Customer Reviews

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I wish I could give a 2-part review of this book. For writing, I'd give it a 4. Well written and interesting.

For content, I would give it a 2. I am a woman, and I have spent time in Middle Eastern countries. While I have not lived in Saudi, I must agree with other readers that she gives a valid yet exaggerated picture of life there. It is valid because things can be like that. Yet it is exaggerated because they are also not that way.

Any culture (as every American knows) can be viewed through the lens that portrays it as venal, banal, empty. Or it can be viewed as rich in possibilities and adventure if you approach it from where it stands.

To be fair, I think the character of Fran tries to do that. And yet, the people she is with remind me of one set of people I know in Dubai. And they are a handful of empty-headed Brits and Aussies who would rather drink than do anything else. And yet I know Brits, Aussies, Americans, Indians, Arabs, Pakistanis, and Persians in the city who have endlessly enriched my life through what I've experienced in my time there.

Also, the explanations of Islam are annoyingly one-sided. For once and for all it is NOT written in the Koran that women must cover themselves. It says only that they must be modest in their dress, and the definition of modest is what changes from culture to culture and from generation to generation. I feel that Mantel never really tries to show us the rich complexity which would make the odd alienation Fran feels that much more profound, nor does she give any insight into why certain people would stay for years.

As a final note, if nothing else the book obviously works on one level, because so very many of its reviewers are responding so strongly and passionately to what lies therein. The author has done a good job of touching something for all of us.

For a richer understanding of the life of a woman in the Middle East, read Ahdaf Souief's books. She is phenomenal.

One of the frustrations [and benefits] of going to live in a foreign culture is that the standards and norms used, usually unconscientiously, for "sizing up" people no longer valid. So how do you determine who is your friend and who is using you? How do you determine what is friendship ad what is mere politeness? How do you determine what you "believe" is truly your belief and what is your cultural conditioning? How do you determine what is virtue? How do you determine which "cultural traditions" should be observed out of politeness and which should not? LIving in a foreign culture is challenging, not only because of external adaptations you may be asked to make, but because of the internal self-examinations you will require of yourself.

Hilary Mantel is a keen observer of human character, human fraility, human environments, and she describes the environment, emotions and atmospheres with a crystal clarity.

Frances and her husband Andrew go to Saudi Arabia, where Andrew, an engineer, has signed a contract to construct a building. They live in an apartment building on Ghazzah Street, where Frances makes friends with the wives there [a Saudi and a Pakistani], and encounters some mystery, as there are sounds coming from a supposedly empty apartment.

Mantel carefully builds up the story, horror replacing the stifling boredom of the place as she progresses. Excerpts from Frances' diary are effectively interspersed in the text. The tension slowly rises, to the mysterious end.

Mantel paints the varied expat communities (and the ugly corporations that do business there) very well, her opprobrium doled out equally to natives and foreigners alike.

The novel is written as an "entertaining read", in a page-turning style -- you are interested in the characters and events. Yet it is a substantial work, addressing important themes: good versus evil, do our choices make a difference, the cost of cultural misunderrstandings, the loss of faith, how any sense of security is an illusion. While entertaining, Mantel is not afraid of the artist's obligation to tell us unpalatable truths about ourselves.

My one complaint is that the ending was unclear and unsettled.

Frances Shore is a young English bride joining her prototypical bland English engineer husband as expats living in Saudi Arabia. She's been fully warned that life for w woman in Saudi Arabia is "unpleasant", but she quickly learns that "unpleasant" is truly an understatement. The repressive and authoritarian aspects of fundamentalist Muslim society, and the cynicism it breeds among the educated middle classes within it, are on full display here.

Moreover, though the day-to-day grind of Saudi life is stressful enough, Frances begins to suspect that something truly ugly is occurring in their apartment building. She is alone in her concern about this though--her husband is a fairly crass and indifferent sort can't be bothered and, as a woman, she has no standing whatsoever to engage anyone else into looking into things.

This book has been much criticized as "negative" and "exaggerated" but as recent events illuminate the realities of life for women in the Muslim world in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular, one has the sense that the book renders a much more realistic picture than many would like to believe.

This is a low key suspense novel. There are no "grand" moments and it does not build to any sort of crescendo. The ending is open and quite ambiguous. However, I see this not as the flaw many proclaim it to be but as a part of the whole. When I finished the book I felt weighted down and oppressed--yet disappointed the story was over. I realized that the books real accomplishment was to render for me in as much a physical as an intellectual way the weight and anxiety that simple day to day life imposes on women in the Muslim world.

