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August 25, 2002
REVIEW: Foursome’s adventures
NOW here’s a really fun book and up for a prize as well. It was short listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2002 for it was written in Arabic and translated by Catherine Cobham. Hanan Al-Shaykh, the author, was born and brought up in Beirut but now lives in London.
We meet the four characters whose exploits and lives are so cleverly charted in this, her fourth novel, in a plane coming from Dubai: Amira is having hysterics as they pass through some turbulence; Nicholas is sympathetic; Samir is hiding a monkey whose intestines hold smuggled diamonds and uses the occasion to persuade Lamis to give him a sleeping pill for it. And from then on there’s no stopping them or at least the imagination of Hanan Al-Shaykh as she ricochets her quartet through a series of absurd, hilarious and very telling tableaux against a series of deeply invoked London backdrops.
How marvellously the author depicts London: the Edgeware Road of course has pride of place with its Lebanese cafes and itinerant Middle East population; then there’s Hyde Park; the nineteenth century oriental splendour of lovely Leighton House; even a trip up the British Telecom Tower. There’s a brilliant description of looking at an old Arabic manuscript in the British Library for by now Lamis and Nicholas have fallen in love. The physical manifestation of this, their hot and pounding breath is as the author calmly announces ‘harmful to the manuscript’.
Poor Lamis has had an unfortunate marriage forced on her by her parents to a very rich man twice her age. She’s now bravely divorced him and we follow her lonely exploration of a London previously known at the side of her tyrannical mother-in-law. In between times she meditates on her grandfather’s life in the Iraqi marshes. No wonder Nicholas is enchanted by her. He is by way of being a modern Orientalist dealing in Omani daggers for a mysterious Indian prince. His life is meticulously portrayed: you know the type.
But it’s Amira’s story which is the most hilarious and outrageous. She is, when the novel begins, a mere up-market tart but she has ambitions. She teaches herself and a few friends how to go round London as a Saudi princess with her entourage. They masquerade in the most expensive hotels; trick chivalrous rich Arabs into lending and giving them money and then make off. It’s hair raising what they get up to and you’ll laugh and laugh at the audacity of it all.
Samir, the last but not least of the quartet, dresses up in women’s clothes and gets into all manner of scrapes as he parades around London looking for blue eyed, fair haired men. When his wife and four children arrive, he is only momentarily thrown off course.
Yes this is a great read. The verve and audacity of the situations; the clever, completely believable characters and the wonderful descriptions of London simply transport the reader.
Reviewer’s email: thenewliz@hotmail.com
Only in London
By Hanan Al-Shaykh
Bloomsbury
ISBN 0 7475 5304 1 288pp. £16.99
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