City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran by Ramita Navai – review

Of the great cities of the Earth, Tehran is by no means the most engaging. An old citadel and a few villages when it became the capital of the Qajar kings in the 1790s, famed for the purity of its water and handsome oriental plane trees, Tehran broke out of its bounds in the 19th century and exploded in the 20th.

Asphalted and concreted by the first Pahlavi Shah, Reza (who ruled from 1925 to 1941), swelled by rural migrants during the famine years of the second world war and the oil boom that began in the mid-1950s, the city has galloped up the slopes of the Elburz mountains and across the scalding desert to the south. Bursting with automobiles, poisoned with smog and opium, shaken by earthquakes and almost permanent insurrection, a city of 3 million people in 1970 now holds about 12 million. It requires effort to find in this place the vestiges of a great civilisation and the shreds of the old Iranian amenity or douceur de vivre.

Few foreign writers have bothered. Robert Byron, the English art historian, rejoiced in 1934 "to have escaped from that vile stinking hideous intrigue-ridden pretentious vulgar parody of a capital, Teheran". Of modern books by foreigners, only Irano Nox, written by the correspondent of Libération, Marc Kravetz, and published in French in 1982, is worthwhile. The book under review, though lurid and in one or two places mawkish, is its English and female counterpart.

Ramita Navai is the daughter of an officer in the pre-revolutionary Iranian navy. When the Islamic Revolution of 1979 drove out the second Pahlavi Shah, Mohammed Reza (1941-1979) and destroyed the imperial armed forces, the family went into exile in Britain where Ramita grew up. The Times correspondent in Tehran between 2003 and 2006, she lost her accreditation, worked as a teacher downtown and began to collect stories of the traditional families and south Tehran underworld that make up the core of the book. City of Lies shows well how the Islamic Republic, for all its unworldliness, has survived for 35 years and why a man such as ex-president Ahmadinejad, to us a mere clown, for a long time commanded a following.

The book has two organising principles, neither very strictly maintained. The first is the observation of life along the steep boulevard – laid out by Reza Shah in the 1920s and planted with oriental planes – which runs a dozen miles from the Elburz in the north to the railway station in the south. At the revolution of 1979, Pahlavi Avenue was renamed Vali Asr, or Lord of the Age, after the saint who passes incognito among us and whose appearance will bring an end to Tehran and all this transitory world. There is a strange gravity to Vali Asr. As you descend, you exchange cool for heat, cleanliness for filth and spoiled rich kids for gypsy beggars. You pass into history, tradition and religion until, at Shoosh Street by the railway depot, you enter a sort of inferno.

It is here, amid the tyre shops and garages, the "decaying houses shedding brick and dust into gaping holes and alleys that spread out like rivulets, some barely wider than two shoulders, where dirt-encrusted children with matted hair played in the streets next to smacked-out prostitutes slumped on the cracked asphalt" that Navai finds her best effects. Ayatollah Khomeini called the Islamic Republic of Iran "God's government". If Shoosh Street is God's government, maybe the other chap should have a go.

Navai's second principle is deceit. "Let's get one thing straight," she says in her opening sentence. "In order to live in Tehran you have to lie." How could it be otherwise? Counsels of perfection in religion, chastity (namous) and family honour (abru) were converted by the Islamic Republic into laws of the land and reinforced by a mixture of paternal authority, the bullet and the rope. In few other places is the gulf so wide between what is said and what is done.

Here Morteza, a gay militiaman or basiji beats up a long-haired man in a car just to put his comrades off the scent. A potential bridegroom promises Somayeh she can attend university just for a sight of her breasts. To maintain the fiction of chastity before marriage, Navai's women adopt subterfuges that many readers would rather not know. Haj Agha, revered in the neighbourhood for his frequent pilgrimages to Mecca, is in reality travelling in the other direction, to the sex bars of Thailand.

Whether by accident or intention, Navai's first sentence is the paradox known to logicians as the Liar or Epimenides's Paradox. Epimenides the Cretan said all Cretans are liars. Navai, a born Tehrani, says all Tehranis are liars. In other words, these portraits are lies, but only in the sense that they are composite character types. One is startling. Amir, a young man who lost his parents in the terrible prison masscares of 1988, is pestered for forgiveness by the judge who condemned them.

My favourite is Asghar. He is a character type known from the commercial Iranian cinema of the 1960s as the "dumb bugger in the Fedora" (lut-e jahel-e kolah-e makhmali). In those forgotten films, he is the neighbourhood tough guy who, for all his boozing and rough-housing, possesses both chivalry and religion, falls in love with a showgirl and washes away her sin by a sort of quickie baptism known as tobeh.

In this version, Asghar slides (by that gravity I mentioned) from Naser Khosrow Street to Shoosh, where he whiles away his afternoons smoking heroin with an Afghan who has but one sentence of conversation: a drowning man is not troubled by rain. It is only when Asghar hears that his beloved showgirl-wife is working as a char uptown that his abru is piqued and he pulls himself together and opens a gambling den.

The book closes with Farideh, an uptown survivor of the Pahlavi regime, who loses patience when her yoga class is raided by morality police. She decamps to London. She finds the people of our capital cold and stingy, the weather gloomy and the cost of living exorbitant. She begins to pine for aspects of Tehran: blue sky, the clamour of the streets, mulberry and jasmine, "the smoky smell of lamb on hot coals". She returns.

• James Buchan is the author of Days of God: The Iranian Revolution and Its Consequences, published by John Murray. To order City of Lies for £14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.