Friday, July 27, 2012

Court of the Veils: women are also jaguars…


As planned, Duane, Tristan, Isabela and Roslyn go on a trip into the city. On their way in they pass by some Oriental tropes: Isabela is as “proud and distant as Queen Nefertiti” (83) and the scene around a water-hole has a “Biblical quality, unchanged down the centuries” (84). 

Ivan Kalmar, a professor at the University of Toronto, has argued in fact that paintings of Biblical scenes were influenced by contemporary fashions in the ‘East’. So perhaps this ‘Biblical quality’ is more related to tropes of representing the Bible than the persistence of an unchanging style in 'the East'…

In more self-referentiality, Isabela remarks that “real Arabs were certainly not like the sheiks in novels and films” and Duane agrees: “I should hope not! […] those are real men and women, hewn out of the fire and ice of their land. In actual fact, a desert sheik is little more than a shepherd, a nomad wanderer who opens his eyes for the first time in a hair tent, who marries a girl of his own tribe and rarely takes a second wife, let alone a third or a fourth” (84).

The four enjoy the city, shopping in the souk, going out for dinner and dancing (Roslyn quite poorly). At night, Roslyn goes down to the lake by their hotel, to clear her mind and runs into Duane – and another romance plot-line.  They get caught in the rain and have to take shelter in a boatshed and ‘get out of those wet things’, if you know what I mean.

They have to stay in the shed overnight, because a landslide has blocked the path back up the hotel and it’s too dangerous to try to climb it at night. When Duane takes off his shirt (Just to go to sleep, I promise! We aren't in the 80s yet. While The Sheik may have had pre-marital sex, this book does not.), Roslyn sees the jagged scar on this shoulder, from his years in the jungle, she assumes: “a jaguar hiding in a tree, leaping down when his back was turned and rending his body…as that woman he had known had rended him on the inside” (128).

But in seriousness, they bond during the night, as Duane tells Roslyn about his father moving to England and his own choice to come to Dar Al Amra. Roslyn, of course, has no stories of her own to tell, as she still has no memories…

The next morning, they both sneak back into the hotel and, for some reason, don’t tell anyone  about it.  It’s really not clear why.  It would be too scandalous? They like having a secret little secret? Roslyn and Tristan go on horseback rides together, Roslyn hangs out with Nanette and when she goes into town with Tristan, learns about the improvements that Duane is planning with the locals.  He has started a Food Association Board and is friends with the man who will be the headman when the current headman dies, who wants modernization: education and new crop-growing schemes.

In another Biblical reference, Tristan suggests that whoever marries Duane “will have to fold her tent like Ruth and dwell with him in the desert” (154), like any daughter-in-law should (well, he doesn’t say that part, or the part where she later seduces some guy named Boaz).

Foreshadowing?

Finally, a crisis arrives. Nanette becomes ill. Duane calls in Dr. Suleiman, who represents the highly qualified modern Arab, trained in Algiers and in England, but come back to El Khadia to help the local people. And… you’ll never guess… his hands are “narrow and shapely as a woman’s” (160). So I guess this is a thing, at least in sheik romances!

Nanette apparently needs just a bit of bed-rest, so Roslyn takes over her nursing. Isabela is getting restless because she is not having enough attention paid to her. This bit then comes out of the blue: 

There is a sandstorm coming, but Isabela persuades Roslyn to come for a drive with her. She interrogates Roslyn about her and Duane’s relationship and then tricks Roslyn into getting out of the car and leaves her behind! In the desert! With a sandstorm coming! It’s very dramatic, and Isabela has been set up as selfish and temperamental, but it does seem like a bit much. 

Luckily Duane happens to be driving by and he rescues Roslyn.  He also reveals to her the secret of his cynicism around love. It was his mother! She was selfish like Isabela and after a series of affairs left his father, running away with a wealthy Brazilian only to be killed in an earthquake. After this revelation, the sandstorm hits and Roslyn hits her head on the front of the car. And…

Recovers her memory, of course! 

She is indeed Juliet Grey, just as Duane suspected. This prompts Duane to kiss her: “his mouth on hers was relentless, hurting her until she ceased to struggle…then, eyes closed, senses fully awake, she surrendered to the kiss that searched through all her being until it plundered the heart right out of her” (184). Duane reveals he loves her and she, of course, loves him. And then he gives her a ring.

I may have been a little snarky about this book's plot, but it is actually quite pleasant to read (despite the endless ruminations on the nature of love). The ‘local colour’ details are evocative. Morocco serves as a wonderful setting, and the novel is very revealing about the remainders of French colonialism (in a non-political way), but Moroccan people are only background actors in the story. I'm not sure any Moroccan women even have any lines...

Next up, Immortal Flower. This one has two potential heroes on the cover: a Tunisian man and a British man (I think).  Who will the heroine choose?

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