Politics runs through the story constantly, as the characters debate and wonder where the new country will go once the double-crossing English are finally gone.
The story covers a long period of time and is a little episodic - there were many subplots that could have been explored more, and some main plots that could have been trimmed - I had limited patience for Kamal's endless romantic vacillating, but was engaged by his nephew Ahmad's adventures working for a Marxist magazine and trying to break free of the constraints of traditional middle-class life. Like in Ireland, families observed religion, gossiped about neighbours, argued about the politics of a young nation and mothers hoped for a civil service career for their sons and a good marriage for their daughters. Even the way religion infused the language and thinking of the characters, even the nonbelieving ones, was very like the way Irish culture was for much of the 20th century a Catholic culture. While on the surface there wouldn't seem to be many similarities, the conservative, family-focused, deeply religious patriarchy in which mothers dominated the home felt very familiar. The second thing was how much traditional Egyptian middle-class life in the 1920s and 30s as depicted in the book reminded me of Irish culture up until relatively recently. Two main things struck me while I read Sugar Street: firstly that while I don't know Arabic, I got a strong sense of the elegant economy and poetry of the written language from this translation. While in the other books the patriarch of the family is the central character, this book focused on the younger family members, particularly the bookish son Kamal and his two nephews, whose very different paths in life represent distinct political trends in early 20th-century Egyptian life.
I haven't read the other books in the trilogy so I was starting backwards with this one, but there wasn't any need to have read the others to enjoy Sugar Street.
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