Mahmood Mattan has been rescued. Given new life, he emerges from the pages of "The Fortune Men" as a full-blooded literary victim-hero with all the complexity that such a status tends to require.
It's a miraculous feat by Somali-British writer Nadifa Mohamed, coming 70 years after Mahmood, falsely accused of murdering a woman in her store in Cardiff, was hanged in a dank Welsh prison.
Mahmood died in 1952. Family and friends sought for decades to clear his name. Finally, in 1998, a panel of British judges quashed Mahmood's conviction.
With the basic facts of the case and its outcome widely known, what is left for a novelist? How will she maintain suspense?
Mohamed overcomes such doubts with the feast of her prose. She brings magic to her project, achieving in fiction what no historical account could match.
Mahmood grew up Muslim amid famine, drought, clan warfare and colonial occupation in Somalia. His pious mother thought nothing of medicating her boy with words of the Qur'an washed off a chalkboard and stirred into a potion for drinking. As a teen, he began a wandering life as a laborer in Africa before circling the globe as a sailor on merchant ships. Though he spoke five languages, he could scarcely read or write.
He never feared taking chances or facing the unknown: "I am a gambling soul. Even as a small boy if someone say to me, 'Oh, I know you won't do that or you can't do this,' I look them in the eye and just do it. I take everything life give me and throw it in fate's face."
Mahmood's ill-fated story picks up in Tiger Bay, a port town where he hopes to reunite with his estranged wife and their three young sons. It's a bustling place, blasted, polluted, bruised by World War II, the kind of town where "you can have chop suey for lunch and Yemeni saltah for dinner." The town is multiracial but also plenty racist, with Blacks from the West Indies and Africa working as laborers and living in slums.
