Customer Reviews

Lulu in Marrakech

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I'm an American who has lived in Marrakech for nearly 30 years and after reading this book, I'm wondering what Marrakech the author is talking about? She passes off a mish-mash of foods, traditions, names and clothing from other parts of the Islamic world that have nothing to do with Morocco. There are so many factual errors--there's no Moroccan dish called poulet au poivres rouges no raisins in a pigeon pastilla, and no goats in the trees on the Casablanca road, to name a few--that I couldn't help wondering if the author was going to set her spy story in Marrakech, why on earth didn't she take the trouble to get the details right? There are also so many inaccuracies in her descriptions of the relations between Muslims and Christians that it would seem to add even more fuel to the fire of misunderstandings that already exist between us and the Islamic world. If you want to get an authentic look at life in Marrakech as seen by a Western woman, read another book: "Zohra's Ladder & other Moroccan Tales."

There are no redeeming aspects of this book. The character development is laughable (all Lulu's relationships seem forced and unrealistic; for that matter, Lulu herself is someone you wouldn't want to get stuck next to at a dinner party). Her so-called observations are ignorant and predictable ( every Arab man she comes across is a terrorist or a coward, and every woman is weak and abused). Her portrayals of life in Marrakesh do not even attempt to conjure up the sights, sounds, and smells of the city or its inhabitants. The author made no attempt to research the culture. The plot is flat and almost laughable. Don't bother with this book.

Never for one moment do you accept Lucy as a spy, intelligence officer, whatever she purports to be. Her undercover work in Marrakech is haphazard, her relationship stilted and unbelieveable, and the famous Diane Johnson sense of irony missing altogether. Don't buy it; I'll send you mine.

A lot of Johnson's readers seem to have expected Lulu in Marrakech to be just like La Divorce. How can it be, when French and English speakers' misunderstandings are so tempered by our cultural similarities and long joint history of Western thought?

Johnson (like Lulu) clearly does not understand Morocco as well as she does Paris. How can she when the cultural setting doesn't allow her to meet any Moroccan women except as objects of charitable efforts? How can average Moroccan women understand us, if they are forbidden to either read or attend social functions with Westerners?

And how can Islamic conservatives join a dialogue with us when, as Lulu notes, they clearly cannot say out loud what they think: that our women look and act like whores (by their standards), that we can't meet in groups without the aid of alcohol, and that Westerners who travel to the Middle East don't even seem to honor their own religion, never mind respecting people whose religious principles direct every part of their life?

Johnson plays Lulu's inability to access Moroccan culture against a myriad of perspectives presented both by the other characters and by her chapterhead quotes from seemingly everyone on earth: from the Koran through Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad and William E. Colby to someone named Orhan Pamuk, whom Johnson quotes saying,

"And now you've aired all your smug Western views, probably even having a few laughs deep down at our expense . . . but by inflicting your own naive ideas on us, by rhapsodizing about the Western pursuit of happiness and justice, you've clouded our thinking."

We've clouded our own thinking as well -- just think of America's recent accomplishments in the areas of happiness and justice. And this is the magic of Lulu in Marrakech: every time the reader draws a conclusion about the collision of West and Middle East, the next chapter forces the reader to reexamine the issue from yet another perspective.

Any plot weaknesses in this book are more than made up for by the force of the intellectual and emotional challenge it raises: what can we do to even begin to understand a culture that is so terribly foreign to us that we don't even know what questions to ask it?

This is not France: France was easy.

Kind of bad in every which way. First off, the main characters is unconvincing as a secret agent. She's much, much more concerned with dinner parties and her paramour than with her job, which she doesn't seem to even have a full grasp on how to do competently (occasional throw-away lines about her knowledge of being a secret agent are unproven and contra-indicated by her complete inability to people read). Then, there is the unconvincing romance and the preposterous cast of characters. The plot, when it does develop, is never resolved. Johnson's characterization of the Middle East is a sadly stereotypical, binary us v. them, east v. west, fundamentalists (all muslims) v. rational people (we christians) portrayal. But mostly it's the lead character's vapidity that ruins this book - huge, huge turn off of this book.

