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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
by Hilary Mantel
March 1998
Synopsis
"This excellent British novelist, winner of Britain's Hawthornden Prize, makes her U.S. debut. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street tells in harrowing, you-are-there style the story of a British cartographer who follows her engineer husband to a job in Saudi Arabia. The claustrophobic world in which she finds herself is hostile to expatriate workers and particularly to women, and the isolated apartment building in which they live seems to hide ominous secret affairs. Frances struggles to understand the lives of her Muslim neighbors but is deeply disturbed by the climate of fear around her. A Change of Climate concerns the loss of faith of an upright Christian couple, Ralph and Anna, who have raised their four children and led exemplary lives but are haunted by a missionary trip to Africa in their youth. Mantel does a superb job of re-creating these foreign cultures as seen through British eyes and has a precise insight into the vagaries of humanity." (Library Journal)
Reviews
- "Set in Saudi Arabia during the boom created by soaring oil prices in the 1980's, this sinuously crafted tale by Hawthorndon Award winner Mantel (for An Experiment in Love) uses the outsider status of a British woman and the minutiae of her daily life to mask and eventually reveal a chilling situation. Mantel builds a sense of disorientation, claustrophobia and paranoia in rendering the abysmal quotidian existence of Frances Shore. A cartographer, Frances has followed her civil engineer husband, Andrew, to the Red Sea port Jidda, where he is engaged in a lucrative construction project. Shunning the expatriate housing compound, the Shores move into a grim four-flat building on Ghazzah Street. Shut out from practicing her profession by the severe, ultra-sexist legal code of Saudi Islam, Frances writes in a journal and observes a domestic scene that comes to seem more and more ominous as she struggles to define the ever-shifting line between private morality and public order. A nonperson in the Muslim world, Frances is unable to break through a wall of prejudice about Westerners to come to a common understanding with her neighbors. She becomes hyperconscious of suspicious goings-on in their building, including a shadowy figure carrying a gun in the hallway. This story of a place where puzzles are 'more apparent than real' ends provocatively with more questions than answers. Mantel's relentless pounding away at Frances's stultifying life offers a bit of misdirection, enabling the mystery to sneak towards its conclusion with disconcerting stealth. With marvelously understated wit, Mantel chronicles a world of teas and dinner parties that eventually coalesce into a sinister story of horror just beyond a veil." (Publishers Weekly)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Hilary Mantel
- 'A Change of Climate'
- 'Every Day is Mother's Day'
- 'An Experiment in Love'
- 'Fludd'
- 'The Giant, O'Brien'
- 'A Place of Greater Safety'
- 'Vacant Possession'