Among the group of British writers who made their homes in Cairo during the Second World War, the name of P.H. Newby stands out as someone who, in the words of the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, “made the East a career.”

However, whatever Disraeli may have meant by those words, he presumably did not mean the construction that Newby put on them – since for him the East, and more properly Cairo, meant an apparently inexhaustible source of inspiration for the mostly comic novels that he produced throughout his writing career.

While other British writers in Egypt during the War also drew on their experiences for the works that later made them famous, notably Lawrence Durrell in his Alexandria Quartet of novels and Olivia Manning in her Levant Trilogy later adapted for television as The Fortunes of War, perhaps in their cases Egypt was mostly intended to provide a backdrop for events that were at least potentially epic in scope.

Only Newby saw another possibility emerging from his Egyptian experiences, using them to found what in his hands became almost a new genre – the Anglo-Egyptian comic novel.

Born in 1918 and sent to Egypt in 1940 as a private in the British Army Medical Corps, Newby was unusual among his writer peers in that he saw combat both in France and then in Egypt where he served in the Desert War. Released from military service after the Battle of Alamein in December 1942, he taught at Cairo University until 1946, after which he returned to England.

Much of his later career was spent at the BBC, where he climbed the ranks before becoming director of its classical music radio station. Meanwhile, he published a first novel in 1946 before eventually seeing success with his Anglo-Egyptian novels, starting with The Picnic at Sakkara in 1955 and culminating in Kith in 1977.

Of his 20 novels, five at least are set in Egypt, with The Picnic at Sakkara, Revolution and Roses (1957), and A Guest and His Going (1959) forming a connected trilogy and others, including Kith and Something to Answer for, standing alone. The latter novel won the first UK Booker Prize for fiction in 1969.

Newby also wrote several non-fiction books drawing on Egyptian themes, including several on ancient Egypt and a well-received biography of the mediaeval Ayyubid Sultan Saladin. Taken together, they would seem to show that his Egyptian experiences, starting in his early twenties in the unpromising circumstances of the Second World War, shaped many of his later choices, notably by providing the inspiration for his best-known novels.

Other foreign writers have been attracted to Egyptian subject-matter because it has offered them material for a sequence of novels, mostly using Egypt as a canvas on which the doings of their characters can be traced over successive episodes, rather in the way in which 19th-century writers like the French novelist Honore de Balzac used Paris as the setting and main character in his works.

However, perhaps only Newby was able to drain his novels of the rhetorical excesses –and much of the orientalism – that infect even many of the best of such works. For him, Cairo was a natural setting for lighter novels on a smaller scale, comedies of manners, political and social satires, which even if they lack the epic proportions of those of some of his peers may have given equal or even greater pleasure to readers.

 

Egyptian Trilogy: The Picnic at Sakkara, Revolution and Roses, and A Guest and His Going, all published in the late 1950s, are often seen as making up Newby’s “Egyptian Trilogy” of novels, with the tone of the whole established in the first.

The novel focuses on Edgar Perry, a lecturer, like Newby himself, at Cairo University during the days of Egypt’s last monarch King Farouk. He is given the job of English tutor to a wealthy Pasha and uses the position as a way of interesting him in plans to improve the living conditions of the students, even producing an elaborate report. Meanwhile, the Pasha’s wife the Princess, at work on a novel in French about women in ancient Egypt, hires Perry to translate it into English, a task complicated by her many changes of mind.

Perry becomes involved in all manner of scrapes, finding himself caught up in a student demonstration outside Cairo University and pursued into the neighbouring Botanical Gardens and then having to be rescued from a lecture at the British Institute in Zagazig, which despite its innocuous subject-matter risks getting out of hand. Later, he is imprisoned on political charges, having been apprehended while making enquiries about the statistics of student housing in Giza.

“‘If you want to make a full confession,’ said the police captain, his eyes firmly closed, ‘including the names of all your accomplices and full details of your plot, I can easily provide you with pen and paper.’” Even the intervention of the Pasha is not able to extricate him. Meanwhile, the Princess, convinced that Perry’s arrest is part of a plot to weaken her social position, insists that the Pasha take further action.

“‘Darling,’ she said to her husband, ‘they’ve arrested that little man because it’s a good way of striking at me, and through me at the Palace. Everyone knows Professor Perry is under my protection! All they want is for me to go on my knees to them! It is a government of cannibals and Bolsheviks! I must telephone the prime minister and insist on Professor Perry’s release.’”

