Immortal Flower: Carthage edition

The next book on my pile of romances is Elizabeth Hoy’s Immortal Flower.  It’s a Harlequin Romance first published in 1972.

Everyone look in a different direction

According to http://www.squidoo.com/Elizabeth_Hoy_vintage_Harlequins, Elizabeth Hoy wrote a few books that could be considered Sheik romances: including To Win a Paradise and Flowering Desert. I don't think I have any of her other books, but I could be wrong! She also wrote a number of books set in Italy and Ireland.

Immortal Flower is interesting because it’s in-between a sheik romance with a sheik as a hero and a desert romance where the desert is simply a romantic setting for a romance between two ‘westerners’. As you can see, there are two men on the cover – one Eastern, one Western.  Which one will the girl in green choose?!

It’s quite obvious from the set-up that she’ll choose the Western guy. On the front cover, he's the one looking at her. And on the back cover, he’s the one she finds the most annoying, so we definitely know that he’s the one she’ll end up with. But let’s go along with the ride for fun…

Our heroine Mandy works as a secretary for a professor who is doing research in Tunisia. The professor (Noel Croftwell, a very British Professor name) is a historian and archaeologist who is working on a book on Roman remains in Tunisia, specifically the ancient city of Carthage (of Dido and Aeneas fame). Mandy’s father, John Lavalle is an “authority on Oriental religions, author of the Islamic Encyclopaedia” (11).

Mandy and the Professor have been working in Tunisia for a few short weeks when his nephew Steven Heron arrives for a visit. Steven is a geologist surveying “somewhere in the Sahara” (9). When he arrives, exhausted from his trip, he’s very brusque and rude to Mandy, describing her to his uncle as a “red-headed dolly” (11).  Not a very good first impression.

The three main men in Mandy’s life, then, all study some aspect of ‘the East’ for a living: as a historian, religious scholar and geologist. Mandy, on the other hand, left University to take a secretarial course, as she felt her Arts degree was too un-directed. As she thinks of it, “if secretarial work hadn’t quite the same snob value as being able to call yourself a B.A. it at least promised movement and variety” (21). Mandy’s feelings about being an 'ordinary' woman surrounded by intellectuals are a recurring theme throughout the novel.

There is also a fourth man, Ramon al Hassan, who Mandy met at the beach and has been swimming with regularly, despite not knowing much about him. He is a “golden boy, with a body like a slim bronze god” (17). And very charming, unlike Steven.

Mandy, the Professor and Steven go out for dinner at the local fancy hotel and run into Renata Castella – our Other Woman. Hopefully she won’t turn out as terrible as the opera singer from Court of the Veils. Renata is a half-Italian, half-American “dilettante writer who lives in a magnificent old Moorish palace on the outskirts of the Tunis Media” (23). She’s a beautiful, exotically dressed widow; her husband was a race-car driver who died in a crash. And in her party is Mandy’s beach friend, Ramon, who Steven reveals is “the eldest son of an oil sheik who lives in a fabulous palace on the edge of the Sahara” (24).  Apparently, Ramon’s father is not the best of friends with Steven, as he suspects Steven of being a prospector or a spy for English oil interests. Not entirely unreasonably, I would think…

And thus we have our cast of characters all assembled. Mandy is already a little disillusioned with Ramon’s attitudes, for example, his fondness for veiling: “all this Oriental pomposity and male dominance…it struck her as prehistoric! And yet Ramon had been around, living in Cannes and in Paris.  But whether he realized it or not, his roots, it seemed, were in that sheikdom on the edge of the desert” (33).  On the other hand, she’s increasingly jealous of the attention that Steven is paying to the glamorous Renata and annoyed by Steven’s warnings against getting involved with Ramon. Steven too has some out-dated ideas: “the he-man type, like Steven went  about imagining girls were poor helpless creatures who couldn’t take care of themselves and had to be protected; a middle-aged viewpoint totally out of date” (44).

Renata, hearing of the Professor’s interests in Roman ruins, invites them all to come along with her to a party that Ramon’s father, Sheik al Hassan is throwing: “a period of festivity – a gathering of the clans, including Army manoeuvres, riding contest, and jousting, reminiscent of the old days of medieval English chivalry” (49). Another quote to add to Amy Burge's work on the use of 'medieval' in sheik romances. But a marabout “in floating white robes” with “strange depths in his dark eyes” warns Mandy that there is “a difficult and dangerous path ahead of [her]” and advises her to “walk warily” (53). So seldom do Christian mystics advise heroines to beware. It's always Gypsies and marabouts...

So I’m guessing there will be adventure at this party! I’m looking forward to it…