To lay down The Trilogy or Children of Gebelawi and pick up Mahfouz’s next novel, The Thief and the Dogs (available in English), published in 1962, is, in a way, like switching from a Dickens or a Balzac to a Graham Greene or a William Golding, so radical was the change that his style underwent in the third stage of his development. No longer viewing the world through realist/naturalist eyes, he was now to write a series of short powerful novels at once social and existential in their concern. Rather than presenting a full colorful picture of society, he now concentrated on the inner workings of the individual’s mind in its interaction with the social environment. In this phase his style ranges from the impressionistic to the surrealist, a pattern of evocative vocabulary and imagery binds the work together, and extensive use is made of the stream of consciousness or, to use a more accurate term in the case of Mahfouz, free indirect speech.4 On the other hand, while the situation is based on reality, it is often given a universal significance through the suggestion of a higher level of meaning.

Just as his realistic novels were an indictment of the social conditions prevailing in Egypt before 1952, the novels of the sixties contained much that was audaciously critical of Nasser’s Egypt. However, the defeat of the Arabs in the war with Israel in 1967 and its aftermath proved a shattering experience for Naguib Mahfouz from which, it would not be an invalid assumption to make, his work has never completely recovered. In the years following 1967, his writing ranged from surrealist, almost absurd short stories and dry, abstract, unactable playlets to novels of direct social and political commentary with no great literary merit, such as Love under the Rain (1973) and The Karnak (1974). Mahfouz himself was aware of the new turn his work had taken. He wanted to get his views across to the reader at a time of crisis in as simple and straightforward a way as possible; of his disposition at the time he admits to an interviewer that he was prepared to write a novel that would die the moment its occasion had passed.5 This passionate concern of the writer for the loss of direction that his nation has suffered can be seen to have survived into the eighties in There Only Remains One Hour (1982), which is a kind of condensed saga novel giving an account of the failure of successive generations of leaders and their adherents to bring peace and prosperity to Egypt, and also in The Day the Leader Was Murdered (1985), which describes the life of the Egyptians during the Sadat era.