After Perry’s eventual release from prison, a picnic at Sakkara takes place. There are multiple misunderstandings, including an attempt on Perry’s life. Seeing him off at Cairo Railway Station following his decision to leave Egypt, Professor Waldo Grimbley, Perry’s ever-flexible head of department, hands him a reference which, he says, “fully explains all the circumstances. I’ve taken the broad view. After all, it isn’t everyone who can adapt himself to life in a foreign country.”

Other novels in the series continue Newby’s manipulation of such stock comic themes, with various foreign ingenus being similarly outwitted by the complications of increasingly uncontrollable situations against a background of a shifting cast of student radicals, hard-to-read officials, overly subtle Pashas, and often well-meaning, but limited in their ability to influence events, Egyptian and English peers.

Revolution and Roses, the second novel in the trilogy, takes the story on to the July 1952 Revolution, as seen from the perspective of characters that include one of Newby’s visiting English ingenus, a Greek-Egyptian businessman worried about what the unfolding Revolution might mean for his presence in the country, and, a Newby first, but perhaps foreshadowed by the basically decent, but out of his depth Professor Perry in Picnic at Sakkara, the English journalist Elaine Brent.

She thinks that her presence in Alexandria during the crisis that eventually saw King Farouk abdicate following a tense few days holed up in the Ras al-Tin Palace could yield a potential scoop. Contacting her editor in London, she receives a telegram – “hundred and fifty pounds to your credit at Barclays stop cover harem angle stop.” Though nobody in Alexandria, in the few days before Farouk’s abdication, seems to have any idea of what is going on, “she made them call a cab to take her into town” to the bar of the Cecil Hotel, at the time a well-known rendez-vous for journalists.

A Guest and His Going, the third novel in the series, is set in London during the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Tripartite Aggression, and brings together characters from the earlier two novels. Perry is now working for the Helvetia School of English in Hampstead, with an embittered Grimbley, fired from his job at Cairo University even before the Revolution, his reluctant colleague. A former student, Muawiya Khaslat, responsible for many of the upsets in The Picnic at Sakkara, arrives on a British Council-sponsored visit,

Things have changed in Egypt in Perry’s absence. The Pasha, the Princess now dead and his wealth redistributed, has been “confined to a small house on what had once been his country estate.” The Dean of the Faculty at Cairo University, Perry’s former employer, has “lost his job for political reasons and was now teaching in a school in Asyut.” Perry himself, increasingly ruminative, reflects on his own situation and wider political change.

“The Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, and now Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal – all these phenomena could be explained more profoundly than with the help of those terms, communism, colonialism, national self-determination, and the like, that you saw in the papers. Just what this profound explanation could be he was not absolutely sure.”

 

Booker Prize: Newby won the first UK Booker Prize for fiction for his 1968 novel Something to Answer for, one of his Anglo-Egyptian novels.

While the Prize has changed a lot since Newby won it, notably by expanding its reach to the United States, his book won the 1969 Prize even with some formidable competition. It is a far more elaborate, longer, and more densely plotted novel than the earlier ones in the Egyptian Trilogy. The comedy has been turned down, or off, to be replaced by something more sinister. Mysteries abound, and while there are bizarre episodes and strange coincidences, the most appropriate way of responding to them is probably with nervous laughter.  

Townrow – we do not learn his first name – the bored administrator of what seem to be various trust funds in London, was briefly deployed in Port Said at the end of the Second World War as part of his military service. Ten years later, as the Suez Crisis looms, he receives a letter from the widow of a Lebanese businessman living in Port Said whom he had briefly met a decade before.

She wants him to come to Egypt despite her ten-year silence. Her husband has died, she says in suspicious circumstances, and it is essential to find some way to protect the family’s property, scattered between Port Said, Beirut in Lebanon, and Switzerland, from what she fears will be swingeing sequestrations. “As he shaved, a muscle twitched at the corner of his left eye, and he put down his razor to look out at the north London rooftops. It was a grey day. Perhaps it would be no bad thing to be out of England for a couple of months,” and so begins Townrow’s mission.

Something to Answer for is late Newby, his partly bewildered, partly long-suffering, or long-suffering because bewildered, vision of an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous outside world deployed in a novel that specialises in multiple, sometimes barely comprehensible and possibly at least partly hallucinated, muddles.

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* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly