A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah, now 76, moved to Britain in 1968 as a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution. His books often feature people who leave what they know and arrive “in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions”, to use the words of a character from his 2001 novel By the Sea. Theft, Gurnah’s first book since his Nobel win, is in part a continued inquiry into familiar themes of exile and memory, home, longing and loneliness. It is also a poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal, set against Tanzania’s tourism boom during the 1990s.
The novel follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, chronicling their uneasy passage into adulthood. Karim’s story begins on Pemba Island, where his mother, Raya, leaves her joyless marriage while he’s a toddler, first returning with him to her parents in Unguja and later relocating without him to Dar es Salaam, where she remarries. When Karim enrols for university in the city, he stays with her and her husband, Haji Othman. He returns to Zanzibar once he finishes his studies to take up a position in development. There, Karim crosses paths with Fauzia – once a sickly, epileptic child, now a confident young woman training to become a teacher. The two fall helplessly in love.
Sometime during Karim’s second year of university, 13-year-old Badar arrives at the Othmans’ house, sent by his adopted parents as a servant (“There was to be no more school for him. There was no money”). Homesick and haunted by his abandonment, Badar gradually learns to adjust to his new life. While Raya, Haji and Karim are all kind to him, Haji’s father appears to resent him. Badar senses that the hostility isn’t exactly directed at him, but rather at his real father, “a restless troublemaker”, as he’s often been told. It isn’t until several years later, when he is accused of theft by the old man, that the reader is finally let in on the truth about Badar’s father and his ties to the Othman family. The revelation is a modest development, only confirming Badar’s suspicion that “there was something degrading about his circumstances”. True intrigue begins when Karim, now married to Fauzia, invites Badar to start anew with them in Zanzibar, arranging a job for him at a boutique hotel: a gesture that leaves Badar profoundly, almost existentially, indebted to him.
Debt, both as a real monetary burden and a symbolic relational pact, has been a recurring feature of Gurnah’s writing. In his 1987 debut novel, Memory of Departure, impoverished Hassan Omar invites himself into his wealthy uncle’s home in Nairobi, on the basis of an inheritance that is owed to his mother. By the Sea featured two Zanzibari migrants who reunite in an English seaside town, years after a loan gone awry had led one to lose his family home to the other. Paradise, shortlisted for the Booker prize, told the story of young Yusuf’s quest for freedom after he is pawned to an ivory merchant by his parents. It is set in what is now Tanzania; then, at the turn of the 20th century, a beleaguered place on the verge of German colonisation.
Theft is in dialogue with these books, with the motif of debt grounding wider ruminations: on hospitality, autonomy and servitude as well as the nuanced distinction between obligation and generosity. For Gurnah, the record-keeping principle underlying a ledger is also one that animates human exchange more broadly, corrupting even the most innocent of bonds. As the tale progresses, Karim increasingly hectors and dominates Badar, demanding gratitude, deference and eventually even subordination and silence, convinced that without his help, Badar “would have ended up living on the streets as some kind of a criminal”.
The final third is the novel’s most compelling section. Karim’s testiness with Badar takes a toll on their friendship, while his relationship with Fauzia is complicated by the arrival of a difficult baby and Karim’s domineering mien. The island, meanwhile, is in the throes of profound change. Foreign exchange rules have been relaxed. More and more hotels dot the coast; houses once belonging to Omani sultans and Indian-owned buildings abandoned amid the post-independence exodus have been transformed into heritage retreats, while old premises, now in the hands of foreign investors, are “gilded fantasies of oriental luxury”. Everywhere, European tourists with no Kiswahili and little regard for the locals “went about their pleasures with frowning intensity”.
The same holds for the EU-marshalled aid workers Badar encounters, volunteer tourists who journey “all this way to do their good deeds”, bringing condescension, “such ill humour” and an insensitive spirit of adventure. Gurnah’s sly pairing of volunteer tourism and the colonial enterprise, as when Badar muses on the kind of work one hotel guest, the director of an international relief exchange programme, would be doing if she was around “during the old good times of the empire”, hints at harms glossed over in the name of “goodwill”. The idea of poisoned benevolence is picked up again when Karim becomes involved with a British volunteer, a software engineer bent on a local affair. “Does beauty like hers make its own rules, disregarding responsibilities and duties?” Badar wonders. “Or was it that coming to a place like theirs she felt entitled to please herself because in the end it was she that mattered?” Powerful, affecting and provocative, Theft is a vital addition to Gurnah’s remarkable body of work; a novel steeped in heartbreak and loss but one that ultimately refuses despair.
• Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah review is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
