The long period of time (over four years) covered by this novel, the close linkage with the political events of the day, and the optimistic ending have all been criticized on artistic, if not political, grounds. It has been suggested that Autumn Quail represents a response on Mahfouz’s part to critical reactions (including presumably those of “the official cultural sector” of which he himself was a part) to the subtly negative commentary on the Revolution to be found in Al-Liss wal-Kilab (The Thief and the Dogs, 1961), the first novel in the series of works published in the 1960s. In the latter work, a man who has been “framed” is released from prison and vows vengeance on his wife and her lover, who have tricked him. In trying to kill them, he mistakenly kills two other people and is then hunted (or hounded) down by the police as a homicidal maniac, meeting his death in a cemetery as the police dogs chase after him. Autumn Quail certainly represents—at least in the implications of its ending—a more “upbeat” view of Egyptian society than that. I would not wish to imply that Mahfouz felt himself to be under the same constraints as Dimitri Shostakovich, who prefaced his Fifth Symphony with the phrase “an artist’s response to just criticism” in the wake of his ostracism from Russian cultural life (in turn a reaction to his Fourth Symphony). However, one may legitimately wonder whether the general intellectual atmosphere in Egypt during the early 1960s—a period about which many details concerning assaults on civil liberties have only recently come to light—did not suggest to Mahfouz that a retrospect with positive contemporary implications might be at least apropos.

Whatever the artistic and societal motivations may have been in writing Autumn Quail, Mahfouz decided to trace within a novelistic framework the relationship of past and present within the Egyptian Revolution and the possibilities of cooperation, or perhaps coexistence, in the future. It has to be admitted that the novel’s narrative suffers from the extended time period. Bearing in mind Isa’s frequent travel back and forth between Cairo and Alexandria, the links of time and place seem to be extended beyond endurance in a comparatively short novel (compared, for example, with The Trilogy, a huge societal canvas in which these two aspects can be more expansively and successfully managed).