Palace of the Pomegranate: A woman is like a candy

There’s an Eastern woman with a speaking part in this (actually two, we’ll meet the other one later): Shalena, who is “darkly pretty” and helps Grace in the camp with her toilette.  Grace assumes that she is Karim’s “desert kadin” but in fact Shalena is engaged to one of the other men – Achmed, who is a wonderful cook. She doesn’t really get a story arc, but she seems very nice.

Grace is thinking about how to avoid having sex with Karim, something which she assumes will be an imminent issue. Her plan involves using the gun which she earlier threatened her husband with. 

This book is a bit oddly structured because while she’s worrying about this she also stares at herself in the mirror and muses about her past. But we’re about halfway through the book, which is a bit late for mirror-staring.  It does provide the opportunity for one of the more absurd lines in the book, when Grace is thinking about how her grandfather (the candy baron) never really cared about her: “Always for him Grace had been an object to improve upon…as if like a candy she could be made sweeter, choicer, more decorative and lucrative” (92).

Ladies are like toffees!

Grace, like Diana when in the Sheik’s tent, takes the opportunity to peruse Karim's shelves. She can’t help but admire his taste in décor; his taste in novels also surprises her, as “the fact that he was educated was more of an affront to Grace than if he had been a truly wild son of the desert” (94).

When Karim returns, he’s shaved off his beard: “he was clean-shaven, and the hard, sculptured look of his features was both fascinating and terrifying.  His eyes were a deep, brilliant green, lambent as a leopard’s in the blue light of the hanging lamps” (95). Grace argues with him incessantly, justifiably given that he’s basically kidnapped her, but narratively it just makes her seem like an argumentative person. She snipes at him, calling him a villain and then he calmly mocks her by saying “so that is what we are, eh? The sinner and the saint” (95) and then tells her that he hopes she’ll enjoy the dinner

Grace and Karim do a lot of talking at each other in this book. At one point he even quotes Oscar Wilde at her: “Here you are ‘whitely wanton with a velvet brow. A mouth like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory.’ The man who wrote those lines – perhaps to a woman, perhaps to a boy – had your surname, Lady Wilde.  He might well have had your image in his brilliant, strangely romantic mind.  In breeches and shirt, with your hair partly concealed, you look a boy who might tempt a satyr. In your silk, mon puritain, you look a woman to tempt a saint” (102).

This is very interesting. Grace is boyish here both as a reference to Diana’s boyishness in The Sheik and for the same reasons as Diana was boyish. She’s independent, virginal and uninterested in love; she is not womanly, then, but also beyond being a girl (and no, not like Britney Spears). 

I haven’t been able to figure out what Oscar Wilde work this is a quote from. Wilde does have a collection of fairy tales called House of Pomegranate, but this is not from that. In fact, the first part of the line, “whitely wanton with a velvet brow” appears to be from Love’s Labour’s Lost (by another man rumored to have written some poetry to perhaps a woman, perhaps a young man). 

In any case, this passage is interesting because it brings in the suggestion of homosexuality, something which has been associated with ‘the Orient’ in a number of Western works. This doesn’t go anywhere in this particular novel, but it’s still interesting…

Anyway, after more sniping at each other, Karim tells Grace that he’s not intending to “use brute force” on her (that is, rape her), just to wait around until she wants to have sex with him. While keeping her effectively a captive. This differentiates him from The Sheik, but still keeps him pretty sketchy. 

But he believes in destiny, apparently. And at this point he thinks she’s had sex with Tony, her husband, so he wonders why she objects to getting involved with him, when she didn’t object to her arranged loveless marriage. Karim speculates that “the marriage to Lord Wilde was more suitable for you than a marriage founded on emotion.  It provided you with the freedom to keep your heart to yourself, and your body, not to mention your soul. Love unlocks the heart, does it not? Love uncovers the body. Love enslaves the soul” (110).

It’s not clear here whether Karim is implying that he’s in love with Grace. He never really says so, but maybe we’re supposed to infer that? But Grace doesn’t think so, she thinks he’s talking about lust.

And then she tries to shoot him.

Does she succeed? Find out in the final installment on Thursday!