It's likely I will never again read one of Diane Johnson's novels. Despite being one of the most interesting and intelligent American authors around, she insists upon wasting her talent inventing tales featuring tiresome, silly heroines with no morals. In book after book we are confronted with what could be a fascinating story but the main character is so vapid and predictable that we lose interest rapidly. I had to force myself to stay the course until the end of this book. In her ongoing resentment of the double standard in life for men and women, Diane Johnson invents scenarios in which the heroine gets to act like "a man". The character in this book is no different. The preface says that "Readers will fall in love with this endearing young woman." Newly-appointed CIA operative Lulu Sawyer is about as endearing as a retarded tarantula (dumb and dangerous). She drifts along in life, completely open to sleeping around with whoever is handy (would she sleep with someone to get information? Yes!) and somehow we're supposed to find this admirable and interesting because that's how men act (and men aren't judged and men are happy is the silent moral of the story). In this book the heroine even "progresses" to murder and that without much of a conscience, either. A female James Bond. How liberating! Lulu's lazy promiscuity and immorality (only hinted at in this book, true) is just as damaging and soul-destroying as the moral and physical imprisonment forced upon the women of Islam. I had hoped for and expected so much more from this latest work. If you like Diane Johnson, read "Natural Opium: Some Travelers' Tales" or "Into a Paris Quartier". That gives you an idea of the superb level of writing that she is capable of doing.

Espionage, threats of terrorism and a romantic relationship collide in Lulu in Marrakech, a cross-cultural exercise in tolerance and diversity. The main protagonist Lulu Sawyer is an American "human intelligence" officer sent by her handler Sefton Taft to the Moroccan city, ostensibly to track whether someone with Western connections is cooperating with or running the Islamists to send money through charities to various terrorist organizations. But Lulu also wants to reconnect personally with her wealthy British lover Ian. The sudden onset of this kaleidoscopic place with it's strange and beguiling treatment of women, and the machinations of various foreigners eventually thrusts Lulu into some of the most compromising circumstances.

It is the destruction of Ian's factory building, leased to a manufacture of fertilizer that jump-starts Lulu's investigations and leads her to realize that perhaps her beloved Ian is not an innocent party as she first thought. The fire only increases the chatter, and the certainty that something might happen. The metaphorical significance of the flames, "like lurid colors of purple," the force engulfing the Englishman's building causes Lulu to almost faint with anxiety. If the fire wasn't an accident, what did it mean or portend? The incident provides a wake-up call, forcing Lulu to ask how much has been orchestrated, and how much might be the collusion of unforeseen events.

In a world where people - especially women - hide in baggy robes and veils, author Diane Johnson peppers her story with an unlikely smorgasbord of both Western and Arabic characters: The gangly but useless British laureate poet, Robin Crumley and his pregnant wife Posy, "a sturdy girl with the English ankles," whose greatest achievement is the study or arcane topics like water imagery in Moroccan poetry; Gazi and Khaled Al-Sayad - a Western educated Saudi couple with Gazi's traditional veil hiding hints of Khaled's abuse, but both proud of their ability to mingle and be accepted among Westerners as if there were nothing odd about them; Marina Cotter and her effusive husband with her decisive British upper-class tones and their sense of entitlement; Tom Drill and his partner Strand who runs a tea shop in the center of the City; and Suma, the woman in the black chador whose brother, Amid, a French Algerian is perhaps mixed up in something illicit and is the current subject of surveillance.

All of these people mired in a retro form of political correctness even as Lulu acts as a type of cipher wandering the alleys of the souk sometimes with Posy while she attends dinner parties and luncheons and begins to understand even more about the limitations of her situation, a woman alone, caught between the demands of her mission and her intimacies with Ian. Meanwhile, Ian seems content to entertain in his old grand house, the personification of "lordly colonial master," always powerful and preoccupied, and often disinterested. Lulu finds herself more deeply committed to Ian than ever, but part of her essential dilemma is that she's not prepared to forget her personal history with him, even as she ends up being stupefied by her own deficient powers of observation and the power of her hopes to drown out common sense.

