The Fortune Men: A Novel

"I will just say right off the bat, this was a story I had no idea about. And I’m assuming that almost everybody who encounters the book won’t have any idea about it either. Yet it’s a story that seems to me exactly the sort of story that we should know about, because of the ways in which empire and its legacies continue to affect the lives of people within Britain and the lives of those in places formerly colonised by Britain. So this book is a really important intervention. She destabilises what readers might think they know about British society. It really isn’t a work of nonfiction. I say that as a compliment, because I think one often sees heavily researched novels that are talking about some episode in the past, which give you the feeling that the author has been carried away by their research and wants to show off what they’ve learned. And in the meantime, not necessarily taking advantage of all of the opportunities that fiction provides—to go to places where you don’t have sources. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Mohamed really takes advantage of the novel as the vehicle for telling this story. She certainly takes advantage of the use of time, the passage of time. The other books we’ve talked about all handle that quite differently. On the one hand, we get this extremely condensed timeline—the event happens, there’s a trial, there’s an execution, all over a short period—but within that she’s giving us this whole global story that also goes back in time through the character’s earlier life. She gives us the backstory of the victim of the crime as well. So she’s able to use this novel to give what seems like a detective story, on one hand, but then bring into it all of these other kinds of perspectives. And she’s able to mobilise our empathy in a bunch of ways. You certainly feel horror at what happens to Mattan, but at the same time she’s not turning him into some kind of saint. Equally you feel real compassion for the victim of the crime and the family that’s left behind. So it’s really great at pressing against the record of the past but doing it in a way that gives us a much more enriched and nuanced picture of how people deal with the constraints that their historical moments place upon them."