SOURCE: “The Accidents of Life,” in Times Literary Supplement, January 24, 1992, p. 22.

In the following review, Wood offers a positive assessment of The Search and draws attention to the Oedipal tone of the novel's plot.

The sleazy hero of this very good novel [The Search] is placed somewhere between Double Indemnity and The Plague. The book has the well-paced plot of a film noir, and is also littered with delicately posed questions about moral, psychological and national identity. Some of its patterned contrasts—easy-going old Alexandria set against bustling Cairo, the virtuous, loving girlfriend against the rabid sexual temptress—are rather schematic, but they are not insistent, and the novel never tells us what to think.

The Search was first published in Arabic in 1964, and plainly reflects the Egypt of the Revolution and after. But there is a sense in which its real location, without ceasing to be historical...