A sobering, disquieting reality is that identity isn’t entirely intrinsic: We are shaped by our circumstances. Within that disquiet, the idea persists that there is a core—something immutable—to every person. Nevertheless, people can be shaped, altered, mutated, changed. That identity can be imposed by others with more power and privilege, is frightening. 

This possibility, explored fantastically by authors like Witold Gombrowicz, is examined more realistically and fatalistically by Shady Lewis in his novel, On the Greenwich Line, recently translated by Katharine Halls. An Egyptian Coptic living in London who writes in Arabic, Lewis shows how vulnerable people suffer when others casually burden them with abusive expectations and mistaken assumptions. In his rueful and often funny way, Lewis shows how politics can sweep ordinary people into historical tumult, thwarting their attempts simply to live their lives.

The narrator of On the Greenwich Line is an unnamed Coptic Christian immigrant, from a tiny Egyptian village, who works as a housing officer at a local council in London (a position Lewis has also held). His bureaucratic job mostly boils down to deciding if applicants are able to receive permanent government housing. 

In this multi-ethnic and immigrant-run office, most of the applicants are migrants and refugees who are subject to many rules. These rules are, in fact, overwhelming, reducing to mere paperwork the complex humanity of the people they are meant to help. This is most evident in the protagonist’s primary case, which centers on an old Iraqi Kurdish woman. As anonymous as the novel’s unnamed protagonist, Service User A is stuck in a terrible waystation where refugees wait to see if they will get a home. 

Switching between Arabic to English, the protagonist translates the simple, distanced, bureaucratic questions and answers for his glad-handling but ultimately indifferent boss. When the protagonist asks the woman why she doesn’t speak Kurdish, she insists that she is not denying her past. Rather, she is holding on to it, in order to keep part of herself:

You can’t be truthful here and survive. You have to lie to avoid death, or at least not open your heart to strangers. You understand. When someone opens their mouth and speaks to you, here in exile, in the language you miss and long to hear, your defences drop and your soul pours out before them. But if you want to lie, it’s easiest to do it in a foreign language […] in any case, speaking a strange language is the soul telling lies.

Her eloquence and longing to survive are no match for the paperwork. As the bureaucrats depart for the day, she blocks the door, demanding to know whether she’s ever going to leave this in-between place. Mustering her English, she asks “Home or no home?” Having “finally succeeded in freeing his arm from her grip,” the boss snaps, “No home.”

In these grim scenes, desperate people, barely speaking the language of their new country, are told that they are homeless, doomed, and without recourse. Meanwhile, on the other side of the desk, a box is checked, and the workday grinds on. The boss and the protagonist are also immigrants, and like them, they too are subject to many rules. But their attitudes toward their charges could not be more different. While the boss sees the agency’s clients as a pathway to advancement, the protagonist, whose namelessness is a reminder of his closeness to those clients, is aware of the thin line that separates the protected from the vulnerable.

Hollowness, hopelessness, a grim balancing of the books: Lewis demonstrates what a decade of Tory (and often Labour) austerity politics has created. While his London doesn’t have post-war griminess, its grey and grungy meanness isn’t that far off. But the migrants have the added sorrow of having been tossed into this uncaring London by the brutal politics of their own countries. Through these machinations and calculations, they have become invisible, irrelevant, non-people. 

Their situation mirrors that of the protagonist, whose strangeness and remoteness have been with him his whole life. In his tiny village in Egypt, he and his family were bullied for being Christian, but when he arrived in London, everyone assumed he was Muslim. Although he likes ham and enjoys alcohol, everyone assumes he doesn’t. The impact of these assumptions is highlighted in one of the book’s tragicomic passages. After talking about how, even after years of explaining that he is Christian, his colleagues were shocked when he ate a slice of pizza with ham. He says:

You can achieve a lot by simply wearing a person down. To begin with, I let my stubble go unshaven; beards were in fashion at that point. Then one day I shaved my mustache by mistake. I stopped going to the pub after work on Fridays to save money, and secretly I was starting to regard it as a little undignified […] When the dentist told me I needed to take better care of my teeth, I got into the habit of strolling down the high street with a miswak in my hand […] This was much more comfortable for everyone around me, restoring their peace of mind and reinstating the image of the world as it appeared to Border Agency officers.

