Customer Reviews

The English Harem

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The English Harem started out well - Tracy seeing Literary figures in her supermarket customers was delightful, but that proved to be the only highlight of this disaster. I am always astounded by writers who manage to personify the opposite gender well, making their characters completely believable, but this author is hopeless. One wonders if he knows any women at all. Remember, he is supposed to be writing about Western women agreeing to be part of a harem (where the second wife is taking on the man who accidentally killed the love of her life!!) -really, what is their motivation to do this? The book is a long, drawn-out male fantasy, with glaring inaccuracies about Islam as well. It is a bad straight-to-video movie of a book; the author needs to get out more, meet some real people and some real muslims.

I really can't say I enjoyed this book much, and finished it more in the name of morbid fascination than general interest. Its a promising subject matter that could have been interesting, but instead was dealt with in a slightly ridiculous and melodramatic way which left no room for character development or further exploration of the key ideas. It would have been nice if the writer had gone deeper into Sam and his East-West conflict, or the real reasons behind Tracy's obsession with exoticism. Yes, there were points where I wanted to know what would happen next but I was mainly counting the pages to the end, where things turn out to sadly resemble a made-for-video matinee film.

A young London working class girl becomes one of three wives of a middle aged Persian. Superb characterizations; funny; touching; a novel about goodness (in a totally unmawkish way) in the midst of lack of understanding and (for a few pages) of unbearable wickedness; full of unexpected developments until the very last page.

It's a story about a twenty-year old girl who works as a check-out for Sainsbury. She compensates for her dreary job, by spending her days daydreaming about celebrities. It is no surprise when this daydreaming gets her fired. She found herself without a job, but determined to change her life she fights her way into a waitressing job at the Taste of Persia, a vegetarian restaurant ran by a 50 year old self-exiled Iranian.

It's a fascinating fantasy where modern London lifestyle meets that of the more old-fashioned and conservative style of Iran. It offers a gentle introduction to Muslim religion and tradition. I found it very entertaining and enjoyable.