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The Republic of False Truths by Alaa al-Aswany review – the personal cost of a failed coup

<span>Photograph: Liselotte Sabroe/EPA</span>
Photograph: Liselotte Sabroe/EPA

Early on in Alaa al-Aswany’s new novel, The Republic of False Truths, a conversation takes place between an older and a younger man that proves bleakly prophetic for what is to follow. Essam Shaalan, once a student protest leader in the 1970s, is now the manager of a foreign-owned Cairo factory; Mazen Saqqa, a young engineer, is the son of Shaalan’s former comrade and a union representative for the striking workers.

“You want to know the truth?” Shaalan tells Saqqa. “Egyptians don’t revolt, or if they do, their revolution is bound to fail because they’re cowardly and submissive by nature… The Egyptians love a dictatorial hero and feel safe when they submit to despotism. In Egypt, the only thing your struggle can lead to is your own destruction.”

Shaalan’s cynicism is intended to save Saqqa from his father’s fate – years of imprisonment on false charges – but this choice between struggle and self-preservation is one that most of the novel’s characters have to face. The Republic of False Truths is a fictionalised account of the short-lived Egyptian revolution of 2011, when mass protests forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign in favour of the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi, who was himself ousted in a coup two years later and replaced by General al-Sisi. Al Aswany’s books are banned in Egypt under al-Sisi, and the author now lives in New York, but he took part in the protests and exile has only whetted the blade of his satire. Saqqa and Asmaa, the young teacher with whom he strikes up an intimate email correspondence, are both part of the Enough! movement, a real activist organisation of which al-Aswany was a founder.

Like his internationally acclaimed debut The Yacoubian Building, The Republic of False Truths is a polyphonic novel, in a lively translation here by SR Fellowes, whose various narratives offer glimpses of the gathering unrest across Cairo society as the characters’ lives converge on Tahrir Square. Among them is General Alwany, head of the Apparatus, charged with discovering enemies of the state, a pious man who performs his religious devotions impeccably every morning before violently torturing political prisoners. Al-Aswany has always had a sharp eye for the inflated self-love of the powerful and knows that the most effective attack is mockery; in this respect, he is often compared to Mario Vargas Llosa. If the general appears almost cartoonish at times, he is intended as the caricature of a type.

Elsewhere, the author draws his characters with more delicate strokes: first-hand accounts by women arrested during the protest and forced to undergo humiliating “virginity tests” and sexual abuse at the hands of soldiers cut starkly through the novel’s comic elements and are all the more painful for requiring little fictional embellishment. “They’ll break your soul just so you won’t think of saying, ‘I want this country to have its rights,’” one young protester says.

The Republic of False Truths is a glorious, humane novel that chronicles the failure of a revolution and its personal cost without ever quite extinguishing hope of a better future.

The Republic of False Truths by Alaa al-Aswany, translated by SR Fellowes, is published by Faber (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply