The Sunday Salon and Weekend blues

On Sundays, or Saturdays, whenever the mood takes me, I like to go over the book reviews, the book blogs and the snippets on publishing and writing, including the gossip.  Well, you probably know that if you’ve at all followed some of my blogs on Sundays.  Whiling the time away, it’s blustery outside – I love this English expression: blustery showers, which means that there are sudden and frequent changes from hard chasing clouds that leave space for a peeping and watery sun, to sudden all-over greyness that opens up with gallons of water and rain, to change again into a cold and bleak landscape, shaking off the drops – and so it is, blustery, after a promising start to the day.  My mood is very similar: cold and frosty and then agitated and miserable, skipping from paper to paper and from book to  ipod and music, restless and questioning.  It’s probably the outcome of a couple of weeks of non-stop deadlines and work which is now leaving me uneasy and at a loss with myself. The merry go round that somehow cannot come to a stop. 

I am going over the reviews but there is not much there that catches my eye; I change my attention to the Guardian’s books blog and while clicking here and there I come across this review of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea.  I have only just recommended this book to Lisa (who does some great book reviews herself, by the way) as perhaps one of the first books to read by IM if you haven’t read any yet.  However, the book does have a bit of a mixed review here,  doesn’t it?  It is so long ago that I read the Murdoch books that I am now wondering whether I would still like them as I did at the time or whether they have truly and utterly dated as one or two of the comments suggest.   I look forward to Lisa’s comments; moreover I have also just bought (again) a copy of her first novel The Net, to try and find out whether I am as taken by these novels as I used to be at one time.  I know, these books are all a bit crazy and weird, but that was part of the attraction.

I have now finished Mahfouz’s first book in the Cairo Trilogy, Palace Walk.  I have to admit that even though I was absorbed by the story I was at the same time irritated by it.  I felt a mixture of admiration and impatience with the style of writing, the authorial voice coming through at times, telling me as a reader what one of the characters was like, always hovering over and above the action.  Mahfouz has been compared with Tolstoy and I can see why, in that we are given a very grand and tapestry like overview of a society in a state of flux, in this case Egypt, and the way a certain class of that society behaved and lived.  I cannot, somehow, conceive the absolute and total obedience of the women as they are described, as if they are fixtures, emotionally dead, accepting their place and making sure that they keep each other in place as well.  But then, perhaps I can now and it is the mastery of Mahfouz that he is able to make me feel angry and almost upset at the way this family lives and keeps the women suppressed.  He definitely has a masterly way of evoking scenery, for example when Amina the long suffering wife and mother creates a bit of space for herself on the roof (she is not allowed ever to leave the house or meet with people outside of her immediate family!) and keeps hens in wooden chicken coops:

     How much joy she got from scattering grain for them or putting the water container on the ground as the hens raced for it, preceded by their rooster.  Their beaks fell on the grain quickly and regularly, like sewing machine needles, leaving little indentations in the dust like pockmarks from a drizzle.

I dislike Amina’s subservience, her giving in to a tyranical and miserable husband, who bullies his family at home but once outside is able to square his home-based god-fearing behaviour with the drinking and womanising with friends in cafes and clubs, only to come back slightly intoxicated every night again to a wife, Amina, who holds up the lamp for him and takes his clothes and makes sure that he is obeyed in his every wish. 

The youngest son, Kamal, cannot quite believe it when his father allows his sister Aisha to leave the house and to marry:

     He had asked repeatedly how his father could allow it, since he would not allow even the shadow of aone of his woemn to be seen through the crack of a window.  The only answer he reeived was loud laughter.  He had asked his mothe critically hows she could do something so extreme as giving Aisha away.  She had told him he would grow up one day and take a girl like her from her father’s house, and that she would be escorted to his house with cries of joy.

The book gives a real insight into the family but also into a country that is slowly waking up from a sleepy acceptance of the impositions by the English and Australians.  This book is set against the background of the end of the first world war ending in the 1920s when Egypt struggles for its independence.  However, the main focus is the way this family lives just prior to the move for independence and then gets caught up in it.  I need to let it sink in a bit more and although I thought, when finishing this, that I would leave well alone for a while before reading part 2, if ever, now that I have been able to take a step away from it I think I will pick up part 2 sooner rather than later. 

One needs to accept the authorial comments, and once you have turned the last page all that seems less important: it has become part of the story, almost as if he is trying to make sure that you quite understand what his characters go through, for example when he relates the conversation between the two brothers Yasin and Fahmy on marriage.  Yasin, the elder brother has married, and is becoming very bored and distanced from his wife, after only a short time:

     ‘I never imagined that marriage would be so dreary.  In fact, it’s nothing more than a false dream. It’s a cruel and evil swindler.’

In the next paragraph, Mahfouz explains Fahmy’s reaction:

     These words seemed difficult for Fahmy to stomach and aroused his suspicion.  That was only to be expected from a young man whose emotional life was centrered on a single goal which could be pictured only in the form of a wife and under the rubric “marriage”.  Fahmy was disturbed to have his irresponsible brother attach this revered category with such bitter sarcasm.

This is the full omni-scient voice of Mahfouz, giving us his verdict on his character, explaining him to us, and he does this throughout the book.  However, he does so consistently, guiding us through some of the mores of his characters in a setting that, for most of us, will be quite alien. 

Do I recommend the book?  Yes, because of the topic, because this is writing that reveals a completely unknown world in a way that, even if you are unsympathetic to a lot of the characters or don’t quite understand why they act the way you do, you feel that at the end of the book a curtain has been lifted, you’ve actually been part of a family’s life, you really have gained some insight into a culture that is nearly incomprehensible in its laid-back acceptance of the way things are and will never change.  But of course, you realise that they will change, that times are changing and that this family will be affected. So, we must read the next part in order to find out how it will change the lives of the women living in this very oppressive society.

Advertisement