I read this on the plane home from Canada and
maybe reading in the hours when by rights I should have been sleeping resulted
in me missing some essential quality of the novel.
The cover proudly proclaims that Barry Unsworth is a Booker
Prize winner and in is within the context of this claim that I found the novel
lacking. The story is fairly engaging
and appealed to the bit of me that enjoys reading Agatha Christie but is that
enough to place it in Booker Prize territory?
The
cast of characters was made up of clichés, many of them paper thin clichés at that –
there were few that were in anyway rounded and none that were insightful. There was a worry that these stereotypes of
the Western and the “Arab” were in fact supporting racist assumptions – you can
give Agatha Christie some degree of flexibility as she was writing in different
era, and so we can hold a critical distance to some of the less enlightened
depictions of non-Western characters, but for Barry Unsworth, publishing in
2009, to be deploying the simpleton chai wallah as the basis of his non-Western
characters is unsatisfactory.
If you have a few hours that need filling with light
reading this book “would do” but to be honest my recommendation is to avoid it.
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