SOURCE: “Two Wars, Much Peace, but No Tolstoy,” in Spectator, April 25, 1992, p. 34.

In the following review, Lively offers a positive assessment of Sugar Street, comparing Mahfouz to John Galsworthy.

Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo trilogy, of which Sugar Street is the final volume, was completed in 1952. It reaches us 40 years late, giving an extra displacement in time to what is already in effect a sequence of historical novels. Palace Walk, the first volume, set the scene during the first world war and introduced the leading figure, the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad. At the close of Sugar Street he dies, as the Libyan campaign rages in the wings. Two wars, neither of them Egypt's wars, are dispassionately observed by the central figures of the novels, for whom the abiding concern is the domestic political scene and the continuing hated British administration. The trilogy is a political and social discussion of a crucial...