“Links,” Farah’s ninth novel, begins with one murder and ends with another. No sooner has Jeeblah, the protagonist, disembarked from an airplane at the Mogadishu airport than he sees a man shot dead for no good reason. Quite sensibly, Jeeblah is horrified. He has come from America, where he lives as an exile, to find his mother’s grave and make peace with her memory. But old friends and enemies and their troubles keep ensnaring him. By the time the last murder in the book occurs, Jeeblah himself is deeply implicated. How he changes from bystander to accessory is the puzzle posed by “Links”: what circumstances are necessary to make a decent man turn to killing?
Writing in a plain, almost awkward English, Farah does not subscribe to the theory that an author should show, not tell. Why not bluntly tell the truth? he seems to ask. Isn’t life oblique enough without a writer arting it up? This straightforwardness makes the mysteries at the heart of this searing novel even more unnerving. What are the ties of place and blood, and how do they survive in us even when we think we’re beyond all that? “Links” is rough-hewn art, but art it surely is. Like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, writers to whom he can be favorably compared, Farah poses questions that, once asked, never go away.
