While Mohamed vividly draws the brawling and diverse tough-luck world of the Cardiff docks, most of the secondary characters feel thinly sketched. Mohamed’s gradual development of Mattan’s character is poignant and profound, although it really gathers strength in the last third of the book when his increasingly dire situation pushes him to think more deeply about his life. Yet it is sometimes slow going, even if Mattan’s unsettled fate draws you along. Considering the suspense naturally built into the story, this should be a book that can’t be put down. The result is a memorable portrait that sometimes gets lost in the novel’s sprawl. Often provocative and evocative but while Mohamed ultimately brings Mattan fully to life, the book’s digressions undermine some of its narrative urgency and potency. Even though it takes place in 1950s Cardiff, it feels depressingly relevant today. The Fortune Men, which uses this real-life tragedy (Mattan was executed for the crime, for which he was exonerated in 1998) to create an intimate look at a man whose pride is seen as defiance and whose refusal to be demeaned proves dangerous to a Black man and a foreigner. The horrific finale of The Fortune Men is never in doubt, but for more than 200 pages Mohamed still creates a sharp sense of suspense by pulling us right into Mahmood’s world as his life tilts and then crashes. the crux of Mohamed’s artistry: Her clear-eyed acknowledgment of this man’s self-pity runs parallel to her piercing exposure of his society’s relentless, enervating prejudice. Hovering close to Mahmood’s thoughts, The Fortune Men conveys the mix of deprivation and harassment that exhausts unemployed laborers.
The immediate allure of the novel is the vibrancy of Mohamed’s prose, her ability to capture the complicated culture of Cardiff and the sound of tortured optimism.
But with a vision that exceeds this one tragic case, The Fortune Men also plumbs the existential plight of so many similar victims. The resulting confluence of fact and fiction provides a damning indictment of judicial racism. While the details of her story are drawn from news accounts and court records, the interior portraits stem from her own deeply sympathetic imagination. As a work of historical fiction, Mohamed’s novel is equally informative and moving.
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