Jelloun’s body of work, which now includes more than thirty novels, books of non-fiction – most notably Racism Explained to my Daughter – and countless essays (he is a regular contributor to a number of periodical publications including France’s major daily newspaper ‘Le Monde’) The Last Friend stands out for its straightforward presentation and uncomplicated style, while still remaining true to characteristic themes of Ben Jelloun’s such as secrecy and the nuances of cultural contact.
The Last Friend is a prize-winning novel but more importantly, it is a winning novel, one that relies on tried and true techniques of ample character development, suspense, lean writing well-served by the translation of Kevin Michel Capé and Hazel Rowley (proving once again that in matters of literary translation, two heads are most often better than one) and resonant themes. It is as good a novel as Ben Jelloun has ever written and an excellent entrée into his work for the uninitiated.