The Open Door

"Yes. It spans a period of around ten years, starting before the revolution and ending after it. It’s told through the perspective of the central character, Layla, and follows her coming of age in the context of bourgeois Egyptian family life, which is shown to be simultaneously stultifying and oppressive for independent-minded women. Layla is beset on all sides by people who undermine her in different ways. The older patriarch is mostly just unpleasant. He is tough, unbending, thinks everything should be done by his rules and doesn’t brook any dissent. At the same time, men of Layla’s generation (including her brother and cousin), speak like feminists and claim to support the advancement of women, but when it comes down to it, they don’t take Layla very seriously. They’re nice to her and they’re not domineering but they talk down to her and say she shouldn’t do various things for her own safety and so on. At the same time, the large majority of the women around her are so obsessed with status, keeping up appearances and doing the right thing that they cannot offer a way out for her. It’s a book about an (internally) rebellious woman in a society that has various ways of suppressing that rebellion. Everything changes as Layla becomes involved with the revolutionary moment following 1952 when, to put it very simply, Nasser and his Free Officers’ movement overthrew the king and the vestiges of the British Empire, ushering in a moment of national rebirth for Egypt and the beginning of a truly post-colonial era. It’s through these that Layla manages to become a fully realized woman. This is where, probably for a modern reader, the book falls a little flat because the message is quite uncomplicated: Layla is liberated both as an Egyptian and as a woman by being part of the revolution. The book ends with a great celebration of anti-colonial resistance and the freedom it offers women in a way that feels overly idealized – at least that’s how I read it. It is. There are some very good characters in it, and some good moments of humour alongside the social observation. One of my favourite characters is the odious Dr Ramzi, who is a professor at the university she goes to. He takes her under his wing, but then turns out to be the most boring, self-obsessed type of academic who has no interest in her whatsoever except as a status symbol. It’s translated by Marilyn Booth, who is one of the great Arabic translators working today. She has a little afterword in it, written in 2000, in which she says that it is a little too melodramatic for a modern audience. But reading it again now, I wonder whether we might be back into the age of melodrama. It might have been too melodramatic for a 2000s audience, but maybe a 2025 audience is ready for that again. It’s probably a little bit too long. No, it’s about 380 pages. But it’s probably about 60 pages too long. By the end, we’ve got the point."