The Maze of Justice: Diary of a Country Prosecutor: An Egyptian Novel

The bright and cheery cover of this book coupled with the description provided by the publisher could lead one to expect a light comedy; however, what the reader gets is more complex. One way to define comedy is a genre which pits two different societies against each other in conflict. The protagonist of the novel, a court functionary much like our District Attorney, is part of an archaic behemoth of a system which measures competency by the weight of the documents one produces and justice by the speed of the trial. The Napoleonic Code casts poverty and the destitute as the villain in a story which they can neither read nor comprehend. The bureaucracy is as amusing in its corruption as the fellaheen are amusing in their cynic fatalism and creativity in dealing with the legal system. The irony is that both the members of the legal system and the fellaheen see the other as fools- and both, in many ways, are correct. The book, too, is a black comedy which pokes fun at the very darkest aspects of human nature. For example, at the hospital of the city each morning, the dead are thrown out a window into the streets for the relatives to dispose of, and one has to pay a fee, a form of extortion, to a man called a barber in order to get a body buried. There is a scene in the book where the coroner has to exhume a body and we see the gravediggers exhume several wrong bodies before they finally get it right. The protagonist gets called to a poisoning - the most dreaded of all cases because he is required to interrogate the fatally sick victim while surrounded by vomit. All darkly amusing scenes. Aristotle defines comedy as an imitation of life. Tawfik Al-Hakim worked as a prosecutor and drew upon his life experiences to write this novel. It is richly detailed with believable characters from a corrupt and lusty mayor, to a Hamletesque indigent who the reader senses is only "mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly" and knows a "hawk from a handsaw" (2.2.272). What novel would be complete with out a saucy prostitute and a beautiful, innocent young maiden? The protagonist suffers from moments of clarity and anguish of conscience as he goes about his business at all hours of the day and night plodding through a mire of bureaucracy and delicate egos in an attempt to investigate crimes. While I burst out laughing quite frequently while reading this novel, the humor is cynical and dry revealing a satiric look at a corrupt society where "justice and the people are just words whose significance are unknown . . . they are just phrases whose only purpose is to be written on paper and delivered in orations, like many other words and moral attributes whose existence is not tangibly felt" (133). The idea that justice is a very intangible idea is a recurring theme in this novel. The Napoleonic Code seems incomprehensible by all but a few members of the legal system. The concern of most civil servants is job security and their place in the political

Mr.Hakim is one the best philosophers of the modern arab culture. He captures the heats and minds with his wisdom and wit. His styles is a unique blend of eastern and western paradighms delivered with the simplicity of the besant and the depth of the philosopher. His words and ideas passes through any translation with utter transparency...as if he is telling the story with his own words...The beauty of the story is that wisdom lies within the story not at the end...a lot of issues are left hanging and the story never ends...but you don't care...you will have what you are looking for