Book review: The story of a twisted relationship in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Happy Marriage

One of Morocco's most acclaimed writers Tahar Ben Jelloun paints a bleak portrait of a failing marriage from the point of view of both the husband and his maligned wife.

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One of the biggest novels of 2015 – and Barack Obama's book of the year – was Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, the story of a marriage seen from two angles. The first half of the book comprised the viewpoint of the husband, a world-renowned playwright; the second was that of his wife. Needless to say, the latter offered a valuable, surprise-filled corrective to the former.

The latest novel from one of Morocco's most acclaimed writers, Tahar Ben Jelloun, happens to have the same structure and also a famous male lead – although it should be stressed that The Happy Marriage was first published in France three years prior to Groff's book.

Where the novels truly differ is in the treatment of each couple’s relationship. The marital cracks in Groff’s book are nothing compared to the deep fault lines and seismic rifts that divide and wreak havoc in Ben Jelloun’s. His absorbing, ironically-titled novel is about love soured and a woman scorned, but also the emotional cost of a failed marriage and how much both parties have to lose.

In the book’s first section, our married man, who remains nameless throughout, is a celebrated painter and an equally great seducer who has been paralysed by a stroke. In the studio of his Casablanca mansion, surrounded by unfinished canvasses, he is attended to by two caretakers he refers to as “the Twins” and is massaged and fussed over by a pretty nurse and physiotherapist called Imane.

When alone in his wheelchair he spends his days “dreaming and reinventing life”. He recalls his childhood, learning his craft in Fez, and his travels, particularly a trip to Marrakech to retrace (Eugène) Delacroix’s footsteps in Morocco.

In addition to this, he reflects on his time in Paris in the late 1980s with his new, young wife, and their years of conjugal bliss.

But that bliss is short-lived. By 1990 the marriage is fraught with daily disputes. The painter remembers how in order to avoid bickering he would disappear for illicit rendezvous with other women. He replays his many affairs, finds himself unable to conceal his desire for Imane and, in a litany of complaints, enumerates the reasons why his wife is far from the perfect partner (“My wife is a flash flood”; “My wife is like a house that was built without foundations”).

When we switch to the second part, the painter’s wife, whom he has not bothered to dignify with a name, steps forward and introduces herself as Amina. After filling us in on growing up in a rural Moroccan backwater (“it wasn’t even a village…but a cemetery inhabited by the living”) and her fresh start in France as a teenage model, she proceeds in a direct, no-nonsense manner to rebut her husband’s version of events.

We hear that her marriage contract was “the certificate of my slavery, confinement, and humiliation”, that her husband’s studio doubles as a brothel, and that her presence and influence helped shape and enrich his art, transforming bland, unimaginative realism into bold, risk-taking surrealism.

Amina’s account is both a feisty reckoning and a vital retaliation. But it doesn’t set the record straight: it is merely a different perspective, and a reminder that there is more than one side to every story.

The novel’s beauty lies in its ambiguity. He brands her irrational and irresponsible; she accuses him of being a stingy, selfish control freak, “an ayatollah in western clothes”. We are not sure who to believe, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

What does is each colourful individual history and two divergent depictions of a descent into “living hell”. André Naffis-Sahely’s elegant translation masterfully conveys the brief spell of harmony and longer lasting acrimony.

The Happy Marriage is largely composed of memories but also contains meditations on love and hate, excerpts from notebooks and Imane's tales.

Towards the end, there is a twist of sorts as Amina explains the real reason why her husband’s nurse has left his side. But Amina saves her biggest surprise for the book’s closing paragraphs, in which she outlines a singular means of revenge.

Fiction is full of marriages in freefall or in shreds. However, Ben Jelloun’s punchy, emotionally-charged novel is a unique portrait of a husband and wife’s dead-end desperation and the lengths both are prepared to go to in order to break free.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh.

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