Leaving Tangier

14 kilometres.

Or about 8 1/2 miles for you colonials. That's the distance between Morocco and Spain, Europe and Africa, Christianity and Islam, wealth and poverty. It's not that far, really. In Tanger, Azel and his friends sit around smoking kif, sick to death of a world where nothing happens except when the police decide to do a raid, and in Almería (Arabic name, like so many other names in southern Spain; al-mariyat means "The mirror") across the water is paradise. Or so they would like to think, at least. All they need to do is get across the Med without drowning and into Spain without getting arrested by the guardia. How hard can it be? And if a rich Spaniard offers you a chance, what are you willing to do to take it?

Obviously, it's hard for me to judge just how authentic Ben Jelloun's image of working-class Tanger, and the unemployed 20-somethings in it, is. And while Thomas isn't the first to comment that Ben Jelloun isn't a very vocal critic of the Moroccan government - Leaving Tanger very pointedly ends right as the current king ascends the throne, complete with crowds chanting "Long live the king" - I'm not sure that bothers me. When we're talking of political issues, I tend to prefer novels that deal with wider perspectives than just a specific government or a specific country, that try to get at the issues underneath the issues. And Leaving Tanger - a clumsy English title, that lacks both the deceptively simple Partir of the original and the rather poetic To the Other Side of the Ocean of the Swedish translation - seems to have the makings of a very fine novel; one that's about both geographical, cultural, political, religious and sexual outsiders in New Europe, of the difficulties of being human when everyone is expected to conform to the labels put upon you by others. Azel sleeps with women and men but refuses to be labeled bi or homosexual, he's a muslim who think the idea of women wearing veils is ridiculous and gladly gets both drunk and stoned, he doesn't belong in Morocco and he's not welcome in Europe... Through him, and the other people he meets who for various reasons exist on the fringe of society, Ben Jelloun wants to create a multi-faceted mirror of the ever-the-twain-shall-meet relationship of those 14 kilometres, with subtly hinted roots going all the way back to the days of the Califate. It should be a set-up for a Great Old World Novel, and every now and then it almost is one - funnily enough, the bits I find the most affecting are the ones where he spends an entire chapter on a secondary character. Maybe this should have been a collection of short stories instead.

Because unfortunately, he sabotages himself a little too often. His prose walks a wobbly line between concise poetry and dry reporting that's occasionally beautiful and occasionally (and far too often, at critical points in the narrative) reads more like a summary of the novel than the novel itself. Especially towards the end, it feels like Ben Jelloun has handed in a first draft that still needs fleshing out; characters come and go in a flash, plot lines are abandoned with no follow-up, and we never really get a completely clear picture - authentic or not - of the world the novel takes place in.

Ultimately, Leaving Tanger is a frustrating book. Frustrating because it describes people, and by extension a world, trapped in a situation that cannot continue indefinitely but where there are no clear answers to the question how to move forward. That's fine; a good novel should be more about asking questions than answering them. But it's also frustrating because it doesn't fulfill its promise, and because it seems to give up on itself towards the end (despite its short length) in a way that makes the somewhat hopeful ending sound like a lie. And that's a pity for both the novel and the real-world issues it tries to tackle.