Once Upon a Time in Cairo
by Sayed Gouda
Blacksmith Books, $95
Most people will recognise the characters who populate Once Upon a Time in Cairo. On the one hand, there are the generous, honest and self-reliant; on the other, the self-interested, unprincipled and manipulative. The reader's loyalty is stirred and polarised as readily as by a classic cowboy movie. Will good triumph? Or will injustice prevail?
What's fresh is the setting in which the story takes place, and here the title provides the answer. Once Upon a Time in Cairo mingles the familiar with the alien and in doing so performs an important task. The lives and concerns of the protagonists, with their often unfamiliar names, have much in common with our own.
A building in a gang-dominated Cairo neighbourhood is shared by upwardly mobile working-class families. The tranquil, ordered and traditional life of owner El-Arabi's family is shattered by two events: El-King, the boss of the area, covets their ground-floor shop; and one tenant seizes control of another's flat, falsely claiming that his wife has inheritance rights.
Believing the courts to be corrupt, the wronged owner rules out redress through legal channels, instead executing an armed raid with family and friends to regain possession. But El-Arabi's book-loving son-in-law, the independent Kamal, is killed and the stage is set for his widow, Amina, to pursue vengeance, pressing her three sons as they grow up to do the same.