To an outsider, Gaddafi’s Libya was a weird, disturbing but ludicrous conundrum: a country where ‘the people’ were said to be in charge and one man had absolute power; where public transport was abolished as ‘anti-democratic’ and the police force was one day replaced with children in uniform to deter crime; and where abundant oil revenues were spent on motorway flyovers that carried no motorways.

Laugh as the visitor might, there were hints of darkness too, with the Italian embassy quietly complaining of skips full of human limbs dumped behind their elegant villa. A thick screen of PR rhetoric, evasive officials and an undeniably nervous general public obscured the visiting journalist’s view. The wider world guffawed at the antics of a ruler who held court in a tent and, depending on his mood, wore Bedouin cloaks, slick Italian suits and mirror sunglasses, or an admiral’s uniform with rows of medals from imaginary wars. He did many a turn on American television, oblivious of the figure he cut, and the West smirked.

We visitors used to say that the commonly held view of a country with a mad leader was not quite accurate. He was horribly sane – and malevolent – and it was his country that was being driven mad.

The reality behind this emerges powerfully and elegantly in the words of Hisham Matar. He is a man well qualified to dissect the regime, not forensically, but in a personal way, which he accomplishes to stunning effect in this account of his family’s experiences at the hands of a ruthless dictator. Matar’s father, who went into exile in Cairo in 1980, was an active opponent of Gaddafi. He was kidnapped in 1990 and disappeared. Many years later his family learned of his incarceration in a brutal prison in Tripoli. His fate is unknown and his son has spent most of his adult life searching for the truth: ‘I envy the finality of funerals, I covet the certainty. How it must be to wrap one’s hands around the bones, to choose how to place them, to be able to pat the patch of earth and sing a prayer.’

Gaddafi is toppled, Libya lurches into an initially optimistic but uncertain future, and in 2012 Matar returns to pursue his search. His journey is a family grand tour – there are 103 cousins and numerous uncles and nephews, many of whom have fought in the revolution or were imprisoned alongside his father. He goes through a seemingly endless round of courtesies, cups of tea, family anecdotes and happily remembered poetry. There is no detective-like inquisition, just quiet reflections after careful words have been spoken. Through the extended family’s love of books – in a place where libraries and bookshops were closed or destroyed – or an uncle’s recollection of the voice of Matar’s father in a nearby cell, somehow changed over the years, a skilfully rendered picture emerges of the Colonel’s grim world, and of the ruthlessness of a regime under which the bones of massacred prisoners were ‘ground to dust and the powder poured into the sea’.

Earlier in the book, at a time when Matar’s father has been missing for twelve years and there is still no confirmation of his death, a real chill descends in the most banal of settings – the Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel in London. There, Matar meets Saif al-Islam, the Gaddafi son with the veneer of a reformer covering a capricious and cunning mind. That encounter, with several subsequent phone calls, captures the tricksy, smooth lying that the regime had refined: always promising, often wheedling, and in the end completely callous. Matar asks Saif directly about his father’s death:

‘But is there nothing you can tell me now?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘But I know that you know.’
‘I do. I know what happened to your father, but I can’t tell you until I have all the facts.’

The conversation sums up the way the country was run by a small coterie schooled in untruths. In this self-styled ‘people’s republic’, people were threatened whenever they whispered any doubts. Phones were tapped, complainers disappeared. The courts were a pantomime. I recall a case where we arrived too late for a hearing, so the judges returned, the defendant was produced again from the cells and the whole procedure was repeated. ‘Libyan justice,’ said the ministry official to me. ‘Same sentence, good – eh?’ and he giggled.

Some of the most feared men in Libya are woven into the story, among them Moussa Koussa and Abdullah Senussi – both in the frame for mass murder, including the Lockerbie bombing. The thought of trying to discover your father’s fate and finding yourself dealing with dangerous men who are subject to no boundaries at home and have been treated with kid gloves by democratic governments abroad sends a shiver down the spine. Throughout the search, there’s always a sense of lurking threat. Libya’s century of colonisation, rebellion, war and dictatorship has done little for the nation’s self-confidence. The family and tribe are all that offer some kind of trust – wider society and national unity are still concepts rather than realities. Matar’s family understands such concepts; his father died trying to oppose a dictator who wrecked the country’s fragile infrastructure. Even after the 2011 revolution, it is only the family who can support Matar’s efforts to find the truth.

Matar’s story adds to the fragmented picture we have of his homeland. It is told in lyrical language, yet with great simplicity. His love of art and literature and his delight in returning to what he finds precious among his own people are wonderfully described. That these joys of life stand out against such a dark background makes this a stirring read. And that the search eventually has to be resolved in his own heart, rather than in any impersonal document or process, is a testament of honesty.