THE OTHER STRANGER HAD A TALE
Kamel Daoud interrogates Camus in The Meursault Investigation
Harun, the narrator of Kamel Daoud’s stunning debut novel The Meursault Investigation, is the brother of the nameless Arab murdered by Meursault, the narrator of Camus’ existential classic The Stranger. No one even remembers his dead brother, Harun says, because the author of that book depicted him as “a poor illiterate” whose sole purpose, apparently, was “taking a bullet and returning to dust — an anonymous person” with “no name, no face, no words”.
There are two central premises in this book: first, that the alienated Meursault is the author of the book we know as The Stranger, spinning a murder he committed (and stood trial for) into a beautifully chiselled tale about man’s existence in an absurd world; second, that the book we hold in our hands is a revisiting of the events in The Stranger — depicted from the perspective of the brother of the man shot and killed by Meursault one hot day on the beach in Algiers.
This is not just a clever, playful conceit. As executed by the gifted Daoud, an Algerian journalist, it provides the architecture for an intricately layered tale that not only makes us reassess Camus’ novel but also nudges us into a contemplation of Algeria’s history and current religious politics; colonialism and postcolonialism; and the ways in which language and perspective can radically alter a seemingly simple story and the social and philosophical shadows it casts backward and forward.
Borrowing the form of Camus’ novel The Fall (as Mohsin Hamid did in his 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Daoud has Harun tell a listener (a stand-in of sorts for us readers) the story of his life, and the abbreviated life of his brother, Musa.
This monologue structure proves remarkably elastic, as Harun’s reminiscences and ruminations cut back and forth in time, looping over and around the events recounted in The Stranger. Sometimes he uses Camus’ words. Sometimes his language deliberately echoes the razor precision of Camus’ prose. Sometimes he is more lyrical and expansive.
Early on in his monologue, Harun tries to make us visualise Musa: “He was quite tall, yes, and his body was thin and knotty from hunger and the strength anger gives. He had an angular face, big hands that protected me, and hard eyes because our ancestors lost their land.” Musa is the narrator’s older brother and their mother’s favourite, and, at the same time, a kind of Arab Everyman. His death devastates their mother — makes her obsessed with vengeance, and it casts a lengthening shadow over Harun. During the first days of Algerian independence in 1962, his mother goads — forces him, even — to kill a Frenchman as a way of evening the score with Musa’s death, an act that will forever divide his life into a before and after. He will find himself in trouble with the authorities not for killing a man per se, but for having bad timing — he should have joined the resistance and killed Frenchmen before Independence Day, an officer tells him.
In fact, Harun finds himself identifying with Meursault: “I was looking for traces of my brother in the book, and what I found there instead was my own reflection, I discovered I was practically the murderer’s double.” Both men have killed — randomly, gratuitously. Both have complex, conflicted relationships with their mothers. Both reject the consolations of faith.
“I detest religions and submission,” Harun says. “Who wants to run panting after a father who has never set foot on earth, has never had to know hunger or work for a living.”
In The Stranger (published in 1942 in the midst of World War II), Meursault’s rejection of religion reflects a view of life as meaningless and absurd, bounded by the inevitable fact of death. “Nothing,” he thinks, “nothing mattered.”
In The Meursault Investigation, Harun’s rejection of religion and the certitudes of all ideology occurs in a different context — against the backdrop of contemporary Algeria, where Daoud recently came under a death threat, issued on Facebook, by a radical Islamist preacher for being an apostate — and it comes to signify an embrace of individual liberty and choice.
Sometimes Harun longs to list his “impieties in detail”. He wants to “cry out that I’m free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth”.