Review: What gets lost along the way

Entwined characters and convoluted histories make for a compulsively readable novel.

The parallel lives of two boys, Karim and Badar, intersect in this novel. Karim is born after his mother, Raya, marries an older man to protect her family’s honour. She later flees to Dar es Salaam and remarries. The 14-year-old Badar is employed by Raya and her husband, where he unwittingly becomes part of a secret. When things come to a head, Karim steps in to rescue him.

The brilliant Karim is without a mother’s love during his formative years, but has many advantages over the orphaned and impoverished Badar. The latter’s story is one of endurance; the former’s the evolution of one of Africa’s future Big Men, with all the moral corruption that entails. None of this, Gurnah suggests, is inevitable, leaving readers to reflect on the forces shaping each of these men’s lives.

The women of the novel provide some of these forces: Raya, Karim’s mother and Badar’s employer; Badar’s stepmother, helpless in the face of her husband’s silent rage; and Fauzia, the loved one who becomes a wife.

Theft is a quiet novel of some beauty, focused on character studies, with Gurnah musing on human frailty. It’s suffused with a sense of place, particularly the countryside and Zanzibar’s old town. Gurnah also comments on the destructive influence of tourism and “white saviourism” on Tanzanian and Zanzibari culture. Whereas we often hear about the harmful nature of tourism, Gurnah reserves most of his wrath for the condescending aid workers who helicopter in and leave a trail of devastation behind them.

The title echoes across the novel – “theft” doesn’t refer only to the literal stealing of possessions, but that of potential and personal independence.