EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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Second, the main character, Frances, was surprisingly shallow. She is supposed to be a professional woman who spent many years in Africa, so you would expect more interesting social and cultural commentary than was offered up in her "diary." Instead, she simply wallows in self-pity and largely self-imposed isolation from her first day in Saudi Arabia. Literally, the first day. This not only prevents character development, it is simply not logical. Why would she feel isolated after only a few hours? so plausibly rendered that we never feel we're reading dire jingoist or racist fantasies. Still, the unmistakable correspondences between the two novels do, at moments, suggest the less than sympathetic travel writing of Paul Theroux,

to consider any of this at all, and simply to enjoy Hilary Mantel's smart, astringent and marvelously upsetting fiction. Frances does hate it. She hates the greed which brings the expats to endure the intolerable in return for generous salaries. (She and her husband Andrew are mustering a deposit for a house in the UK). She hates the vacuous lifestyle of endless shopping and nostalgic British ‘cultural’ activities. She has nothing to do, and apart from (illegal) boozy parties with the other expats and the shopping, she is confined to her flat because it’s not just the official decrees that restrict her, it’s also the constant sense of feeling unsafe because of unofficial ad hoc harassments: Left alone, she closed her eyes. She was apprehensive, yes. She turned over the steward's comment in her mind, because she was not one to let flippancies go unexamined; it paid to examine them, as there was so little, she always thought, in what That would be plain greedy," she said, "having children so that you could get their school fees paid."You poor things, that's all I can say. And you were in Zambia too? I've been to Lusaka, done a couple of stopovers. They're thieves in Lusaka. They'll take the wheels off your hire-car as soon as look at you. This friend of mine went into a pharmacy for a drop of penicillin, he was planning, you know, on being a bit naughty that night, and he believed in dosing himself first; and he came out, and no bloody wheels." The apartment building on Ghazzah Street offers some diversion -- and some mystery, as there are sounds coming from a supposedly empty apartment. Con il marito geologo si trasferirono poi per qualche anno in Arabia Saudita, dove scrisse il suo primo romanzo pubblicato: Every Day is Mother's Day, che uscì nel 1985; ma intanto teneva anche dei diari che certamente stanno alla base di questo romanzo ( Eight Months on Ghazzah Street), che uscì nel 1988, dopo la continuazione del primo: Vacant Posession (1986). We thought that her isolation and how insular she became was interesting. The atmosphere that was created. Quite a poetic style at times.

Frances is unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful. sensation of movement, no intimation that they were in flight. She closed her eyes. Sleep now, she coaxed herself. Tomorrow I will have people to meet and there will be a good deal to do. How pleased I will be, to do it; and to be there,

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That's fine," she said, "but just try to ensure that what we're given doesn't include Pollard. Do you think they'll all be like him?" Too often. The Saudia flight's supposed to take off at twelve-thirty, but it never does. Not in my experience. I suppose the staff are having prayers. Bowing to Mecca, and so forth." I'd read somewhere, in a satirical critique of Mantel's work, that she is overly fond of a semi-colon; scatters them about like confetti I was led to believe. This much is true; there is a plenitude of the little blighters; a tide of winky faces bereft of their smiles. But you're a woman," the steward said. "You're a woman, aren't you? You're not a person anymore." Doggedly, courteously, as if their conversation had never occurred, he reached for a glass from his trolley: "Would you like champagne?"

Mantel's depiction of the mortal threat of living in a country that has no rule of law is devastatingly realistic. Her biting and brutal humor seems at time like satire -- except there's no exaggeration involved. The Pakistani neighbor of the protagonist, Frances Shore, tries to reassure her by explaining that they don't really stone adulteresses any more -- they throw a few token stones then shoot her. "I was so relieved," Frances wrote mordantly in her diary. The British expats discuss some of the more famous customs of the country, like cutting off the hands of thieves, by noting in passing that they use anesthetic and have doctors standing by to bind up the wound. of the President Hotel's gift shop: crocodile handbags, skin rugs, complete bushmen kits with arrows and ostrich shells, direct from the small factory in Palapye which had recently started turning them out. "I can hardly believe So Frances rarely risks it. She stays in, and learns about her new home from her husband and his colleagues, and her neighbours. Yasmin and her wheeler-dealer husband Raji are from Pakistan, and there’s a Saudi couple: Samira and her elusive husband Abdul Nasr. Half an hour later she is inside the terminal building. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88 [degrees] F; the year is 1405. people said when they were trying to be serious. You could only describe the future by exclusion; say what will not occur. Say what you will not be: an ice dancer, a cosmonaut, a mother of twelve. Much less easy to make a single positivepleasures of moral censure, the frisson of violent death in faraway places. The press reports had left an image in people's minds: of lazy, glitzy, transient lives, of hard liquor and easy money, of amoral people turned scared and Oh no," she said. "I'd have to go around with a headscarf on all day. I couldn't put up with that."

It was at the Holiday Inn, Gaborone--but in the bar, not in the coffee shop--that Andrew had met Jeff Pollard. They had run into him once before, in Lusaka, and not liked him particularly; but now Pollard was offering a job, and Andrew needed one. His up the conversation. "Sure on that brandy?" the steward said; and moved away. The slightest encouragement, and he would have asked, "Do you remember that Helen Smith case?" Look," Frances said, "there are two kinds of cheese in Botswana, cheddar and sweetmilk. They are imported from South Africa, which makes any number of kinds of cheese, but they only import two; they realize that people must have cheese, but to have too much of it might seem to condone apartheid. You're with me?" He believes that his choices have been the right ones, that this is where he wishes to be. . . . If his choices have led to this, have brought him to this moment, they have an intrinsic rightness; as for those other worlds, the alternativeAt the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable. So there you go. Not an overwhelmingly positive response to Eight Months on Ghazzah Street but a lot to talk about! Next months book club meeting (Tuesday 25th June) will be hosted by Natasha Wilson as I am off to a wedding! She’ll be chairing the discussion on Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox which is available now in the Insole Court Visitors Centre or widely available online. No, I'm sure. It was very trying when they took your wheels off. It was quite common though. You could never plan on being anywhere by a set time."