THE RETURN: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By Hisham Matar

Random House, 243 pp., $26

As “The Return’’ opens, Hisham Matar is preparing to fly from Cairo to Benghazi in March 2012, amid Libyan unrest that six months before had claimed the lives of two American diplomats during a rebel attack on the US embassy in that same city. It is Matar’s first return to Libya since age 8, when his family, fearful for their safety under the tyrant Moammar Khadafy, fled to Nairobi, then Cairo. His father, Jaballa Matar, a wealthy dissident, had incurred the dictator’s wrath. Hisham returns to a country he has not seen in over three decades. His visit, which takes place after Khadafy’s death at the hands of rebel fighters, has a purpose: to search for his father.

In 1990, about a dozen years into the family’s exile, agents of the Egyptian secret police abducted Jaballa and spirited him off to Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison. Hisham was then 19 and a student in London. Over time, Jaballa managed to smuggle a few notes to the outside world, but he had not been heard from in many years. Around the time the letters stopped, an estimated 1,270 prisoners were massacred at Abu Salim.

“The Return’’ is a son’s account of his desperate quest for closure. It is Hisham Matar’s third book, following “In the Country of Men’’ (2006) and “Anatomy of a Disappearance’’ (2011). Both of those novels focus on a son whose father is abducted by a despotic, brutal regime. In each, the son is torn between adulation and resentment of the missing parent. The young son in “In the Country of Men’’ is even wracked by guilt over the realization that he is the one who betrayed his father to government thugs.

“The Return’’ lacks that complexity of filial motive. Hisham remembers Jaballa as wise, brilliant, and generous, a father figure to younger men who revere him. The older man’s disappearance leaves his biological son physically and psychologically devastated. He is haunted for years by images of Jaballa tortured and murdered. In his stubborn campaign to alert the world to his father’s plight through hundreds of letters and public appeals, Hisham risks assassination by a shadowy network of Libyan agents. At one point, standing on the Pont d’Arcole in Paris, he contemplates his own death.

The lectures that Hisham gives on Franz Kafka’s “The Trial’’ can easily draw from his own decades-long experience in what he calls “the fog.’’ He regularly receives soothing pledges of help from the British government, even from Foreign Secretary David Miliband, while the UK actually cozies up to Khadafy. Months and years after tenuous contact with Libyan authorities who promise answers to his questions, he continues waiting for the truth. In a particularly bizarre sequence, he meets in London with Seif al-Islam Khadafy, the dictator’s erratic son. “I really think we can be good friends, you and I,’’ Seif assures him, insisting that he knows what happened to Jaballa and vowing to tell him soon. He never does. Tarek al-Abady, Libya’s cultural attaché in London, claims to be a fan of Hisham’s fiction. “Come to Libya and allow us to give you prizes like other people have done,’’ he exhorts. But Hisham knows that his books are banned in Libya, and incarceration and worse would be the likely outcome of a premature return.

When he does go back, Hisham learns the stories of other victims of Khadafy, including members of the author’s extended family. One of them gets caught up in the ongoing violence following the dictator’s fall. Hisham also details the massive atrocities under Italian colonial rule. But, trained as an architect, he also pauses to explain the idiosyncrasies of buildings in Benghazi. And, a frequent visitor to London’s National Gallery, he lingers over paintings with special relevance to his predicament, such as Titian’s “The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence’’ and Manet’s “The Execution of Maximilian.’’

European art provides a distraction and consolation to an exiled, grieving son, just as the curious allure of a chilly, Spartan boarding school in England had led Hisham, a rebellious adolescent, to abandon his privileged life in Cairo. The danger to him in England seemed urgent enough to require disguising his Libyan identity with a British pseudonym. Hisham likens himself to Telemachus in quest of the absent Odysseus. However, in Homer’s epic, Odysseus eventually returns home and fights side by side with Telemachus to defeat their enemies. “The Return’’ offers no such happy ending. Instead, it is an utterly riveting account of a devoted son’s quest to learn the fate — not necessarily the truth — of Jaballa Matar.

THE RETURN:

Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By Hisham Matar

Random House, 243 pp., $26

Steven G. Kellman is the author of “Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth’’ and “The Translingual Imagination.’’