Here is the protagonist transformed, worn down by the expectations of others. To take another example: He isn’t welcome as a Muslim, so Muslims tell the local halal chicken store to stop serving him. This inconvenience shows up as just one more of the narrator’s personal sorrows: “That really hurt, because the fried chicken there was very good, and very reasonably priced.” He’s resigned to being merely a person with a job, but even this humility can’t save him from being constantly battered by the ideas of others. 

There are, of course, worse ways to be battered. As the book begins, the protagonist is asked by a friend in Egypt to help arrange the funeral of a Syrian refugee, Ghiyath, who died in a hospital in London, but whose family ended up in a same small village in Egypt from which the protagonist hails. 

That Ghiyath died so unremarkably is contrasted with the insanity of his circumstances. Ghiyath was locked up by security. He tunneled out but was caught. He was sentenced to death but got lucky when the judge was also sentenced to death not thirty minutes minutes later by another faction. Here, the protagonist explains, the story “gets tediously bogged down.” Ghiyath survives “41 air raids by 21 different countries,” is caught and tortured, tunnels out again, swims from Beirut to Alexandria with the help of a friendly dolphin, has to leave Egypt, travels through “four continents and 57 countries,” starting in Ecuador, survives earthquakes and alligators and Bulgarian police dogs, and then finally gets to London, where he dies. 

This all is condensed into a few paragraphs, in what could be the book’s only real flight of fancy. Perhaps it is less a fancy than a baroque summation of the dehumanizing madness of Assad’s murderous regime and the refugee crisis to which it gave rise. 

Still, the protagonist’s reaction is strangely blasé: “I’m not saying there aren’t interesting parts here and there in what Ghiyath went through; the problem’s just that these days it’s all very familiar. There are a million similar if not identical tales, and ultimately these things get boring.” It isn’t that he doesn’t care. It is that the dislocation of the modern world is overwhelming. 

The Greenwich Line of the title refers to the spot in London through which the Prime Meridian runs, where the eastern and western hemispheres meet. Of course, that geographical divide has nothing to do with the cultural ideas of “east” and “west,” bizarrely dictated by the same tattered empire. The Middle East and Far East are not actually east of anything except a tiny landmass that was briefly a world power, but names have stuck, and the regions, central to global history, have had their identities transformed by someone else’s geography. 

As with nations, so with people. Even as “east” and “west” mingle in a world of refugees and migrants, ideas and attitudes harden, subject to the pinched imaginations and literal-minded visions of Border Agency officers. Who you are doesn’t matter as much as who those with power think you should be. 

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Shady Lewis, (b. 1978) is an Egyptian novelist and journalist in London, where he has spent many years employed by the National Health Service and local authority housing departments, working with homeless people and patients with complex needs. He has published three novels in Arabic to date—The Lord’s Ways (2018), On the Greenwich Line (2019), and A Brief History of Genesis and Eastern Cairo (2021)—all of which engage with the social history of Coptic Christians and trajectories of migration from Egypt to the West. He is also the author of a travel diary, Death Tourism, or a Comedy of Foreigners (2024). On the Greenwich Line has also been translated into German, French and Italian; the French translation was shortlisted for the 2023 Prix de la littérature arabe.

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Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. Her critically acclaimed translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography; she was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed; and her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace won the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award. Her work has appeared in Frieze, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Common, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is one third of teneleven, an agency for contemporary Arabic literature.

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Brian O’Neill is a freelance writer in Chicago. He is a reviewer specializing in small presses, novels in translation, foreign policy, the Midwest, and regional histories, and he also writes about baseball. Follow him @brianoneill.bsky.social on Bluesky.