text: This novel about a community in some desert village is written with the simplicity of language that one associates with old myths, and underlying the story are indeed echoes, sometimes close and sometimes rather distorted, of ancient myths.  God is allegorized as Gabalawi, the remote and mostly unseen owner of the estate of which the Children of the Alley are supposed to be his heirs.  The central character in each of the five stories is up against the selfish and oppressive overseers who dominate the estate and its inhabitants with the help of their retinue of gangsters.  The first of the stories evokes that of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the story of Cain and Abel; the second that of Moses and Pharaoh; the third that of Jesus; the fourth that of Muhammad.  
  
  Then there is a fifth story, in which the central figure, a `magician',  is presumably a scientist.  He tries to discover the secret of Gabalawi  He fails to find it, but in the process he is  instrumental in the death of Gabalawi `who had been easier to kill than to see'. It makes no difference: the scientist, who has invented a weapon of great destructive power, is forced to put it at the service of the new overseer, and the Children of the Alley remain as oppressed as ever, though they remain hopeful that one day `magic' will put an end to their suffering.
  
  Subtle the book is not, either in content or in style; and in my view is far too long and far too repetitive.  The overseers and the gangsters in each generation have different names, but as individuals they are indistinguishable one from another.  A large number of the characters are perpetually angry or violent.  They mostly `shout', `scream', `shriek', `yell', `cry' or `sneer', which becomes rather tiresome. 
  
  The literary quality of this novel is, I think, greatly inferior to Mahfouz's rightly famous Cairo Trilogy which has contributed to his having become the only Arab to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  But it is a courageous book for an Egyptian to have written: it has been banned in Egypt;  its allegories enraged the Islamicists and led to an attempt on the author's life.
  