'Thieves' Robbed of Its Potential

On the cover of Mathias Enard’s “Street of Thieves,” geometric blue and white lines zigzag across a red background. This dynamism, combined with the title, suggests a labyrinthine thriller; the blurb on the back sets it up even further as a wild, socially relevant coming-of-age story. Unsurprisingly, though, judging a book by its cover proves to be a mistake. “Street of Thieves” delivers well on the socially relevant elements of its premise but presents a plot with little electricity and a main character without much depth.

The book traces the story of Lakhdar, a modern Moroccan man who travels across the Eastern hemisphere after being disowned. Settings range from Morocco to Tunisia and Spain as Lakhdar works for a fundamentalist Islamic group, holds down a variety of odd jobs, and gets involved in a love affair. However, all plot events feel slightly unimportant. Lakhdar is frequently on the outside of whatever major international event happens to be occurring: while his girlfriend gets involved in Occupy Spain and his friends become terrorists, Lakhdar simply sits inside drinking beer and typing out manuscripts for a living.

Granted, there’s an element of realism in this. If Enard aimed to describe the turbulent environment of the Middle East from an everyday perspective, highlighting the undramatic, human side of revolution, he’s succeeded. And there is definite social value in seeing an area so often defined by its violent extremists described instead by someone who simply wants love and a good book to read. In its quietness, then, the book emphasizes that, for many people in the Middle East, violent extremism is an unhappy, depressing fact of life that can be neither avoided nor stopped. This sense of pointlessness and futility is expressed particularly well when Lakhdar describes a terrorist he once knew: “Journalists and writers…hurried to understand and explain as if there were something truly interesting in the paranoid ravings from the a brain of a bastard so frazzled that even Al-Qaida didn’t want him.”

As far as its social conscience, the book also makes some incisive observations about the path to terrorism, Islam, and the internet. In one moving section, the Islamist organization leads a mob to attack a bookseller. Accusing the man of blasphemy, the group expects Lakhdar to assault the man, and Lakhdar reluctantly does so: he simply wants to please the people who have taken him in, seeing no comfortable way out of the situation. This, Enard suggests, is the trap of terrorist organizations: the poor and lost become entangled in notions of belonging and expectation.

Lakhdar is also an internet aficionado, using Facebook to connect with girls in the Western world—or as he calls it, the “free zone.” The web, though never a major plot point, plays a regular part of his life, providing him with connection and relief. Thus, Enard subtly acknowledges the enormity and power of social media in the Middle East, perhaps referencing the internet’s role in the Arab Spring. At one point, he also describes a character obsessed with finding gory images on Google, noting that the technology also enables a new level of voyeurism. Terrorist tragedies, a fact of life in the place he describes, can turn into mere entertainment for those of a world away.

All of this social poignancy, though, does little to actually animate the plot. The story itself passes along in mere anecdotes, most of which barely sustain mild interest. The unifying plot lines—Lakhdar’s involvement with a girl named Judit and his friendship with someone from the Islamist organization—come across as equally lackluster. His friend, Bassam, disappears early in the novel, and much ado is made over Lakhdar’s agonizing uncertainty even though it’s abundantly clear what Bassam has been up to.

The love story is also hard to believe. Judit, Lakhdar’s girlfriend, is given almost nothing in the way of a personality, and the relationship has little to no spark. It also doesn’t help that these relationships, together with all of Lakhdar’s actions, are described with annoying psychological simplicity. Violating the key rule of “show, don’t tell,” Enard directly states Lakhdar’s motivations for doing something, often through oversimplified cause-and-effect relationships. In one case, Enard allows a depressing encounter with a prostitute to explain Lakhdar’s entire reaction to a woman living next door to him. “I never dared go up with her…because of the memory of Zahra, the little whore in Tangier, which saddened me,” he says. Creating character depth requires creating an intricate and half-hidden web of desires, fears, and actions, but Lakhdar puts everything on the table right away.

The book’s style is also often difficult to engage with. Though the writing has moments of real prettiness, some sentences consist of five or more independent clauses tacked on to one another confusingly and with seeming randomness. One of the first sentences in the book, for example, is ten lines long. In excerpt, it reads, “A few months later I got my first real beating, an avalanche of blows the like of which I had never experience before, I ended up half unconscious and in tears, from humiliation as much as from pain, my father was crying too…” and so on. Enard may have aimed for a kind of Joycean conscious-stream, but the effect is instead one of jumbled excess.

More precise language would have helped, to be sure, but the novel’s real problem is its lack of meaty plot or character. There’s plenty of thematic material to work off of, and, had Enard found a better way to package his thinking, the book might have carried real resonance; as is, though, it just stumbles along.