Desperately seeking asylum

In 1994, Abdulrazak Gurnah was shortlisted for both the Booker and Whitbread prizes for Paradise. It was as if the Tanzanian, Zanzibar-born writer, who is a career academic based in England, had come from nowhere - despite having by that time published three good novels. Paradise, his best work to date, is yet another fine African book.

By the Sea is so intelligently and thoughtfully written that Gurnah almost manages to conceal the fact of the narrative being complicated and awkwardly layered (all of his novels favour a multi-layering worthy of Conrad). In this new book, there is a wealth of detail that should matter yet almost doesn't, because the strength of this novel lies in the narrative voice. Saleh Omar, now living in Britain, has had his experience of toying with immigration officials. He pretended not to understand English while mustering sufficient cunning to announce he was seeking asylum.

The opening sequence, an extraordinary monologue, is such a fine study of a man living in isolation - and well aware of it - that the remainder of the book becomes an irrelevance. It is a freeflowing account of a displaced life. Saleh Omar knows what it is like to lose everything, his entry into Britain and a new life having been based on another man's passport: "I live the half-life of a stranger, glimpsing interiors through the television screen and guessing at the tireless alarms which afflict people I see in my strolls."

As he wanders through furniture shops, he lives in an alert, if suspended, state, noting the striving of others as they mill through life around him: "They seem consumed and distracted, their eyes smarting as they tug against turmoils incomprehensible to me." By the end of the fourth page of remarkable prose, this outsider with little interest in self-dramatisation has simply declared: "I am a refugee, an asylum-seeker".

For much of the remainder of the novel, Gurnah succeeds in sustaining the sense of this being one man's story. Eventually the narrative does acquire a wider intent through addressing the confusing legacy of post-colonial independence. Yet, as with so much else in By the Sea, this neither limits nor contracts the story. Omar is believable, sad, and very real. He is not a hero, and he is not a victim. He is merely seeking "a safe place of detention".

His family story is at once simple and complicated, involving an ineffectual, unhappy father and a tragic, doomed mother. It is also interestingly petty, dominated by battles over ownership. Most curiously of all, it also seems to be going around in circles. Omar is a man living contentedly in an empty present having escaped an equally empty past.

While it is a story based on specific actions, the tone of the narrative voice is reflective, almost philosophical and certainly random. It is at once a casual memoir and a philosophical tract. Omar has plenty of time to think.

"I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable . And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map."

As a narrator, Omar appears to be drifting, but he is not on the point of a breakdown. Elderly - his wife and daughter are dead - he has moved well beyond such a state. In some ways, By the Sea possesses echoes of Russian fiction without the exasperation or urgency, yet the weight of political oppression is there, if almost as an aside. Omar's period in prison is so casually dealt with, it may as well have been an eccentric holiday. Gurnah is confident enough to merely allude to other characters and events before returning to them to develop their role in the story.

It is also a subtle impressionistic novel of set pieces. The finest of these occurs, not surprisingly, in the superb opening sequence, in which Omar recalls the weary emigration officer. "He told me his name was Kevin Edelman, pointing to the badge he wore on his jacket. May God give you health, Kevin Edelman."

The descriptions of both the appearance and the changing attitudes of the weary official account for possibly the finest, most sustained and controlled writing in the novel. It chronicles the stock experience of the newcomer arriving without hope of entry. Omar resorts to silence as the only method of dealing with officialdom. This allows Gurnah to focus Omar and the narrative on Edelman, an overweight, red-faced man "looking sad and furrowed", himself the son of Eastern European immigrants, who eventually asks him out of human concern, not spite, and well aware Omar may not understand him:

"Why do you want to do this, a man of your age?...You don't even speak the language, and you probably never will. It's very rare for old people to learn a new language...It may take years to sort out your application, and then you may be sent back, anyway. No one will give you a job. You'll be lonely and miserable and poor, and when you fall ill there'll be no one to look after you."

By the Sea is an unusual, even demanding performance because of its layers. Yet the potential chaos is tempered by the calm narrative voice. Although not as impressive as Paradise, which remains an important study of the impact of white colonialism on traditional African values, as well as a human story, Gurnah's new book succeeds through the force of an intelligence striving for realism rather than intellectual games or easy twists.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times