A Flâneur at the Revolution

I read Waguih Ghali's Beer at the Snooker Club

Creatures, imagine that you are intelligent and enervated, and living in complex political times where the threat of violence is everpresent, and when you were a child you thought you were rich but with late adolescence came the discovery that you were more of a sponge or remora on the great family shark. Imagine that you have received the best of British education (derogatory) and so you can read books, play polo, and turn bad beer into “Bass” with the addition of hard liquor, but that is about the full extent of your skills. Imagine that you are Egyptian, and heterosexual (also derogatory), and it is the 1950s, that age of revolution, and you are a person with a lot of unacknowledged internal weather—and, creature, I love you already.

I loved you when you were Sidney Carton, and when you were Grantaire, and when you were the hotel owner in Graham Greene’s Haiti novel, and even—yes, creature, I admit it—even when you were P.J. O’Rourke. I love you all the more because you’re from the place you’re in.

This is Ram, the narrator of Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, a louche and low-key semiautobiographical novel about the years immediately following the Suez Crisis. He’s an alcoholic and a gambler, obviously. He knows he isn’t worth much, obviously, and he says that to women, oh how the feminine heart goes pit-a-pat for such abasements. There are funny little riffs about the difference between British and French education, and a very good, again very low-key speech about how Ram is actually Egyptian despite spending so much time at the country club. And every now and then there is a moment like the one where a woman who has been looking out the window turns to look at Ram, and her hair falls away from her face, and he sees the new scar that a soldier’s whip has cut across her face.

And then he continues to woo her, because absolutely none of these moments when you see what the characters are risking in opposing Nasser’s dictatorship are marked in any way. There’s no ominous music cue or sudden silence in the narrative—I stopped, I felt a sudden silence, my heart thudded, but Ram’s didn’t. There’s both an aesthetic power and a moral claim in that choice: Political courage isn’t a thing that changes you, that makes you a hero and not a loser; it isn’t something for a certain kind of person which you aren’t. It’s just what you do, because of where you are, the same way you go tor the snooker club because that also is where you are.

I respect that a lot and it’s a big source of the novel’s power—it’s something Ghali gets that none of the other writers I name-checked above really do. Ghali handles all of the politics more or less the same way, including actions it seems like Ram might regret if he wanted to think that hard. That list above where I cram Les Mis in next to Republican Party Reptile suggests a way of relating to politics which appears at many different points on the political spectrum. This helpless, shrugging activism doesn’t protect you from unwise action, or complete detachment from reality (“The Chinese are not starving at all,” Ram insists). But it does have a certain low appeal, because it tends to both involve personal risk and find that risk embarrassing.

Most of the time I did want this novel to go further, to get bigger, a touch of psychedelia or sublimity—I could’ve added The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida to that list above, or even A Fan’s Notes—but I’m not sure that imagined bigger, bolder novel would really have worked. The bigger you go stylistically, or like, in terms of sincere belief (or whatever we’re calling Graham Greene’s deal), the harder it is to sustain a small, wry, defeated tone. The perspective of the mole or vole, some small burrowing, undermining thing.

Photo of Ronnie O’Sullivan at German Masters Snooker Final by “DerHexer,” via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.