The Dark Side of Love, By Rafik Schami trans Anthea Bell

At last, the Great Arab Novel - appearing without ifs, buts, equivocations, metaphorical camouflage or hidden meanings. Two caveats derive from the necessities of this project: its great length, nudging Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and the fact that it could only be first published not in Arabic but in German, in the author's exile abode, removed from the immediate vengeance of its primary target: the blood-soaked Syrian state.

Rafik Schami has been in exile since 1970, and his trajectory follows closely that of his main protagonist, young Farid Mushtak. Like his hero, Schami is a son of the Arab-Christian community, and the background of his tale is a long blood feud between two Christian Syrian families. This blights and destroys many lives as it moves in on the contemporary Romeo and Juliet affair between Farid and Rana, a daughter of the rival Shaheen clan.

Schami provides an extensive family tree, but the scope of the novel renders it a satirical trope. By the time you have plunged through the whirl of so many chaotic events you have, like Farid and Rana, forgotten why and how the whole tit-for-tat round of killing and hatred began in the first place.

Syria, like Lebanon, remains a country of multiple religions and sects, with tribal and clan bonds forming the only reliable method of navigating the skeins of historical change, from Ottoman rule through the French occupation that lasted for three decades after the end of the First World War. Unlike Lebanon, Syria became plagued by serial dictatorships that replaced French rule in the late 1940s, forming a cancerous growth on civil society and crippling the hopes of the emergent state.

Schami's book is exceptional not only in the scope of his ambition, to relate the inner history of an ongoing disaster as the state veers from one moronic regime to another, but also in its ability to juggle a vast cast of characters in a complex structure which the author himself likens to a mosaic of pieces that create their own patterns. Apart from the people, the main character is the capital, Damascus itself, with its ancient labyrinths of streets and history, the city which "has seen and endured Arabs, Romans, Greeks, Aramaics and another thirty-six peoples... so it has become a historical patchwork, a lost luggage office of cultures."

Some readers may find themselves caught in the digressions that the author weaves in the city, in his categories of "The Book of Laughter", "The Book of Growth" or "The Book of Loneliness", where the narrative breaks away and wanders along tales of childhood, or of love affairs and peripheral characters. But those tempted to give up there will lose out on the terrible denouement, as we are tipped into "The Book of Hell" - the sombre details of Syria's complex of prisons, and the darkest side of the state's grisly secrets.

Setting the tale among Syria's Christian communities, alienated from the Muslim majority, liberates Schami from the potential trap of feeding the West's current slew of anti-Islamic prejudice. For the dark side is resolutely secular, a function of the exigencies of brute power, political and financial, or more often the combination of both. Schami does not shirk the dark side of religion in his tale of Farid's phase in a Jesuit seminary. This place seethes with sadistic tensions and secret societies that will play a vital part in the unravelling of the book's convoluted plot.

The Dark Side of Love is itself dissected as the basic sin of paternal control, where fathers and brothers decide the fate of sons or siblings as well as wives and daughters, and where a loveless marriage consummated by rape is the outcome of family propriety. The state itself becomes the patriarch, dispensing punishment and execution for any defiance of its rules. The dictator himself is the primary father, who dispenses harsh justice by whip and cells.

Despite its length, the book is a compulsive read. We experience a long-awaited revelation of a society too long presented as a set of gruelling or exotic stereotypes. And the mythic elements endure, in the grist of many twisting tales. The continuing roll-call of revenge for old slights is exemplified by a piece of dialogue in which two brothers toast their success in avenging their father's death after 15 years, and one notes: "A Bedouin would say: well done, lads, but why in such a hurry?"

Simon Louvish's 'Chaplin' is published by Faber & Faber