Palace of the Pomegranate: A homage to The Sheik?

Hello readers! Sadly the new school term is almost upon us. I’m teaching an introductory course on Sociocultural Anthropology this term (yay!), so I won’t have as much free time for the blog as I did in the summer. I’ll be too busy writing lectures and applying for jobs. But don’t worry, I’m not giving up – I still have literally millions of books to read! I’m just going to switch to posting twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays) instead of three times a week. I'll post 1920s stuff every time I finish a sheik romance. Hopefully that schedule is not too optimistic of me…

And now on to a new book! Next up is another romance by Violet Winspear: The Palace of the Pomegranate, a Harlequin Presents novel from 1974. I think this time we’re going to get a romance with a ‘real’ sheikh – except he’s not actually Arab but Persian and not a ‘sheikh’, per se. But close enough.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Palace of the Pomegranates has a lot of references to E. M. Hull’s The Sheik.  It begins with the heroine being described by an elderly woman at a party of ex-pats, just like in The Sheik. In this case, the party is in Reza Shahr. Perhaps my googling skills are slowly going downhill, but I can’t find a city called Reza Shahr. Only a neighbourhood in Mashhad, Iran? In any case, the book never mention the name Iran; everyone always refers to Persia. It’s interesting how blurry the geography and political context get. This is something that also happens in romances set in the US (so many made-up American small towns), but it does have a different effect.

 

Anyway, the rumour is that Grace Tillerton, “heiress to the fortune earned by the Tillerton toffee factories,” is still a virgin, despite her recent marriage to impoverished aristocratic playboy Tony Wilde (Wilde by name, Wilde by nature, I presume). Grace married Tony purely to please the stern grandfather who raised her (just like The Sheik’s heroine Diana was raised by a stern older brother). And Tony married her for the money.

Having a heroine married to someone who it’s fairly clear will not end up the hero is unusual for a romance. Usually if the heroine’s been married (which was not out of the question in 1970s romances), she’s already divorced or widowed by the time the romance starts. But Grace’s husband is still alive and kicking. 

1970s independent woman!

The cover of the Harlequin Presents edition evades the hero question entirely, by just having this striking drawing of the heroine.  It’s very 70s! I actually love it! 

This guy?

I can’t tell in the Mills and Boon edition who the man in the drawing is intended to be. Is it Tony Wilde or is it Kharim Khan (you’ll find out who he is soon)?

Grace, like Diana, is not a fan of love or marriage. She asks a young Officer who’s a little in love with her “Has there ever been a man who loved with a single hunger, wanting no one else but his wife? I doubt it” (8). She muses that “men liked to please themselves, but they didn’t really consider that women had the right to indulge their longing and desires.  They were chattels, whichever way the situation was looked at” (12). 

Grace and Tony are planning a trip into the desert to find the legendary lost Garden of Sheba, where “Sheba was said to have made love with Solomon” (9). This confuses our location even further, since the Queen of Sheba was maybe from around Yemen?  Or eastern North Africa? And King Solomon lived in Jerusalem?

Anyway, Grace is warned against going into the desert by a number of the expats. They say she’s too frail for the desert, that there might be dangerous men in the desert (the threat of rape by terrible foreigners, as in The Sheik) and, more unusually, that her husband might be planning to kill her for her money and the desert would be a great place to do it!

In this novel, Winspear has brought the conflicts in British gender relations which in The Sheik are in the recent past (the abusive husband who is Ahmed’s biological father) into the present and thus more direct comparison with ‘Oriental’ gender relations. We might think that Eastern men and women have arranged marriages and unequal relations (and Grace does, to a certain extent), but look – this British couple has an arranged marriage and there’s nothing more unequal than (perhaps) plotting to kill your wife. And both of these cases are removed (to different extents) from the most readers’ day-to-day lives, given their location in the worlds of the rich and aristocratic.

But Grace refuses to be warned. She is infatuated with the idea of the desert: “it may be a savage place, but at least it isn’t as uncivilized as our so-called modern society. […] out there in the desert everything is so open – so free and gold and blue” (13). And she scoffs at the notion that someone would try to kidnap her (“that old chestnut about hot-natured nomads,” as she describes it). 

And so Tony and Grace set off into the desert, led by their Persian guide Kharim. We meet him at last! At first he’s innocuously passing himself off as a guide, if one with "the look of a leader" and eyebrows with "an almost Mephistophelean slant to them" (34). As they finally set off into the desert, Grace is very very excited: “As Grace thought of being in the real desert, with nothing but sand all around them like the rough pelt of a tiger, she felt quivers of excitement coursing through her body” (26). Very excited.

Grace thinks about how she first found out about the lost garden of Sheba – in the autobiography of a British woman Rachel Leah Bourne who had spent most of her life in the East and then disappeared, presumed dead.  I’m thinking this Rachel Leah Bourne was not dead, but is in fact: Kharim’s mother! That’s my bet. Any takers?

Grace has enjoyed her first day in the desert and they set up camp at an oasis. She and Tony spar.  Grace is rude to their guide for no particular reason and thinks that “the eyes of a Persian leopard would flash like that only seconds before it leapt upon its prey and tore it to pieces” (35). Winspear really loves her big cats. 

Kharim recommends that they not break camp the next day, because one of the porters believes there’s a storm on the way, but the couple do nothing but argue with him that it looks fine!  It’s not really clear to me why Tony and Grace have hired a local guide if they planned to disregard all of his advice about super dangerous sandstorms. Why bother?

Later on in the evening Tony comes to Grace’s tent drunk and tells her he wants to have sex. She tries to kick him out and he hits her across the face. Just as he is about to cap it off with a kick in the ribs, she points her gun at him and threatens to shoot. This indignity is last straw for Grace and she offers Tony even more money to leave her alone and get a divorce. 

But first they have to get out of the desert. Against their guide’s warnings, the next morning they set out back towards the city. But a storm is on its way… 

Will they survive the swirling sands? And what is Kharim’s interest in all this mess anyway? Next installment – Thursday!