Hooray – yet another of my 20 Books of Summer 2024 project! Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). I’m actually currently reading Book 7 so doing really well! Ali passed me this one after I was intrigued by her review (I do love immigrant stories). Of the seven books I acquired in June 2023, I have now read and reviewed two, and they both came from Ali! I feel like I’ve been reading a few books from mid-2023 onwards but know I have some older ones coming up next month. This book also covers one of my 2024 TBR project reads.
Hilary Mantel – “Eight Months on Ghazzah Street”
(21 June 2023, from Ali)
The press reports had left an image in people’s minds, of lazy, glitzy, transient lives, of hard liquor and easy money, of amoral people turned scared and sour; so now when you were off to Jeddah, people said, ‘Don’t fall off any balconies, will you?’ It became monotonous And their talk had left an image in her mind, whichh she did not like but could not now eradicate; the image of the broken body, still in its mortuary drawer. (p. 18)
One of the things Hilary Mantel was very good at was creating an atmosphere – here of horror and anxiety – and she does it very well in this novel originally published in 1988 (I assume my copy is a reprint as it mentions her later Booker Prize wins).
Here we meet Frances and Andrew Shore, professional expats, who met and married in Africa and are now in Saudi Arabia, Andrew building a fancy new ministry and Frances basically trapped in a flat, only able to interact with her neighbours. Railing at first against being trapped inside the numerous bolts and gates, she finds going outside is not much fun, being constantly harrassed on the street by male drivers, and kept under control by the rumours that swirl around the expat community about nasty things that have happened to Western women who haven’t toed the line. But is anyone safe, however careful they are? What is going on in the empty flat above theirs?
We know something horrible is going to happen as we read a memo from Andrew’s employer mentioning this at the start of the book – there’s the odd further memo and also Frances’ first-person diary entries as well as the third-person narrative. The feeling of Something Horrible Coming grows and grows as we realise how actually horrible all the other expats and their wives are, trapped by earning so much more than they can elsewhere, always trying to leave and never managing. A particularly disturbing image comes when the little tiny Western women in their miniskirts and sundresses have to be moved from the architect’s model of the new building.
What will become of Frances? Will she and Andrew pull together or apart under these new strains, given that Frances starts to feel a block in her throat when she tries to talk to him?
Many of the characters are unlikeable, as Ali’s book group pointed out in their discussion outlined in her review, but it’s an interesting book of people trying to do their best under a difficult regime, and the way that kind of regime will push people’s characters into fear or cunning.
This is Book 6 in my 20 Books of Summer 2024.
This is Book 40 in my 2024 TBR project – 101 to go!
peterleyland
Jun 27, 2024 @ 09:03:01
I’ve read and enjoyed her Booker Prize winners and your review encourages me to try some of her others
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 09:19:03
I read another one ages ago but can’t remember which – I’ve never fancied her big trilogy though I admired her greatly.
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Lisa Hill
Jun 27, 2024 @ 09:20:55
This is such a brilliant book. As I said in my review it’s no coincidence that Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale and Mantel wrote this one in the wake of the Islamic Revolution.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 13:59:07
She certainly makes it clear what an oppressive regime will do to especially women (and the children get no freedom, too, do they), as indeed Atwood does. Both of them only using examples drawn from the real world, too, I imagine, as Atwood said that about HT and this one is based on Mantel’s experience.
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A Life in Books
Jun 27, 2024 @ 09:59:18
I read this when it was published when I was new to bookselling and while I don’t remember the details I do recall how unsettled I was by it. You’re romping through your 20!
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 13:59:48
Unsettling is the thing, isn’t it!
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Elle
Jun 27, 2024 @ 10:06:19
I have a feeling this was based on Mantel’s actual experience—her husband worked in Saudi Arabia for a time and she went with him. The boredom of the expat wife, not being allowed to do anything, does seem awful.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 14:00:29
Yes, I believe that’s the case – I didn’t bring that out in my review because of my espousal of reader-response theory but you can’t help but see it inform the book.
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Jane
Jun 27, 2024 @ 12:27:47
I haven’t read this one but love her writing and yes I’m sure her experience as an expat wife will have been used!
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 14:01:12
Yes, something I was aware of while still sticking in the main to my reader-response theory of responding to the text itself. Good that she got such a good book out of the experience at least!
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MarketGardenReader/IntegratedExpat
Jun 27, 2024 @ 13:38:40
This is definitely one I would love to get hold of. If you’re a career woman, being a ‘trailing spouse’ in a country like that must be very frustrating. Especially if you don’t enjoy coffee mornings and pot luck suppers and book clubs. Not me; I love those things, but I worked then had children and living in NL is not as restrictive as Saudi or Jakarta or Ethiopia, as some of friends have. Thank goodness for portable careers and remote working for today’s expat wives.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 14:03:02
Yes, indeed, I have read another one (somewhere?) about diplomatic (maybe) wives and you got the same sense of frustration.
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Helen
Jun 27, 2024 @ 13:42:55
I have read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy and one or two of her other books, but not this one. I’m not sure if it really appeals to me, but it does sound like an interesting setting and subject.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 14:03:49
I think it’s very different from those – weirdly, I’ve read one other by her but really do not fancy the Wolf Hall ones, though I can see they’d be very, very well-written and I admired her as a person.
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Laura
Jun 27, 2024 @ 14:25:53
I remember the atmosphere of this one so vividly.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 14:26:27
Yes, I think that will stay with me for a while!
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WordsAndPeace
Jun 27, 2024 @ 14:54:05
I love her writing, but I’m afraid this may be too painful to read (emotionally) for me
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Liz Dexter
Jun 27, 2024 @ 15:09:47
I certainly found it quite challenging, more scary than the usual books I read. But Ali had given it to me and I trusted her to know what I could cope with. It’s very interesting.
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hopewellslibraryoflife
Jun 27, 2024 @ 16:08:17
Good review. I found much to relate too as I was living in Malawi under at dictator at about the time the book was set. We could only wear dresses to the knee and were not even supposed to wear shorts or pants in our own home. There were rude comments by party thugs any time any of the women volunteers ventured into non-white areas. I knew a lot of expats there and the “golden handcuffs” thing was so real. The money from international agencies like the World Bank was worth it. That said, our situations were not as creepy as Saudi. The book matched everything I’ve heard from the few people I know who have worked there. It is creepy as f….. there. Even today.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 28, 2024 @ 15:11:18
Interesting info, thank you, must have been odd to read something set at the same time in a similar regime!
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hopewellslibraryoflife
Jun 28, 2024 @ 19:27:31
It was! Plus, my friend’s husband worked there for several years during his first marriage and it was about that time, too.
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whatmeread
Jun 27, 2024 @ 16:50:04
I think this is the first book by Mantel I ever read. I’ve read a lot more by now.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 28, 2024 @ 15:13:43
Well, I apparently read An Experiment in Love from the library in February 1999 but I recall nothing of it!
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whatmeread
Jun 28, 2024 @ 18:24:43
I haven’t read that one. I read the Wolf Hall trilogy, A Place of Greater Safety, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, and Fludd. I tried to read Beyond Black, but it wasn’t my kind of humor. I also read her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost.
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kimbofo
Jun 27, 2024 @ 22:27:59
This is my favourite Mantel (I have tried and abandoned Wolf Hall three times). I read it years ago when my sister was an expat wife living in Abu Dhabi. I used to visit regularly, and while the UAE gives the impression of being very Westernized (my sister was allowed to work and later did a long stint as a primary school teacher) but is actually highly regulated and surveilled … one wrong move and you’re in jail or thrown out of the country.
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Liz Dexter
Jun 28, 2024 @ 15:15:58
Oh, that’s really interesting, too. I haven’t read anything by her apart from, apparently, An Experiment in Love in 1999; I’m not a reader of historical fiction and just haven’t fancied anything else of hers!
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kimbofo
Jun 29, 2024 @ 00:21:12
Her earlier stuff is great. Can recommend Beyond Black and An Experiment in Love. Her memoir Giving up the Ghost is brilliant, too.
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wadholloway
Jun 28, 2024 @ 07:58:42
I have read two books set in Saudi Arabia in the past year, both from the perspective of Saudis rather than of expats – Brother Alive which is set a little in the future; and Rebel, the account of a young woman’s escape from the clutches of her father and brothers. It’s not a place for stepping out of line (as determined by religious bigots)!
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Liz Dexter
Jun 28, 2024 @ 15:18:03
It’s a shame that a book published a while ago is sitll so relevant. Rebel looks very interesting and I might well pick up a copy.
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kaggsysbookishramblings
Jun 28, 2024 @ 18:51:59
I really do want to try Mantel but I wonder whether she’s for me. Maybe a slimmer novel would be a good way to find out before tackling the mahoosive volumes!!
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Liz Dexter
Jun 29, 2024 @ 16:10:56
I’m in good company if you haven’t read the biggies either; I just don’t fancy them.
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