And that is no small accomplishment.

Like certain pieces of music, this book was strong on creating a vivid atmosphere, while being almost entirely free of "hooks" -- i.e., the momentum of a plot. Yes, something does happen at the end, but we don't know quite what, and in a wierd way it doesn't really matter. I don't have such a problem with the lack of plot that other reviewers did, but what did bother me was that Frances was such a blank. Why did she leave England? Why did she fall in love with her husband? What makes her tick? We don't know, it's almost as if the author wanted to put a blank, generic, white educated middle class Englishwoman down and just watch her interact in this excellently rendered alien environment. Sorry, but I want a three dimensional protagonist. It would have helped if she'd had some kind of back story, after all, no one is a complete blank. While I can understand that one might feel like a blank after several months of nearly solitary confinement, such as Frances experienced, she began the novel seeming that way to me. That was the only weakness of the book. The strength was the excellence of the writing,and the detailed eye that summoned up the locale to perfection.

While I was rather disappointed with this as a novel (I gave it four stars instead of three, because the writing style is so much more intelligent and superior to almost any American writer's)I highly value it as a cultural study. When a friend of mine was considering moving to Saudi Arabia for a year, I said, Don't make your decision until you read this book!

I base my opinion on Mantel's novel from 18 years of living in Saudi Arabia. In defence of this book it is obvious she writes from first hand experience of Jeddah and she suceeds in creating an uneasy atmosphere from the start. However, the characters are, without exception, somewhat bland, empty people, lacking strength or depth. This may well be Mantel's intention together with the lack of substantial conclusion to the plot. Mantel dwells entirely on the negatives in Saudi and very little on the positives, such as the genuine friendships one acquires by getting to know people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures.The success of this novel must surely lie in its negative sensationalism rather than its literary credibility. It would be tragic if readers were put off visiting Saudi Arabia on the strength of this book which portrays bigotry and ignorance.

Mantel's book brings to mind the films "Blow-Up" and "The Conversation," in which evidence of some kind of malfeasance is discovered by an otherwise innocent observer, then takes on a life of its own, while the observer is swept up in a growing tide of paranoia. The narrator in this chilling novel is a woman whose husband has taken a job in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, in the 1980s. Husband and wife are immediately submerged in a culture far different from any they've known, where appearance and reality are seldom clear and fear and rumor dominate their lives.

Trapped in the claustrophobic flat provided by her husband's employer, the narrator comes to suspect that the empty flat above her is not empty at all. Looking for clues to the real nature of its use, she comes to know the wives of two other men who live in the building, who try to dismiss her concerns while reassuring her that the restrictive role of women in this Muslim country is quite reasonable, and repeating to her firmly held beliefs about the West that are wild exaggerations and outright myths. As suspicion points in every direction, the reader begins to doubt the veracity of everyone, including the other western expatriates who make up the central character's social circle.

Finally, the novel is a discourse on the impossibility of discovering the truth, especially when covering it up or ignoring it serves the interests of enough people. Meanwhile, it finds much to say about gender politics, whether under the dictates of Islam or the double standards still to be found in the democratic West. This is a page-turner that is also sharply written. Its characters are vividly created and the dialogue among them is often withering. Not likely to be embraced by Saudi readers, it portrays the Kingdom in ways that are far from flattering. Readers of this book may also be interested in Peter Theroux' memoir, "Sandstorms: Days and Nights in Arabia."

With remarkable understatement, a fellow airline passenger tries to prepare Fran Shore for her life as an expatriate wife in Saudi Arabia. A cartographer by profession, she is told, "You're redundant. They don't have maps."

As Mantel unfolds the action, and lack of action, which take place in the apartment complex where she lives, and in the business community, Fran cannot help but try to create mental maps to make sense of the culture that has enveloped her.

Bored and frustrated, she is unable to discover what is really happening in the "empty" flat upstairs, unable to understand the lives which her devoutly Muslim female neighbors accept as completely normal, and so overwhelmed that she wonders, "Am I visible?"

And that, perhaps, is the point. She IS visible in a heavily veiled world, destined never to comprehend fully either the daily lives or culture of her hosts, a culture within which she has tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain her own values.

