A masterful novel about the struggle to belong

FICTION: The Last GiftBy Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bloomsbury, 279pp. £18.99

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH is one of those novelists whose name lingers somewhere in the back library of my mind and whose novels, were it not for this review, might well have remained high up on the shelf marked “must read sometime”. What a shame that would have been because Gurnah, if this novel is anything to go by, is a very fine writer. The author of seven novels, he has been shortlisted for the Booker, Whitbread and Commonwealth prizes, and, all things considered, it’s remarkable that he isn’t better known. But then I suspect he may well prefer to live his life as he appears to write his books: with little fuss and even less fanfare.

On the surface The Last Giftis a gentle tale about an ordinary family of mixed-race origin living in an ordinary house in plain old Norwich. There's Abbas, a white-collar worker in a local factory, now nearing retirement age; there's his wife, Maryam, a canteen worker at a local hospital; and there are their two adult children, Jamal and Hanna, who have flown the coop and are busy taking their chances, romantically and otherwise, in the wider world. Of course, as in all good novels, the surface is far from solid, and when Abbas suffers a stroke the ground begins to give.

The story shifts with ease from one viewpoint to the next, and each family member is allowed ample opportunity to gain our sympathy. Poor Maryam, who began life as a foundling and continued through childhood as a sort of pass-the-parcel between foster homes, seems destined to be the eternal nurse. The daughter of the house, Hanna, is educated and cynical, at once ashamed and defensive about her ethnic background. She struggles to keep up with her all-white, middle-class and often casually racist boyfriend and his relations. Jamal, the quiet one of the family, circumspect, loving and kind, seems to suffer from an inner loneliness and longs to communicate with his sullen and frequently silent father. Each of these characters is convincingly and movingly drawn, but the heart of the story belongs to Abbas.

When we meet him he is on the bus on his way home from work, where he begins to feel unwell. By the time he fumbles into his house, face wet with tears, trousers wet with urine, the reader is unreservedly bound to him. He is not a particularly good man; nor is he a bad one. As a father he falls short on many levels. At times he is a difficult husband, but we forgive him his many flaws and unwise decisions because Abbas is a man who has always been motivated by love.

The stroke, or rather his slow recovery from it, breaks through the wall he has built to his past, and as his power of speech disintegrates his need to communicate grows. His last gift to his family will be the story of his past, including the reason he ran away from his native Zanzibar all those years ago and the shame that has shaped him into the man they know.

For all the apparent simplicity of the storyline, The Last Giftis a mosaic of underlying ideas and issues, both large and small. Gurnah raises questions long since relevant to our neighbours across the water but only now coming to the fore on our own small island. How many years does it take for immigrants to feel that they belong? How many generations must pass before they can stop feeling foreign? There are the everyday tragedies, too, of age and illness: the loneliness of the stroke victim, the struggle to recover and the wondering if it's worth all the effort and pain.

But, above all else, this fine and masterful novel is about lack of communication within the family, in spite of, or even because of, love.

Christine Dwyer Hickey’s new novel,

The Cold Eye of Heaven

, will be published on September 1st by Atlantic Books