Books and Arts; Book Review;

The big themes of history may be written by the victors, but it is the observant bystanders who fill in the details. When Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Cairo a year ago, among those watching was Ahdaf Soueif, a novelist born in Egypt and mostly resident in London. She missed the first three days as well as some of the postnatal struggles of the new era. As a liberal leftist she is at best a partial victor, given that Islamists took control of the streets after the big battles were won.

So her view of the revolution may never dominate the new textbooks now being prepared in Egypt. The bearded men who will most likely dictate what is in them, however, cannot entirely ignore what she recorded during the initial 18 days that felled the tyrant and his cronies. Well- observed details have an unmistakable ring of truth and revisionist historians ignore them at their peril.

Ms Soueif has collected her notes in a book that above all conveys what it felt like to be in Tahrir Square, to face the police on the Nile bridges, to stumble into makeshift hospitals filled with bloodied youths. She has an eye for ephemera at the edge of a vast stage: that tear-gas canisters become more not less potent when they pass their expiry date, that in July last year a Saudi flag appeared in Tahrir Square, that the soldiers took possession of any US dollar bills they came across as evidence of demonstrators being foreign agents.

She captures the deep contempt of the youths for the old rulers, quoting a teenage acquaintance as saying of the Mubarak men: “Before they open their mouths they’re liars; they breathe lies.”And she records imaginative chants of revolutionaries marching through hard-up districts of the city trying to win allies by warning the residents: “Prices up and no one cares / Next you’ll sell your bed and chairs.”

The lifeblood of Cairo visibly quickens during the days and months she chronicles. Her tone can be bombastic, breathless and laden with pathos, just as it was on the city streets. The narrative has a rushed, unfinished quality, much like the revolution itself. She inserts a flash-forward halfway through the account of the 18 days of revolution, in which she picks at what followed, especially the rise of the Islamists. All of it adds to the sense of drama.

The most successful passages juxtapose the personal and the political. The narrative of street fighting is interleaved with personal memories of a previous age: here the house of a beloved aunt, there the studio where she acted in a television drama. The reader gets a visceral sense of the dislocation the revolutionaries felt in their own city.

There is little clever analysis in the book, but that hardly matters. In years to come it will be a reminder to liberals—now once again in the opposition following the recent election victory of Egypt’s Islamists—of their most glorious hour. It should serve as a heartening reminder of what they are capable of achieving when united and courageous.