As Fran leaves the flat in which she has spent eight months, neither she nor the reader will ever know completely what has happened in the "empty" flat above or in the now empty flats once belonging to her friends. She is forced to accept at last the comment of an Arab acquaintance, "The Kindgom is not a logical world, and besides, logic is not an ornament of young ladies." Mary Whipple

This is a briskly entertaining read. It is creepy and funny by turns, with a well-realized female protagonist and an interestingly exotic locale. The plot is intentionally opaque, and this adds to the tension; there may (or may not be) murders, kidnapings, and other skullduggery in and around the heroine's hermetic apartment building, and we may (or may not) find out.The vividness of the place (Saudi Arabia) brought to mind Graham Greene's African novels. (Why are the Brits so good at this?) Mantel's style takes a bit of patience, but it pays off quickly. Highly recommended.

I, too, am a woman who lived in Saudi Arabia, although for a longer time than Mantel. While I found her book riveting, I also found it unduly negative. Certainly restrictions were irritating and, initially, disconcerting; however, I quickly learned to adapt. My husband and I, after all, were guests in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government was paying his salary and giving him a good job--which was more than he was able to attain in the U.S. What Mantel leaves out are the breathtakingly beautiful moments of living in the Middle East--the morning prayer call; the nights in the desert under a brilliant sky; the thrilling juxtaposition of tradition and modernism; the stunningly beautiful buildings in Riyadh. Mantel has allowed her paranoia to take over. Did she make an effort, for example, to meet Saudi women? Those I met were unfailingly pleasant and polite and, interestingly, content with their lives. There is no point going to another country and criticizing everything you find there. Mantel would have us believe that her protagonist tries to be positive about Saudi Arabia and tries to dismiss the ever-prevalent gossip; however, in the end Frances Shore falls prey to the paranoia of the ignorant which she criticizes in other characters. My life there was exotic and exciting. I read children's stories on Radio Riyadh; I was able to use the (men's) university library to work on my Ph.D.; I camped far out in the desert; I traveled to Sri Lanka, Bahrain, Turkey, Greece and England. These were all things I could never have afforded to do back here and I am grateful I had the opportunity. Mantel leaves out of her novel the beauty of Saudi Arabia--the lift of the heart that comes with the crisp, clear air of early morning winter sunlight. I remember Riyadh with delight and am saddened by the negative emphases of Mantel's book.

If you like extremely ambiguous thrillers with an open ending that you have to go back to the first page to understand, this is fine.

However, if you're looking for information on the "real" Saudi Arabia, it's far from fine.

The claim is that Hilary Mantel lived in Saudi Arabia, but she doesn't write as if she did. I lived there for six years, and her version of expat life is nothing like what I experienced. To begin with, Jeddah is the most Westernized city in Saudi, a really happening place with lots and lots of foreigners, who enjoy life hugely and manage to skate around the restrictions without letting them get in the way. NO ONE I knew just sat in their apartment and moped! There were parties, concerts, art shows, plays, classes, picnics, camping in the desert, and fishing and swimming outings.

No legal alcohol? Home brew. Women can't drive? Tons of taxis, plus a modern bus service.
Shopping? Most of the shop assistants are from Ceylon, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Bangladesh, Phillipines, Taiwan, etc., etc. The idea that they "don't see a woman as a person" is ludicrous! Also, even Saudi men, who traditionally avert their eyes from unrelated women out of politeness, have mostly learned that Western women can and do have minds and opinions, and can be conversed with.

I had a good laugh when someone on the airplane says "Cartographers are redundant. They don't have maps." She wrote that in 1988. However, when my husband and I left in 1985, there WERE maps. We used them to drive around the country.

There are people from all over the world living in the Kingdom, in addition to Americans. Getting to know people from so many countries and cultures was an adventure by itself. My best friends while I was there were Lebanese, Mexican, Canadian and British. My husband and I were invited to visit Saudis, who were invariably as friendly and curious to know about us and our lives as we were about them. Language, by the way, is rarely a problem, as English is used as a sort of lingua franca.

In my opinion, Mantel wanted to write a thriller about a woman in a place where she couldn't depend on anything she used to know, and she chose Saudi Arabia, then cherry-picked the negative elements and exaggerated them.

If you want a more authentic view on Saudi, try "At the Drop of a Veil" by Marianne Alireza. She was probably the first American to marry a Saudi, and while she doesn't avoid the difficulties or the negative things, she also gives a wonderful view of the fascinating culture of the country, and the warmth of the Saudi family she married into.