Subplots involving infidelity and hints of treachery circle around the main theme of love's misunderstandings, which "thrives on stolen moments" and the inevitable complications of Lulu's Moroccan intrigues. Strangely, the book starts out strong, the exotic sites, sounds and smells of Marrakesh - and Lulu's reaction to it - a veritable feast for the senses. The spy sections, however, come across as a bit limp and uninspiring, the social of realities of Arabic women, and their attitudes to sex proving to be far more interesting than anything else that springs forth. As a field agent, Lulu has to be analyst enough to know what to report in the first place and what to take seriously, and what to fear. How much has been orchestrated, how much is "the collusion of unforeseen events." He real mission, however is one where she must overcome this idea of clinging to beauty and sincerity, particularly of the sexual act as she comes to acknowledge that perhaps Ian doesn't love her after all. Mike Leonard December 08.

Though charitable readers and Johnson fans (like myself) may wish that the obtuse heroine is meant to exemplify a certain national narcissism and inability to connect the dots, the superficiality and unreality of all of the characters made this novel an irritating disappointment. I only finished the novel because I'm a former Girl Scout and English professor, and always finish what I begin when it comes to books. Only the occasional phrase or image which glimmered with Johnson's customary power of incisive descriptions of intercultural social tensions kept me going, and the hope that my trust in Johnson's narrative powers might eventually be redeemed. The book flap says that the readers "will all in love with the endearing" Lulu; I found her and the depiction of the world of expatriates she moves in tedious and stupid~ two characteristics I never expected to find in a Diane Johnson novel. Maybe the Moroccan setting is too challenging to a woman more accustomed to European-American social interactions.

Diane Johnson's novel, Lulu in Marrakech, is packed with a series of interesting scenes full of confusion and cultural misunderstandings and prejudices. The protagonist, whom we know by her undercover name, Lulu Sawyer, works as a CIA agent in Marrakech trying to identify the source of funds for terrorism. Lulu landed in Morocco to follow her new English lover, Ian Drumm, whom she met in Kosovo when they both worked there with refugees. Lulu is the unlikeliest of spies, and her cultural clashes are often both hilarious and tragic. While Lulu stumbled and bumbled her way through one scene after another, I read on, hoping that all the pieces would come together and that relationships and characters would develop. This didn't happen. Diane Johnson is a fine writer, and she added a treat in the form of interesting quotes at the beginning of each chapter. The sum of the pieces here don't add up to become an enjoyable, entertaining or enlightening novel. Mildly recommended.

This isn't the worst book I've ever read, it was enjoyable enough that I had no trouble getting through it, however it never really came together. It was like a tepid sex- not altogether unpleasent but ultimatly never satisfying. And the climax you think you are building up to- it never comes.

We never really learn anything substantial about the main character- code name Lulu Sawyer, and she never really learns anything either. She has her mind made up about Morraco, Islam and men (also women, pregnancy, motherhood). Other characters agree with her but nothing she encounters seems to challenge her preconceptions. The book comes accross as anti-Islamic and anti-mother.

This book is extremely one demensional. If it were to be at all insightful, it would need to be factually accurat and the characters would need to at least have some of their assumptions and prejudices challenged. But no one ever does. Lulu herself is at once naive and untrusting and in the end she proves herself right- men can not be trusted and will only entrap you in one form or another. Even this messege comes accross rather weak.

A glowing review of this book assures us that this is NOT "Legally Blonde" tripping through a morrocan spy plot- but it pretty much is. Lulu fails to gather much information, or solve any mystery whatsoever. Everyone around her seems to know more than she does, and her attempts at spycraft go from bad to worse, ostensibly forcing her to make a terrible choice, but in reality meerly giving her an excuse to exit- barely scathed- and avoid the terrible fate of being in a relationship with a man she's supposedly madly in love with (although you don't really believe it).

In any case you are probably wondering- why three stars?. Like I said, it was pleasent enough and easy to read. The character portraits where interesting, I'm just dissapointed that they really didn't go anywere. I would have given it a 2 1/2 if I could, right down the middle because it was basically a semi-pleasent stroll that went no where. It seemed like a decent framework and a pretty good premise, I just would have liked a lot more. I got the book from the library and I would recomend you do the same.