SOURCE: “A Journey in the Medieval Style,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 13, 1992, p. 20.

In the following review, Shah offers a negative assessment of The Journey of Ibn Fattouma.

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz is best known for the three books of his “Cairo Trilogy” (first published in Arabic in 1956–57). Those novels sensuously recall the Cairo of Mahfouz's youth. The city's streets teem with lively and argumentative characters and there is a Dickensian confidence in Mahfouz's narrative. There are mystical undertones and hints of allegory in another masterpiece, The Thief and the Dogs (1961), but the metaphysical drama is played out in the streets of a vividly evoked Cairo, and the reader is still held in the grip of old-fashioned storytelling.

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (first published in Cairo in 1983) is not like those novels, and is much less likeable. One of several allegorical and experimental fictions that...